.

• Timeline:
  • Oct 2006: Faculty committee selected Sakai over Blackboard Vista
  • Jan 2007: Developed a roll-out plan.
  • Jun 2007: Pilot
  • Aug 2007: Production
  • Still: Some classes still running on CE4.1, being phased out of use.
• Needs – no more than 5% of code custom written by GA Tech or professional services.
  • Integration with Banner.
  • Grade book
  • Assignments – no resubmit. Professor had built a section aggregation tool which combined with assignments started killing the servers. Ate all the database connections. Dead in the water Monday afternoon to noon on Tuesday until a code change was implemented.
  • Assessments
  • Course lists would not show unpublished sections. Students were concerned registration failed to take place. Wrote a “More” link to show students the course exists but not yet available.
• t-square
  • GA Tech – 30,000 users and 10,000 sections. 16,000 users login.
• Sakai out of the box not very good.
  • Java Server on Tomcat.
  • User administration sux. No way to see what classs a student is taking without an outside application. Created an administrative console, available to machine room admins. Monitors services, processes. Admin console Perl connecting to APIs.
  • Admin role can access every course. Built in admin console to link directly to courses to go help troubleshoot.
• Unicon – professional services
  • Built t-square implementation.
  • Created some tools.
• Staffing
  • Systems – OS and hardware – 1 person
  • Application support – 1 person
  • Code developers, Quality Assurance – 3 people
  • Database Administrator – 0.5 people (spends part of time on other projects)
  • Instructional technologists – 2 people
• Why Sakai? Faculty hate WebCT. Possibilities of integration (aren’t there possibilities for this with Blackboard?).
• Costs – refused to say. Rumor is 2x our costs for making available for 200,000 students for Blackboard.

Kinda weird. Suggested it was nigh impossible to create accounts except through Banner in WebCT CE. Except the same APIs which create Banner accounts can create guest accounts?