The LMS marketplace has reached a point where commercial cloud hosted LMS systems from large, established companies have become the norm. Systems like Canvas, Desire2Learn, or Blackboard address the need for a scalable production grade LMS without using local IT staff for development, installation, upgrading, patching or performance monitoring. But the move to the cloud has taken away the sense of ownership, iteration, and innovation that has been part of open source LMS systems like Sakai and Moodle. SakaiPlus makes it so that the Sakai LMS can be installed into your campus-wide cloud-hosted LMS using LTI Advantage to give an option to faculty and IT staff to work with an LMS that can grow and improve over time. Using LTI Advantage enables the idea of a “boutique LMS” that serves a small fraction of the faculty on the campus without actually installing and supporting a second LMS. This session will describe the notion of a “boutique LMS” and then demonstrate Sakai working inside of Canvas, Blackboard, D2L and Moodle.

Abstract: Learning Impact 20203

SakaiPlus is the first example of using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Advantage to plug an entire LMS into another LMS, allowing faculty a choice of LMSs on a campus without requiring a second enterprise LMS installation. We have been beta-testing SakaiPlus integrated into Canvas at the University of Michigan School of Information since fall 2022. This presentation will describe how this is done technically, show how it has been used in real courses, and share initial reactions and results of the testing. We will talk about how an institution with Canvas, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn could use SakaiPlus via LTI Advantage.

Abstract for 2023 NERCOMP and 2023 Educause ELI

Hi all,  this is a simple post that points you to where Dr. Chuck now can be found now that he has reduced his use of Twitter due to recent events.

• https://openedtech.social/@drchuck
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesseverance/
• https://nextdoor.com (You need to live near me)

My social network is now at https://openedtech.social/@drchuck – if you are a twitter follower interested in Open Source Educational Technology, Open Educational Resources or pictures of cool breakfast food – follow me there.  You can join any number of Mastodon servers and follow me from any of them.  The openedtech.social server is for those interested in open source educational technology – you should find a Mastodon server that fits who you are – I started at mastodon.social for a while and then moved to a more focused community.  That server might be overwhelmed as the folks depart from the other platform.

For my “announcement stuff” like new videos, professional blog posts, or face-to-face office hours, I am going to start using LinkedIn – a lot – you can follow me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesseverance/ – I only make connections with those I know through work and collaboration or professional contacts say at a conference.

I won’t be closing my twitter account – but it I won’t use it regularly until something changes in its ownership and approaches.   I will not check it regularly – but from time to time I will post a link to this blog post :)

I think the downfall of Twitter is a good chance for us all to reflect and think about why we are part of each of the social networks that we are part of.  If there is not one single, global commercial global social network it makes it so that network cannot act as a global influence.  Many good things happened because of the global public square – but there were as many if not more bad things that happened as well.  It is probably best that it becomes irrelevant so we can rebuild out networks in a more healthy way.

Hope to see you online

— Chuck 19-Nov-2022

This is a message from Wilma Hodges, the Sakai Community Coordinator.

Congratulations to our amazing worldwide community!

I’m pleased to announce that Sakai 20.6 is released and available for downloading [1]! Please note that this is likely the last maintenance release for Sakai 20.

Sakai 20.6 has 52 improvements [2] including

• 10 fixes in Assignments

Other areas improved include:

• A11y
• Account
• Announcements
• Basic LTI
• Bullhorns
• Chat Room
• Commons
• Content Review
• Delegated Access
• Dropbox
• Feedback tool
• Forums
• Gradebook
• Internationalization
• Lessons
• Messages
• Portal
• Preferences
• Rubrics
• Section Info
• Sign Up
• Site Info
• Statistics
• Syllabus
• Tests & Quizzes

There were 3 security issues fixed in 20.6 (details will be sent to the Sakai Security Announcements list).

Please also note the upgrade information page [3] for important notes related to performing the upgrade.

[1] Download information- http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/20.6/

[2] 20.6 Fixes by Tool – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/32250068993/20.6+Fixes+by+tool

[3] Upgrade information – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/17310646353/Sakai+20+Upgrade+Information

This is a copy of the announcement of the Sakai 22.1 maintenance release from Wilma Hodges – the Sakai community coordinator.

Congratulations to our amazing worldwide community!

I’m pleased to announce that Sakai 22.1 is now available for downloading[1]!

Sakai 22.1 has 204 improvements [2] including

• 44 fixes in Assignments
• 10 fixes in Basic LTI
• 14 fixes in Forums/Discussions
• 13 fixes in Gradebook
• 12 fixes in Lessons
• 24 fixes in Rubrics
• 20 fixes in Tests & Quizzes

Other areas improved include:

• Accessibility
• Announcements
• Bullhorns
• Calendar
• Calendar Widget
• Commons
• Dropbox
• Internationalization
• Messages
• PA System
• Portal
• Preferences
• Profile
• Quartz Scheduler
• Resources
• Roster
• Search
• Section Info
• SIgn Up
• Site Info
• Statistics
• Syllabus

There were 3 security issues fixed in 22.1 (details will be sent to the Sakai Security Announcements list).

Please also note the upgrade information page [3] for important notes related to performing the upgrade.

[1] Download information- http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/22.1/

[2] 22.1 Fixes by Tool – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/32201507219/22.1+Fixes+by+tool

[3] Upgrade information – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/32201507179/Sakai+22+Upgrade+Information+In+Progress 

Wilma Hodges and many others have helped build a jumping off page on how to get started in the Sakai community in the Sakai Wiki.

Topics include, Using Sakai, Deploying Sakai, Building Sakai and Helping  with Sakai Community.

It is the place to go if you are interested in adopting or getting involved in Sakai.

This message originally came from Wilma Hodges – the Sakai community coordinator.

I’m pleased to announce that Sakai 21.3 is now available for downloading [1]!

Sakai 21.3 has 140 improvements [2] including

• 24 fixes in Assignments

• 11 fixes in Discussions

• 10 fixes in Gradebook

• 11 fixes in Lessons

• 13 fixes in Site Info

• 17 fixes in Tests & Quizzes

Other areas improved include:

• Accessibility

• Account

• Announcements

• Basic LTI

• Bullhorns

• Calendar

• Chat Room

• Commons

• Content Review

• Dropbox

• Entity Broker

• Internationalization

• Membership

• Portal

• Preferences

• Profile

• Resources

• Roster

• Rubrics

• Section Info

• Sign Up

• Statistics

• Syllabus

There were 2 security issues fixed in 21.3 (details will be sent to the Sakai Security Announcements list).

Please also note the upgrade information page [3] for important notes related to performing the upgrade.

[1] Download information- http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/21.3/

[2] 21.3 Fixes by Tool – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/17188913172/21.3+Features+by+Tool

[3] Upgrade information – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/17310646931/Sakai+21+Upgrade+Information   

This message originally came from Wilma Hodges – the Sakai Community Coordinator

I’m pleased to announce that Sakai 22.0 is now available! 

Many thanks to everyone involved with the release! It wouldn’t happen without all of you!

Our community wiki has both functional [1] and technical [2] release notes.

Download instructions are also available [3].

New in Sakai 22

• Calendar Design Upgrade

• Conversations – New tool!

• Lessons improvements

• LTI Advantage Improvements

• And more! [4]

[1] Functional release notes – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/32201506818/Sakai+22+Release+Notes

[2] Technical Release notes – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/32201506844/Sakai+22+Technical+Release+Notes

[3] Download instructions – http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/22.0/

[4] Complete Feature Summary – https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/32201507202/Sakai+22+Complete+Feature+Summary

This is an abstract I submitted to Open Apereo 2022.

Now that Coursera and other MOOC platforms are almost a decade old (Coursera was founded in 2012),  we have greatly expanded the opportunities for high quality education irrespective of the location or means of the student. As an example, Dr. Chuck’s Python for Everybody has graduated over a million new Python programmers. Some students who complete their education using MOOCs end up getting a job – often as a successful career pivot. However it is more challenging for someone in their early 20’s to parlay a primarily MOOC-based education into that all-important first job. For students enrolled in traditional higher education, they have access to career counseling, internships, and an alumni network that eases the transition from education to employment. So far we have no solution to this problem that scales and is independent of the location and means of the student. This presentation will explore how Open Source projects might just be the perfect place to fill this gap for students around the world.

Many of you know that the IMS LTI working group is doing a lot of great things expanding LTI. All of this is done behind closed doors so you can’t see the draft documents but I can implement and release the features in Sakai early – which I usually do.

Dynamic provisioning is a feature which we have had in Sakai for nearly a year (we call it “LTI Advantage Auto Configuration”) but the actual specification documents are now available for others to look at.

https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/lti-dr/v1p0

The spec builds on OpenID Connect Registration:

https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-registration-1_0.html

This is a great spec as it reduces the copying and pasting of LTI Advantage URLs – which annoyingly have slightly different names in each tool and LMS – down to a single configuration URL and a single click.

The spec has been in Sakai (and Tsugi) for about a year, has been in BrightSpace and Moodle for some time as well. Blackboard is going to build it soon. Canvas has their own proprietary solution for tool registration that works well so they don’t need to support this standard particularly quickly.

This is great news for Tool Developers – it is an easy spec to implement it – it took me about 2 days of coding to add it to Sakai Plus this week.

I should probably schedule a webinar about it. If you have LTI tools, I have open source PHP code in Tsugi for the Tool end – and in Sakai I have both the LMS and Tool end of the protocol implemented and a number of nice Jackson-based POJOs to support the protocol.

If you are working in a language other than PHP or Java at least you have a bunch of working code to look at and lots of ways to test your tool. You can do testing on Sakai’s nightly servers or my dev1.sakaicloud.org servers. I am happy to mentor tool developers to implement this new spec – all of our collective lives get easier with auto provisioning.

To give credit where credit is due, Claude Vervoort of Cengage, a Moodle contributor, and one of the LTI co-chairs put a lot of energy into this spec. So kudos to him.

Let me know if any tool vendors are interested.