Sakai Open Academic Environment

David Goodrum, Sakai OAE Steering Group Member, Indiana University Alan Marks, Director, Sakai Foundation presented on the Sakai OAE. The presentation on Sakai OAE (formerly known as Sakai 3). There are nine main partners - Cambridge, Charles Stuart, AAr, Georgia Tech, Berkeley, Stanford, Indiana, Michigan, and New York universities. Started in 2010 and are now ready for a 1.0 release for 6.31.11. Sakai serves 1/4th of all students by FTE enrollment. Sakai is self-sustaining. It is not dependent on Mellon funding.

Goodrum talked about the difference between Sakai CLE vs. the OAE using their concept of "lenses." They refer to the Sakai Open Academic Environment as "a new

Openness: They demonstrated the tools for sharing, tagging and categorizing documents. One can click through another students research and interests.
Reuse: Students can share using social bookmarking or add to the student's library and reuse it. You can do much of the things that people are already doing in Google Docs. I like this because it represents a breaking out of the traditional silos that are holding back elearning.
Share: Again, like Google Docs, users can share the documents with other users.
Collaboration: The presenters do not see social media as a "powerful educational tool." They believe that they need to add knowledge and information.

I will be really interested in this if there is a way to carry all of this outside of Sakai. I am hoping that this will not just be another silo, even though it is already a very useful silo.

There were a couple of little bugs but not bad for a 1.0 release.

They are adding content commenting, content authoring, and activities (engaged learners).