UBC Arts ISIT Blog

With our collaboration with Land & Food Systems at UBC, we finally have Melete installed on the Dev server. I've tested it out and it's working great! We just have a few minor things to work out but we will have it up and running on our production server soon. We hope to have it done sometime during our Reading Week in Mid-February and the outage time frame will only take a maximum of one hour. This process will be seamless to our participants already using Sakai.

I attended the Sakai conference in December that was held in Atlanta, Georgia. I really enjoyed the session on Melete. It's essentially a lesson building to publish work created by using their built-in text editor. Without Melete, I see Sakai as a disadvantage compared to WebCT and WebCT Vista. WebCT has the Content Module component that allows instructors to publish their modules.

I like how Melete can set up release criteria (start and end dates) of modules as well have modules to be inactive/hidden. In WebCT CE 4.1, you can only hide the entire content module but not the Table of Contents. Lucky that in WebCT Vista 4, you can now set release criteria which is a great improvement.

This is a screenshot of Melete in Sakai taken from the Powerpoint slide that was provided in the Melete resources link.

Here's more resources and where you can download Melete

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ENC/Melete+Lesson+Builder+-+ETUDES+Project,+Foothill+College

I was browsing through Sakai 2.2.1 today and found a few things I thought would be worthwhile to mention.

1) The Sakai Announcements tool is quite handy. It has a nice html editor and allows instructors to post messages right on their Sakai homepage. Unlike in WebCT, students do not have to navigate to the discussion tool first or to any other page. Students will quickly see important messages such as class cancellations or assignment deadline extensions.

2) Wiki! Although Sakai's Wiki is not the best (it doesn't have an html editor so I have to use some wiki mark-up and even then it doesn't look very persentable) at least there is a wiki to use unlike WebCT which doesn't have a built in Wiki.

3) Resource Sharing! In WebCT, students can no upload documents or files of any sort. Instead, they have to create discussion postings with attachments. In Sakai, students can upload all sorts of files to the website and share the resources with anyone who has access to the site.

4) Content Modules are coming. We will soon be able to use a tool called Melete within Sakai so that we can create content modules. Once this is up and running and I promise to write my thoughts on it and compare it to the built-in content module system in WebCT.

Cheers!

Negin