The 10th Sakai conference will be held near MIT in Cambridge, MA during July 7-10, 2009.
The official conference hotel, which will also contain most of the conference sessions and receptions, will be the Cambridge Hyatt. It’s a spectacular location and we will have a conference rate of $199/night, which includes internet access (normally $10/day). More information on registration will be forthcoming.
As the Sakai Fondation moves toward having only one major conference per year, a variety of regional Sakai conferences are being orgainzed. This regional conference at Virginia Tech will focus on two main topics:teaching and learning and adoption and migration strategies.
Following the 9th Sakai Conference in Paris, there is great momentum
behind Sakai. Learn more about the latest developments in the Sakai
software and the state of the community in this webinar featuring
Hannah Reeves, rSmart Community Liaison.
TOPICS TO BE COVERED:
Highlights from the Paris conference
Latest developments on the UX Improvement Initiative and futrure projects
New tools on the horizon
QA developments and performance testing results
New campuses adopting Sakai
New community initatives and how to get involved (TWSIA, etc)
PHOENIX, AZ
(August 6, 2008) – This week rSmart released its latest Sakai service pack: rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5.1.
Part of rSmart's Sakai
support and maintenance service includes regular service pack releases for
clients. rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5.1 delivers to clients 153 bug fixes as well as 12
improvements and minor new features for a total of 165 resolved issues. Many
issues were resolved by the Sakai
community and have been picked up and packaged into this release by rSmart.
Many others were issues rSmart discovered and resolved through the normal
course of its ongoing support services with clients. Most of these fixes were
pushed back into the community code base.
Sakai, a popular open source collaboration and learning environment, is adding content from McGraw-Hill Higher Education to its repertoire of educational tools. Through a technology called Katana, developed by McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions and The ETUDES Consortium, Sakai users will be able to tap directly into McGraw-Hill's electronic learning resources, including online courses, digital media, and curricula.
The University of Michigan was one of the founding institutions of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) and the largest initial contributor of code. "There was nothing accidental in the creation of Sakai," explains Dr. John King, vice provost for academic information and professor in the School of Information. "It grew out of a research project to build online infrastructure for support of globally distributed communities of scientists. We realized that the future required online support for distributed communities of learners in all aspects of the learning process—teaching, research and administration. We needed an environment we could control, so we built it. Other institutions shared our ambition, and joined us. That was the beginning of the Sakai movement."
In 2003, Stanford University found itself at a crossroad. The learning management system (LMS) was becoming a more significant component of teaching and learning, and the university's homegrown system was too expensive to maintain. Assessing the options, all of the commercial LMS platforms lacked significant functionality that Stanford required and the flexibility its faculty and students demanded. Recognizing significant potential and opportunity, Stanford joined the University of Michigan, the University of Indiana and MIT to jointly develop the next generation of coursework tools, Sakai.
rSmart is sponsoring The OPEN Forum which aims to provide an opportunity for leaders and decision
makers from colleges and universities to come together to enhance their
understanding and vision for openness across higher education.
The rSmart Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) v2.5 is here! Join Hannah Reeves, CLE product manager, as she highlights the
new product features and capabilities, discusses the release schedule,
and solicits your feedback.
Institutions switching to a new learning management system are often
faced with unexpected challenges and costs associated with course
migration. To make course and content migration as efficient and
streamlined as possible, Embanet and rSmart have joined forces to offer
institutions the Total Campus Solution. This complete offering gives
institutions a solution for migrating from their current learning
management system to an open source platform, like the rSmart Sakai
Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), at a low cost.
Join an rSmart Sakai expert and Paulo Dias, Embanet's Director of Client
Support Services, as they introduce you to the rSmart Sakai CLE, the
Total Campus Solution, and the migration process.
Mark your calendar for the premier information technology event in
higher education—EDUCAUSE 2008, October 28–31 in Orlando, Florida. The
program, "Interaction, Ideas, Inspiration," will include preconference
seminars; track and poster sessions; small group meetings; and
corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops. rSmart will be in Booth 942 during the conference in the exhibit hall. For more information and to register, click here.
Do you want to learn how to survive--and even thrive--in a Web 2.0 world?
If you do, then come to the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston,
Massachusetts, for Campus Technology's 15th annual summer conference.
This year's conference offers a blueprint for adapting to the new
demands of Web 2.0 teaching and learning, both in and out of the
classroom, and explores how educators are coping with the
ever-increasing demands on their resources, skills and time. You'll
come away armed with tricks, tips and techniques to survive and thrive
Come to Paris, France, this summer for the 9th Sakai Community conference! The dates will be Tuesday-Thursday, 1-3 July, with pre- and post-conference sessions and activities
on Monday, 30 June and Friday, 4 July. All meetings and conference sessions will be held at the
Universite Pierre et Marie Curie.
Whether you're a longtime member of the community, a new face, or are simply
interested in learning more about Sakai, you're sure to profit from the
extended face-to-face interactions that take will place nearly 'round
the clock among designers, developers, pedagogists, faculty, students,
user support specialists, system administrators, educational and
collaborative technology managers from all over the world.
rSmart's Smart Talk Newsletter for May, 2008 (Volume 2, Issue 5) including news about rSmart's new corporate Web site, Kuali Days VI, CLE 2.5 documentation, CLE test procedures, and our regular Smart Tip, Upcoming Events and other items.
Institutions switching to a new learning management system are often faced with unexpected challenges and costs associated with course migration. To make course and content migration as efficient and streamlined as possible, Embanet and rSmart have joined forces to offer institutions the Total Campus Solution. This complete offering gives institutions a solution for migrating from their current learning management system to an open source platform, like the rSmart Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), at a low cost.
Join an rSmart Sakai expert and Paulo Dias, Embanet's Director of Client Support Services, as they introduce you to the rSmart Sakai CLE, the Total Campus Solution, and the migration process.
rSmart is excited to announce the availability of the rSmart Sakai CLE, version 2.5. The rSmart distribution includes the latest releases of Melete (Lesson) and JForum (Discussion Forums) and numerous other tools not included in the community Sakai release.
WIth 1500 improvements and fixes, including 300 individual feature enhancements, you need to look at the Sakai CLE 2.5 again! It is well on its way to becoming the best enterprise solution for teaching, learning and campus collaboration.
Join Hannah Reeves, rSmart's CLE product manager, as she highlights the new product features and capabilities and gives a demonstration of the 2.5 release.
Marist College, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, is known as one of the most technologically advanced liberal arts colleges in the country. Recipient of the Campus Technology Innovators Award and recognized by The Princeton Review and Forbes as one of the 25 "Most Connected Campuses" in America, Marist College determined that the rSmart Sakai CLE was unmatched in its ability to meet the institution's needs to support teaching and learning.
The Assessment and Accreditation portfolio depicted here was initially designed by the Rhode Island Department of Education and the Rhode Island Network for Technology. The primary goal of the portfolio is to collect and display portfolio-worthy assignments completed by students in 25 high schools throughout the state of Rhode Island.
The personal representation portfolio depicted here is an example of a chronological resume, developed by the Career Services Office at Rider University (New Jersey). The purpose of the portfolio was to provide students with a structured environment to build an online resume. The focus of this portfolio is developmental as it seeks to guide students in collecting information about themselves and managing the representation of their virtual identities.
The Teaching and Learning portfolio depicted here was initially designed by Kapiolani Community College for use in their General Education program. The goals of the portfolio were to: Assess student learning according to general education standards, promote the use of general education in disciplinary programs, and support ongoing educational processes. Students and faculty in the General Education community participated along with a few other disciplinary groups.
PHOENIX, AZ. (April 28, 2008) -- rSmart, the leading provider of software support services for open source applications in education, today announces the availability of the rSmart Sakai CLE 2.5 at the JA-SIG open source conference in Minneapolis, MN. This represents the newest version of the industry’s first and only commercial distribution of the open source Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). This milestone release comes early enough in the academic year that institutions considering a new learning management system can adopt Sakai in time for Fall semester.
Kapio'lani Community College in Hawaii needed to add new online learning opportunities for its diverse and scattered student population two years ago. They found an open-source application, piloted it, and now are ready for the next phase. Authentic learning is real-world learning that students demonstrate through their ePortfolios.
rSmart Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment Uses Open Source to Provide Advanced Teaching Solutions at Affordable Cost
PHOENIX, Ariz. – April 21, 2008 – rSmart has been named winner of the award for “Innovation Excellence in Education” in the annual IBM Beacon Awards competition, honoring IBM Business Partners for their ingenuity, innovation, customer satisfaction and outstanding achievements in providing business solutions.
This year's Tech Ed conference will bring thousands of educators and administrators together in Ontario, CA, to share best practice solutions and cutting edge innovations for succeeding in today's educational environment while preparing for the classroom of tomorrow. rSmart will be in booth 930.
If you attend the conference, please join us for our vendor session on Wednesday, April 16, 8:00-9:00 AM, in room 201A. We'll be discussing Sakai's value as a course management system for higher education and will provide a brief demonstration.
Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation, addresses the Blackboard Patent lawsuit on behalf of the Board of Directors of the Sakai Foundation.
Greetings,
As you probably already know, we learned on Friday, March 28 that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a non- final action rejecting all 44 claims in Blackboard's U.S. Patent 6,988,138 as invalid. In 2006, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) requested a re-examination of that patent on behalf of the ATutor Community, the Moodle Community, the Sakai Foundation and the rest of the free and open source software world. The USPTO combined the SFLC request with a similar request from Desire2Learn. This rejection of the patent is good news for the education community and supports what we have believed all along--that the patent in question should never have been issued in the first place.
