Features

A good way to see the features of Sakai is usng the "Help" tool at the left margin. As shown there, the major features as follows. The three items noted with * aren't described in Help yet.

• Announcements
• Assignments and assignment handin. Includes the ability to pass comments back and accept revised submissions.
• Chat room
• Discussion tool. While functional, the current tool will be replaced by one of the standard Internet discussion systems, which has a lot more features.
• *JForum. This is a more powerful discussion group tool. However it's new to Sakai, and may have rough edges. Please try it to make sure it will do what you want before committing your course to it.
• Drop box. This is a separate area shared between each student and the site owner, allowing another way to share information and comments.
• Email archive. Each site acts as a mailing list, with all site members on the list. All email is archived. Members can choose whether to get the postings individually, as a daily summary, or not at all (in which case they would look at the archive).
• Gradebook. This is an early version. It's functional, but is missing a number of things that are being worked on for late 2005. The most important missing features are the ability to group sections within the gradebook, and the ability to upload data into the gradebook. (Downloading works.) Also, grades given in the assignment tool are not passed to the gradebook. If you are using the gradebook, we recommend not giving grades in the Assignment tool, but opening the gradebook in a separate window and putting your grades there.
• Membership. Allows students to opt into sites that are "joinable."
• *Modules (a.k.a. Melete). A tool designed to help you prepare online content. It is also possible to put content in the Resources area. But if you wanted to put your content into some kind of systematic framework, you'd need to prepare index.html pages yourself to help students navigate, just as you would with any web server. Melete automates constructing the framework.
• News. Lets you get feeds from any site that supports the "RSS" protocol. That is becoming increasingly popular, not just with major news sites but projects and even individuals.
• Resources. Minimally, this is a place you can upload files for members of your site to see. However it can be used as a full web server, with the advantages that it knows who your site members are (for cases where you need to restrict access to files), and there are better tools for putting content onto the site than most normal web servers have.
• Schedule. Lets you note due dates and other key dates. The schedule in your workspace joins the information from all sites you are a part of. Many tools will automatically add items to the schedule (e.g. when you give an assignment, the due date can be added).
• Syllabus. Lets you generate a syllabus for a course.
• Tests and Quizzes. Lets you generate tests, surveys, and other assessments. Quite powerful and flexible. Supports the QTI standards, so questions can be shared with commercial course management systems. (However we haven't tried that yet.)
• Web content. Lets you put a link to an external web site in the left margin.
• *Wiki. A wiki is available by Sakai. Because it's still in an experimental stage, it must be added by the support staff. To get a wiki for you site, please send email to sakai@rutgers.edu

For additional information about Sakai, see the main Sakai web page.

Major Rutgers changes are as follows:

• Allow anyone with a NetID to login with NetID and password. Accounts generated this way have role "maintain", so they can create sites.
• Provide an easy way to let users join your site. For sites that support guests, this process will automatically create an account for them and add them to the site. To set up this tool for your site, please contact sakai@rutgers.edu
• Limit guests to require @ in name. Create email process for updating password. Guests use role "friend", which cannot create sites.
• Add process for guests to change password, etc. This works both for guests that requested their own account and those added by site owners as email addresses.
• Connect system to course rosters.
• Improve the Resources tool to allow it to be used as a general web server.