Sakai Frameset Establishes Sakai Design Mindset
From a design standpoint, Sakai uses a frameset in which the student's choice of courses appears across the top, the Sakai tools run down the side, and the course content appears in the large frame along the sidebar. The key to creating a successful course with Sakai is designing the content so it can integrate seamlessly along the sidebar. To accomplish this, I decided to create my course content using our School of Education's Dreamweaver template. 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 that identifies the course as coming from the School of Education.
Because my course was part of UD's evaluation of Sakai, however, I felt an obligation to show how less technically inclined faculty could achieve the same result without needing to understand Dreamweaver, Ajax, and style sheets. So I created another version of the startup page that uses Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF Maker to achieve basically the same result. The key is to organize your course content using Word's heading styles: H1 for chapter headings, H2 for section headings, H3 for subheads. Then use Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert your Word document into a PDF file. Automatically, Acrobat creates bookmarks that enable students to navigate your course content through its headings. The resulting PDF presents the user with a sidebar that puts the MS Word headings in collapsible menus that work very much like the Spry menus I created with Dreamweaver. A 5-minute movie compares the Dreamweaver/Spry approach to MS Word/PDF.
