With spring having officially arrived, the CLE team is hard at work on the upcoming release of version 2.8 of the rSmart Sakai CLE. It’s based on Sakai 2.8, which the Sakai community has tentatively scheduled for release at the end of March. If this schedule holds, we plan to release version 2.8 of the CLE in late May or early June 2011.   

In keeping with our typical practice, we are allowing for additional time between the Sakai release and the CLE release. We use this time to integrate new features and perform extensive testing, as well as develop additional documentation. As always, our goal is to ensure that the CLE provides the best combination of functionality and reliability, and that users have all the support resources they need.

rSmart offers many training resources to help users take full advantage of the rSmart Sakai CLE. Now, we've developed a new resource for the administrators who manage the CLE at their institutions: "CLE Admin Training."

With this self-paced, online course, admins can learn everything they'll need to know for maintaining a successful CLE environment--from tools in the Admin workspace for managing users and sites and troubleshooting various issues, to advanced tasks such as scheduling jobs and customizing the CLE's look and feel.

Proposals are now being accepted for Sakai Conference 2011, to be held June 14-16 in Los Angeles, California. If you'll be attending the conference, there are many ways you can get involved--through presentations, pre-conference workshops, "Birds of a Feather" sessions, and showcase/tech demos.

Keep in mind, however, that time is running short. Pre-conference session proposals must be submitted by March 27, and the deadline for all other proposals is April 3. To learn more and to submit a proposal, visit Sakai Conference 2011.

If you're an admin, you may want to expand the number of tools you can report on with the Site Statistics Admin tool.  You can do so easily, by adding the appropriate tools to the Admin workspace.

(Note: the Site Statistics tool does not report on all tools in the CLE. For more information, see What activities does the Site Statistics tool track?)  

To add a tool, first log in and access the Admin workspace. Then, select the Sites tool and follow these steps:

If you're an instructor, you can easily check who has--and has not--submitted an assessment in the Tests and Quizzes tool. But what about students who accessed the assessment and then did not submit?

You can gather this information by using the Site Statistics tool. To do so, select the tool and click Reports in the menu bar. Then, follow these steps:

In recent months, the rSmart team has resolved a variety of issues with the Lessons (Melete) tool. To make these bug fixes readily available to our clients, we've put them in a binary release.

This release is for versions 2.6.4 and 2.7.1 of the rSmart Sakai CLE. The release includes bug fixes that resolve issues with site import, student access, user permissions, resources links, and the optional Sferyx rich text editor.

If you are a hosted CLE client, our support staff will be in contact with you to apply this release to your instance. If rSmart does not maintain your instance, you may download the release from RSN, where it is slated to be available in early March.