Sakai Fosters Collaboration
Sakai enables you to create courses in which participants form teams to design and develop advanced Web environments. Each team selects a topic and conducts research on what has been learned by other groups developing applications in the content area. Informed by this research, the team designs a Web-based environment and presents it for critique and discussion by the entire class. Then the team selects an appropriate hardware platform and suite of development software. Participants comment on progress as the environments undergo development on the Web. Each team member logs project contributions into an online reflective blog that is used for grading purposes. In the course wiki, each student contributes to a shared knowledge base of best practices and tools of Web design.
Students use both synchronous (Sakai chat room) and asynchronous (Sakai forum, blogger, and wiki) communication to build community, form teams, and reflect on each others' work. The instructor participates actively in the discussion to create a strong online presence. At three checkpoints distributed evenly throughout the course, the instructor evaluates the blogs and provides constructive feedback about the quality and level of student discussion and reflection.
