Since I am interested in Open Courseware and the long-term benefits of open materials to society, I am teaching my courses this semester in a semi-public manner – I am trying to think of my materials as “open first” or “public first”.
I will protect only those materials and information that I feel need protecting.
Using Sakai as my LMS system has been great because it has a lot of features that allow me to remix my own content in Sakai. Frankly over the past few years features and capabilities have been added from many of the Sakai developers that make this fun.
What is amazing to me is how much of this I can already do with Sakai – just knowing the ins and outs of Sakai’s features – of course it does not hurt that I was part of adding these features into Sakai over the past few years.
It also helps to have spent a bunch of time talking to folks at Cambridge, Oxford, and Leeds to understand the “more open” approach to teaching that is present in the UK. (Video)
If you are interested in taking a look at my semi-public site – go to www.si182.com
In the rest of the blog post, I outline some of the things I have done.

Here is a list of what I have done so far.
Teach 95% of the course in a Project site with open membership. This was done by having tech support associate my course roster with a project site that I created. I wish this site could have a “vanity” id so my outside URLs would not be so ugly. The only technical bit is that Project sites do not have proper AUTHZ templates for “Student” roles. The quick solution for this is to simply go through all of the tools and give the students the permissions you desire. It took a while before I realized that students were not getting E-Mail from the project site.
My project site has these tools: Announcements, Resources, Podcasts, Polls, E-Mail Archive, Textbook (Web Content), and Calendar (iFrame to Google’s calendar).
My course site only has the Assignments tool for grading – and *nothing else*. Of Course Roster is only viewable by me. So grades and Roster are the *only* private things in the course. If I end up using materials under “fair use”, I might have to store some resources in the course site. I generally avoid “fair use” things – luckily in the software world – there is so much free stuff that I don’t find a need to do fair use. I understand that other courses might have less of a choice in this.
Furthermore I mark my Resources as completely public and Podcasts as public and set my project site to joinable by everyone with a role of Observer. This coupled with University of Michigan’s wonderfully liberal friend account policy means that *anyone* can get into my course from anywhere (I have to invite friends if their accounts this is their first use of CTools).
Building the really public site – www.si182.com
Once this is all setup I can make a site that simply points to the public urls inside of Sakai. This results on a top nav bar with the following links:
Book – A page with an iframe that points to the publisher web page for the book.
Resources – This points to a URL in the access servlet for the course material without a file name. Thanks ot a lot of work by Chuck Hedrick of Rutgers back in the 2.1 days, Access Servlet in Sakai will serve up directory listings if you do not have a file name on the URL. Try it here and see what happens.
Podcasts – these are public by default so you just need to show the URL with instructions for subscribing.
Calendar – Since I use a public Google Calendar – one more iFrame and viola! We have the same course calendar inside my course – also outside my course.
The primary thing that is missing in my completely public site is E-Mail archive. I could do that – but something inside of me tells me that I would like to know who is listening as I admit to making screw ups in Lecture 3 to my class. Anyone can listen by joining – I just don’t want people Googling “Python Idiot” later and coming to my mailing list – perhaps in time my attitude for that will change as well. Funny – the notion of knowing who was listening was important in the early design of the Bodington LMS.
The E-Mail is in the project site – not the course site – this is because I want those my lurkers to step in and help when they can – and this *has* happened so I like it a lot. It is probably no surprise that I run the E-Mail list in my class much like a open source dev list. Anyone and everyone are encouraged to talk and help each other – mail is not a broadcast-only medium for me – it is a community.
Probably the last point to make is that I am trying to experiment with building a community around a course and idea that lasts beyond a semester – I hope that when the course is all over – some students from each semester – will stick around and help me teach the next round of incoming students. Ultimately this leads to a very natural and organic approach to teaching.
So much to experiment with and so little time :)
Comments
Stephen Marquad made the comment that I could go even farther using the .auth role to effectively make my site nearly completely visible to anonymous users.
He is exactly right – I need to experiment with that feature and see how it fits into my teaching. I may need to do some clever AUHZ to get buttons to show to the anonymous folks like I want to – I could use Worksite in an frameset to make navigation natural or even use the PDA portal in a frameset to make it really easy.
Hmmm. Thanks Stephen.