Beginning a Course with Sakai
What the student sees onscreen makes all the difference in an online course. The first screen especially must make sense. You need to make it as intuitive as you can.
Because Sakai uses a frameset, you are going to have its menu of tools in the left sidebar. How do you design your content so it makes sense in the context of the Sakai sidebar?
I decided to create my course content using our School of Education's Dreamweaver template. This creates a common look and feel that identifies the course as coming from the School of Education. The menus are powered by Spry, which is Adobe's Ajax framework that plugs in to Dreamweaver. I used the same CSS rules to style my Sakai home page. Thus, when students click an item on the Sakai page, they get a common look and feel.
Startup decision: create a home page within Sakai, make the course Web site be a link in the sidebar also on the home page in Sakai.
Suppressing the Synoptic Views
Can we make the announcements appear over or under the home page, instead of on the right? Why do the announcements show if there are no announcements? Karen e-mailed the following solution for this: "Remove the tools using Site Info, Edit Tools and re-add them using Site Info, Page Order. Originally I didn't think it mattered how you added them back. It appears that any of the tools that have a synoptic piece (Announcements, Chat, Schedule, Forums) will add that piece to the Home page if the tool is present when Edit Tools is updated, even if it was previously in the site. So go ahead and do that: remove using Edit Tools and re-add using Page Order."
