Sakai

Sakai is an enterprise web application that provides for online course content delivery and management. Every course at Duke is provisioned with a Sakai site. Most Sociology instructors use Sakai to facilitate their teaching. You may put readings for students in the course. Students may submit their work to you using the Digital Drop Box feature of Sakai. There is an area for Discussion Forums and you can have as many different threads (topics) as you want within the Forums section.

1. Content Considerations

The files placed in your Sakai course site may be of any type. You can put articles, papers, pictures, video, and audio files. Basically you may put there just about anything that you want to use in the teaching of your course. Each file must be 100MB or less in size.

General questions on course content, role assignments and functionality are directed to Jesse Riggan, who coordinates departmental use of Sakai.

The Sakai Support Site provides tutorials, FAQs and other support links.

For questions relating to intellectual property rights, such as copyrights or fair use considerations, please consult the Duke Library Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications. Kevin Smith, the office director, maintains a blog providing current reflections on these issues and a pointer to several other offices at Duke dealing with copyright issues.

2. Sakai Features

• Multiple people can participate in the building and maintenance of a course site by means of roles the Instructor defines and assigns to others. These roles include Teaching Assistants and Course Builders. People acting in roles are limited to Sakai functions appropriate to those roles.

• It is possible to enter student grades in Sakai and have them sent to ACES and the Registrars Office.
• In addition to providing a place to store readings and other course documents, it is possible to track who has read which articles or documents and when they read them.
• In using the Digital Drop Box, student files are time and date stamped by the Sakai system upon receipt, so there is little argument over when something is submitted.
• Courses are maintained until you turn them off (make them unavailable). Content can be copied from one course to another with little difficulty. You can archive your courses as well.
• You have the option of making your course available to anyone or to just the students enrolled in the course. There is now an option that allows visitors read access to the course materials, but not the ability to participate in discussions or to post on the forums.

• You can host discussions using the Forums tools.

• There is a Wiki tool available for the construction of wikis.

• You may also create blogs for your course.

• There is also the Chat Room feature that allows for a real-time online class/discussion to take place.

• Faculty, staff and students may create project sites through special worksite setup procedures. A project site is unconnected to a class and may be created for a variety of uses such as an HR-related activity, an academic resource, a team project, a test space or a public space for sharing with a broader audience.

• People who are not members of the Duke community can be granted access to Duke Sakai sites. They must get a restricted purpose Duke NetID from OIT. This is not a difficult process.

3. Sakai Restrictions

• You must be an Instructor to enroll users in a class.
• Instructors and TAs have access to the grade book; course builders do not.
• Only one file at a time may be put in the course documents folder.
• Single file size limit for documents is normally 100MB.
• Only the Instructor has access to the Digital Drop box.
• Course Builders can only add content to the Sakai course.
• TAs have access to the entire Sakai site except the enrollment area.
• There is a calendar that lets you set reminder announcements for things like due dates and tests as well as anything you wish to remind your class about.
• Items that you upload for your students can be made available for the entire course time or for a more limited time that you control.
• Courses are maintained until you turn them off (make them unavailable). Content can be copied from one course to another with little difficulty. You can archive your courses as well.
• You have the option of making your course available to anyone or to just the students enrolled in the course.

---