Brock University COED 2008 Update

Goodbye Blackboard, Hello Sakai

<ref name="sakai">http://www.brocku.ca/ctlet/sakai/</ref> Thanks to the decision of the office of the Vice-President Academic to move to an open source Sakai-based Learning Management System (LMS), Brock University has an opportunity to build a new LMS.

This proposed new system will be based on the community-based LMS: Sakai (Wikipedia article). Brock's new Sakai-based system will be built upon a cluster (Wikipedia article) that will have all the features of a strong system that is redundant, reliable, scalable, and with sufficient capacity.

The spring of 2008 marks the beginning of a phased transition to Brock using exclusively a Sakai-based LMS for the 2009 academic year. As of July 31st 2009 WebCT will no longer be available at Brock. An implementation plan has been drafted to assure this transition can be accomplished without incidents and discontinuities.

A contest to name the new Sakai-based is currently being held. The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) and others are already beginning the process of documenting Sakai and training faculty.

Matt Clare, from the CTLET presented a summary of the Sakai pilot in poster format in Paris, France this past July 2008. 200px