We now have a program that will move the contents of a WebCT course to Sakai. We have tried it successfully with several real courses. The program is intended for faculty to use themselves. Click the link below to access the conversion tool:

WebCT to Sakai Conversion Tool

If you would like assistance in moving your course moved from WebCT to Sakai, please notify sakai@rutgers.edu.

How WebCT to Sakai conversion works

The conversion does three things:

• It moves test and quiz questions into the Sakai "Tests and Quizzes" tool.
• It moves documents, web pages and other content into Sakai's "Resources" tool. The content in Sakai's Resources should look just like it did in WebCT's "my_files".
• Optionally, it moves organizer pages and content modules into Sakai's "Modules" tool.

Note that there is overlap between the last two items. That is, most of the same documents will show up in Resources and Modules if you use both approaches.

The difference is that "Modules" will attempt to preserve the structure of your organizer pages and content modules. In general, "Modules" is the best approach if you have organized lessons for students to go through, while "Resources" makes more sense if you have collections of documents that you expect students to browse. You should try both approaches and choose the one which works best for your course materials.

What to Expect after your Course has been Converted

Your course will be partially set up, without student access (it is "unpublished" and does not have your rosters added to it); this is done in order to give you time to finish organizing your material before students can see them.

Courses will look different in Sakai. We will move the documents, images, etc, that you put into the course, and (in "Modules" at least) maintain the same structure of organizer pages. We do not copy or create discussions, chats or other items. To add these items, go to your new site in Sakai, click "Site Info" then "Edit Tools", place checkmarks next to as many of the tools as you would like to use, and click "Finish".

[For Fall 2008, "Modules" will have the ability to link to specific assignments, quizes and discussion topics in the middle of other content.]

Only you are authorized to add your roster. To do so, go to your course site in Sakai, click "Site Info" then "Edit Class Rosters" and "Add Rosters". You must have roster access, granted by your department chair, before you do this.

You must also publish your site to make it visible to students. Click "Manage Access" on the "Site Info" page to do this.

For tests and quizzes, we upload all of your questions into a question pool. We do not move specific tests. However once your questions are there, you can create a test and select questions from the pool.

There are two reasons for not copying individual tests:

• The options for building tests are substantially different in the two systems, while individual questions are fairly similar
• We expect that most faculty change their tests from term to term, but want to keep all of their questions.

Limitations

We are not currently committing to anything other than content and tests. Thus we are not planning to move the contents of discussions, old assignments, etc. If this is a problem, please contact hedrick@rutgers.edu.

Some manual fixups may be needed for content. We copy all documents to Resources including some that you may not want students to see and you must delete or hide these. The order in which pages appear in Modules or Resources may well not be right. You can easily re-order the items in either tool.

The primary limitations are in test questions.

• Sakai does not have "computed questions". It appears that only one faculty member is making large-scale use of this. We will make limited WebCT capacity available to that person for another year, at which point we expect to be able to handle that in Sakai.
• Sakai does not have an equation editor. We expect to support equations for Fall, 2007, but support may not be available until Summer.
• In short-answer questions, WebCT allows you to specify the correct answer using "regular expressions." This is an advanced feature that is not well documented. It appears that only one person is using this extensively. We believe his regular expressions can be replaced with facilities in Sakai, but it may take significant time to make the conversion. We are prepared to have staff help in this.