Blackboard en Sakai: toch samen door één deur?

De UT heeft gekozen voor Blackboard als nieuwe Elektronische Leeromgeving, zo kan op de officiële website gelezen worden. Sakai zou niet meer in beeld zijn. Maar voor universiteiten die niet kunnen of willen kiezen tussen Sakai, Moodle en/of Blackboard, is er interessant nieuws. Er is een BlackBoard Sakai connector in de maak, en ook wordt er gesproken over een BlackBoard Moodle connector.
Blackboard heeft onlangs dit belangrijke nieuws aangekondigd: ze werken samen met Syracuse University aan de Blackboard Sakai Connector (zie hier, hier of zoek met google). Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck), de voormalige Executive Director van de Sakai Foundation, heeft een uitgebalanceerde analyse geschreven van de waarde van deze ontwikkeling. Dit is zijn standpunt:

When I look at all of this, the balance tips towards being engaged in the effort and trying to influence the direction to ultimately improve the experience of teachers and learners regardless of what enterprise CMS system their school or campus happens to have installed.

Zie Dr. Chuck's Web Log: BlackBoard Sakai Connector - Inside Higher Education.

It is now public: Sakai is on hold

Sakai in de ijskast - UT Nieuws
Originally uploaded by wytze

Several weeks ago we mentioned that our final report of our Sakai pilots was available. Today our university newspaper features an article where you can read (in Dutch) the decisions that have been made by our board, with some comments by my colleague Stanley Portier.
Our board has urged us to put some serious effort in evaluating the MS Sharepoint 2007 product. This should be our sole focus for the coming months.
The fact that very few institutions in The Netherlands are investigating Sakai, is an important factor in the decision of our board to steer in the direction of Sharepoint (for which there seems to be more interest within our sector).
Final decisions will made early in 2008. We will keep you posted.

Final report in English (University of Twente)

The project team at the University of Twente has recently finished their pilot project Campus Blend using Sakai (CBUS in short). In this project Sakai was evaluated on different aspects. Evaluation was done on technical aspects, educational and functional aspects as well as community aspects.
Extensive results and conclusion on the aforementioned aspects are all to be found in the final report, that has been translated into English for everyone to read. Go to http://www.utwente.nl/elo, where you can download your (electronic) copy of the report.

Final reports of University of Twente

Today we have formally finished our evaluation of Sakai (regarding community, functionality of Sakai, technical aspects and financial aspects). You will find all information and our reports on our website, http://www.utwente.nl/elo. The reports are all in the Dutch language, but they all have an extensive summary in English. The final report ("Eindadvies") is being translated in English in full as we speak.
To summarize our work: we are quite happy with Sakai (version 2.3 that is), but some functionalities should be worked on before we would go into full production. Furthermore we will need to look into MS Sharepoint regarding possible components that could fulfill some of our needs. So, all in all this boils down to a final decision that will be made in the spring of next year (2008).
Our reports now go into the formal decision process. We will keep you posted.