Sakai Design Process
I have worked out the following workflow outlining the steps I take when creating a new course with Sakai:
—On the home page, replace “worksite information” with the name of your course. Use the Site Info URL field to give the link of your first page to display. Make this be a page within your Sakai worksite in order to avoid the unwanted warning about mixing secure and non-secure items.
—Use the Site Info tool to add tools to your course; I added assignments, schedule, forums, wiki, blogger, podcasts, chat room, search, and tests.
—Create your course content. I did this with Dreamweaver; you can also create content with MS Word and use Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert it into a PDF file that works beautifully in Sakai.
—Adopt textbooks; I did this at safari.oreilly.com.
—Create assignments and decide upon the weighting of your assignments. This works best if the weights add up to 100.
—Decide when your assignments will become visible, due, and accepted.
—Write a startup message in the forum explaining to click the heading of the message to which you want to respond.
—Make the first message in your Wiki explain how to create a link to make a new page.
—Front-end your blogger with a message explaining to click new in the menu bar to write a new entry in the Blog.
—Record an audio or video message and use the Podcast tool to put it on your course feed.
—Use the Test tool to create a survey for students to take over the first weekend and let you know how they are doing with Sakai.
(To make a custom "Home" screen, you need to delete the home tool and instead create a Web Content tool named "Home.")
