As many of you probably know if you are ready this post, I am the Project Leader of our WebCT to Sakai migration at the University of Delaware. More that two years ago, before I even started working her at UD, the LMS selection process began with an attempt to get faculty involved with the decision making.
Below is a slidecast of my November 2, 2009 presentation to the Faculty Senate about our progress in migrating users from WebCT to Sakai. Some of you might be interested in some of the metrics that are included in this presentation to sell Sakai as a viable solution for higher education.
Members of the audience reacted very positively to the slide about the progression of the number of course sites using an LMS, and to the state of the LMS in peer institutions. Sakai has a lot of momentum at this point in time, and it's great to see all these top notch institutions getting onboard!
How is your LMS selection/migration going at your institution? Please leave a comment!
For those who didn't know, I was involved with the organization of the 2009 Sakai Conference. I participated in the weekly conference call from the beginning. I had been to two Sakai conferences in the past, and I always learned a lot at them, and now wanted to get involved in some way.
Since the conference was in Boston, I thought that a lot of people from Delaware would be able to make it. After all, it was only a 6 hour drive... But then, a certain "economic meltdown" happened, and my colleagues ended up staying home. As the LMS Project Leader, I was the only one lucky enough to get my trip approved.
The Sakai community builds up a lot of energy during the now annual international conference, so I took upon myself to champion the idea (people on the weekly conference call could hardly stop me from yapping... sorry about that!) of getting as much information out of the conference to the rest of the community who could not make it, including my UD colleagues. It all started with a call for volunteer Citizen Journalists about a week before the conference (if you know nothing about citizen journalism, see this ELI 7 things you need to know file).
Conference Preparation: Building-Up Awareness
One aspect that needed some attention was building-up awareness about the use of social technologies during the conference. Like every decent conference, we needed an easy and short hashtag. #Sakai09 was selected and promoted, along with prefered social media sites and technologies. After debating what should be done, the following technologies were targeted for the conference:
Confluence: The Sakai community wiki space is a blessing the during the whole year, but seems to have a limited role to play during the conferences. Past conferences have shown us that when a lot of people try to use it at the same time, it tends to crash and leave us hanging, so we used it a lot before the conference to promote it, and used a lot of other sites during the conference to "spread the load".
Facebook, LinkedIn: Events were created on social and profesional networking sites to invite people to register for the conference.
Twitter: Since a lot of people in the Sakai community are tech-savvy and heavy Twitterers, we knew that Twitter would be a very efficient way to direct people's attention to interesting stuff in real time.
Youtube: The Mecca of free video could not be ignored. We created a channel called Sakaivideo where Citizen Journalists would upload short videos throughout and after the conference.
Slideshare: Slides as attachments on the Sakai Confluence wiki are nice, but it seems like they don't get enough attention. Slideshare is a premium free slide sharing service that let users tag, favorite, comment on, and embed slide deck, which was exactly what was needed to spread the knowledge a bit more. A slideshare event was also created to centralize all the slides in one place.
Vimeo: For longer videos, since they don't impose a lenght limit like Youtube.
Ustream: The Ustream channel was created in advance and linked from the social media page.
Yahoo!Pipes: I built a Pipe to gather stuff tagged with Sakai09 from different sources (Diigo, Delicious, Youtube, Flickr, etc.) and embedded the results on the home page of the conference Confluence page. This way, attendees could get a sense of live social presence. The pipe was also a great way to aggregate all these knowledge chunks from different sources in one comprehensive stream.
Short Videos
The biggest problem with conference videos in general is that they are usually too long. Another one is that the audio is not that great, and you lose a lot of questions from the audience most of the time. As one of my ex-colleague used to say: all bad movies are too long.
So instead of taking a capture everything approach, we decided to let Citizen Journalists decide on what to record, while trying to capture summaries of key sessions through one-on-one interviews. A lot of people signed-up, and Flip cameras were distributed to most of these people in order to gather short stories about the most interesting projects, opinions, visions, and people. A lot of folks also brought their own high-end video hardware and expertise, including Kim from UNC Chapel Hill (see the pic below).
As of today (July 23, 2009), 40 short videos have been uploaded to the Youtube channel, some of which have been viewed more that 100 times. Below are two samples from these videos.
Longer videos were uploaded to Vimeo, which contains 7 videos, including the keynote address of the two winners on the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA), Andrea Crampton and Edith Sheffer. Only the TWSIA winners and Vijay Kumar's keynote address were "professionally" recorded by the hotel crew (you be the judge of the quality), since we really wanted to make sure to capture those because of their usefulness to the teaching and learning community.
Financial facts: the Sakai Foundation spent around $600 on 3 Flip Ultra HD cameras, and around $5,000 on the hotel crew to record two sessions... You do the math.
Streaming Video
Without realizing the full extend of the workload involved, I volunteered to UStream and record some sessions I was to attend. Strong of the expertise of our Summer Faculty Institute experience with Alec Couros a couple of weeks prior, I decided to try to replicate UD's video guru Paul Rickards' on a shoestring budget, and without the help of a cameraman sidekick. My main concerns were capturing decent audio, connectivity, and power. Below is the diagram of what I envisioned as a one-man band streaming video kit.
I ended bringing all that stuff to the conference.
After testing out the external microphones and webcams, I realized during the pre-conference that the internal microphone on my MacBook Pro did a good enough job to avoid carrying the audio recorder with external microphones. Also, the wireless signal was strong enough in session rooms to allow me to avoid being hard-wired. Still, carrying all that stuff around was a challenge, especially since I needed to change rooms, boot-up, get set to stream and record, all of that without slowing down the pace of the conference.
When slides had been uploaded to Ustream prior to the presentation, I was able to switch from the webcams to my shared screen displaying the slides through a free software called CamTwist, which ended up as a way better streaming experience.
A lot of people at the conference and abroad were thrilled to see that some sessions were streamed, and thanked me profusely for doing this. Attendees also invited at home colleagues to follow the live stream, amplifying the reach of the stream.
Some key stats: more than 22 hours of live streaming, 266 unique viewers, 449 viewers, average of 7.6 viewers at any time, 173 viewer hours, and around 1,000 views of the recordings.
Remember the TWSIA videos? You can compare the quality with the Ustream of the same event.
Lessons Learned
Some lessons learned from this whole experience
Short videos created enough of a buzz to avoid recording every sessions.
Ustreaming equipment should be left in the rooms that are to be recorded. Moving all this equipement is too cumbersome for a single person.
Twitter is good for real time social buzz, but sucks at keeping a archive of an event. Search results on Twitter are purged too fast nowadays, Tweets from the conference are not even availble anymore, two weeks after the event. You need to copy the tweets somewhere to make live blogging efficient in the long run, or use a live-blogging tool like CoverItLive during the event.
When slides are shared in advance, the live streaming experience becomes so much better, because you can switch video sources from webcams to screen sharing, making sure the text and graphics are readable.
You can't do it alone. It takes a team effort to make something like this happen. More than ten official Citizen Journalists were a part of this initiative, and I personally want to thank them for their support and enthusiasm. See you all next year!
More than a year ago, I put the final touch on a report called Wikis in Higher Education, an assignment I worked on for some time from when I started working for the University of Delaware and May 2008. Since the release of the report, there has been some success stories using the wiki tool in Sakai at UD. The latest success story comes from Persephone Braham, an Assistant Professor in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.
But at the pace that the web technologies are evolving nowadays, the Sakai Wiki tool is becoming weaker every day, as wiki-like behaviors are becoming a part of other web 2.0 technologies. Not that it's a bad thing, but having access to a protected, institutionally-supported wiki space has undeniable value in higher education.
Below are some of the missing features that would need to be included in Sakai in order to make its wiki tool competitive again. Some of these features will become available in Sakai in the near future, but I found relevant to list them here anyway.
1. Rich Text Editor
This feature has been asked for years, yet it is not implemented. Attempts have been made to integrate the FCK Editor with the wiki tool, but results have been dissapointing. The biggest issue is related to the fact that there are too many features in the FCK Editor that are not supported in the wiki markup language, like resizing a picture or formatting a table. Other Web 2.0 wiki products like Wikispaces have been using a rich text environment from the get-go, and even rarely show the wiki markup language to the user.
2. Embedding
Users create content outside of Sakai, and they would like to be able to embed objects (videos, sounds, pictures, etc.) inside the page as they create content. Again, this feature is available on all blog engines and on most wiki engines as well.
3. Table Formating
The default "first line is a header with a yellow background" doesn't cut it anymore. Sometimes, the content needs to be presented differently, and users have been complaining about this lack of flexibility. Most wiki engines support a way to turn a cell into a table header. Confluence does it with a double pipe ( || ), Wikidot with a tilde after a pipe ( |~ ).
4. Page and Comment Deletion
It is a little ridiculous to not be able to delete a page or a comment. The workaround is definitely weird. The fact that a page cannot be deleted does not promote tidyness, a basic wiki behavior that should be engrained in user's minds.
5. Group Awareness
I have been asked over and over again if wiki spaces could be created for specific groups in Sakai. Faculty want to assign spaces and change permissions to only allow certain subsets of users access to sections or pages to read or edit.
6. Listing of User Edits
Although highly inefective and time consuming (and personally discouraged as often as possible by yours truly), tracking user edits is a feature that faculty members are requesting. The idea would be to be able to seach for a user and see a list of all the edits that user has done in a specific site. Some faculty members believe that exposing that data can help them assign a participation grade.
7. Editing In Place
This one is a little far-fetched, but it is a behavior we see more and more often online. The idea that whenever a users hovers an editable part of the text and clicks it to start editing is definitely a part of the user experience expectations.
An Emerging Dilemma in the Sakai Community
Now that I have exposed some of the feature requests I'd like to see in the Sakai wiki, the problem comes back to this: How much effort is the community willing to demonstrate in fixing Sakai 2.x vs. developing Sakai 3? Sakai 2.x. is going to be around for at least another year before a stable release of Sakai 3 is available. Are we willing to put our current LMS on ice for a whole year, or are we going to make it work better right now?
I am not sure what the answer to this question is, but I would sure like to hear your opinion on this issue.
Québécois, LMS Project Leader (Sakai deployment) at the U. of Delaware. Instructional Designer, Educational Technologist, Web 2.0 Evangelist, Huge wiki geek. 2009 Sakai Fellow.
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