The Foundation also works to promote the wider adoption of community-source and open standards approaches to software solutions within higher education.
Foundation staff coordinate software development, quality assurance and distribution activities for the community. Staff members oversee Sakai's intellectual property and track contributor agreements. They also provide technical support for both community members and potential adopters, speak at conferences and other gatherings about Sakai and manage Sakai's own conferences and meetings.
Many of these same companies also provide commercial consulting and support services for the Sakai community institutions.
. It is one of the most visible, if not critical, continuously operating / high availablility software applications used in the interest of the university's academic mission.
Before Sakai, IU developed a number of local systems that served the university well, and the university could change them as needed; however, IU alone was responsible for all ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs. The Sakai software (called Oncourse at IU) allows IU to maintain flexibility to make changes as needed, but to share the maintenance and upgrade costs with the other universities. In sum, IU gets a better cost of ownership while still being able to innovate for the needs of IU students, faculty, and staff.
You can choose from features and functions to create course and project sites that meet your needs. Here are some examples:
A course web site where students can work on and submit assignments
A web site where an instructor or project director can make announcements and share resources, such as documents or links to other web sites
A web site that serves as an online discussion board
If they belong to more sites than can be displayed as tabs, a more sites link provides access to the rest.
If they belong to more sites than can be displayed as tabs, a more sites link provides access to the rest.
Rating and review mechanisms allow meritorious work to surface to grow. Want to support the academic process - which we know to be about critical thinking and analysis and synthesis - and allow users to turn it outward to share it more broadly.
