Tufts students starting next year will log onto Sakai instead of Blackboard to access resources for their classes, from readings to discussion boards and assignments.
University Information Technology (UIT) expects the open−source learning management system (LMS) Sakai to replace Blackboard in Fall 2011, according to Director of Educational Technology Services Gina Siesing. The move, which will affect undergraduates first, comes after several years of deliberations on updating the university's LMS to replace the outmoded Blackboard system.
Sakai boasts improved capabilities, from "e−portfolios," which offer remote file storage, to support for blogs, scheduling tools and calendar tools, according to Neal Hirsig, assistant director of instructional services at Information Technology Services.
UIT began researching alternatives to Blackboard three to four years ago, according to Siesing.
The drive to replace Blackboard with a new LMS took off a year and a half ago, following official university endorsement of the project.
The change is necessitated by a desire to upgrade the educational tools available to students and faculty, according to Hirsig.
"We looked at Blackboard and the tools available and looked at what we thought would be the future, and it was very clear to all of us that we needed a different platform," Hirsig said.
But there was another, more pressing reason to switch, Hirsig said. "In another sense, we were forced to make the move, some move, because we expect sometime this year our version of Blackboard will no longer be supported," he said.
Tufts currently uses four different kinds of LMS across its undergraduate and graduate schools, including Blackboard, ANGEL Learning, TUSK and Moodle.
The move to Sakai will streamline and simplify Tufts' LMS usage, Siesing said.
"One of the major goals was to get to a common platform, or at least to reduce the complexity across the institution, and to be able to do more interdisciplinary work across schools," she said.
Sakai will be configured for Tufts by January 2011. The following month, UIT will host workshops and orientations for faculty to help them adjust to the new system first, according to Siesing.
"In the nine months between January and the new school year, we'll be migrating the old course information to the new environment," Siesing said.
Sakai, an open−source program, is more flexible than Blackboard, allowing the university to modify it to better suit the needs of faculty and students, Siesing said.
"We will have the potential to enhance it, to configure it to meet our needs," Siesing said.
By contrast, Blackboard's proprietary nature limited the university's ability to modify it. Blackboard's features have remained static since the university's initial acquisition of the program in 1998, Hirsig said.
Rather than integrating new tools into Blackboard over that period of time, the university instead developed complementary tools in order to meet faculty and students' evolving needs, according to Hirsig.
UIT developed "Spark" tools, including blogs, wikis and podcasts, to expand upon the Blackboard feature set.
These will not disappear with the move to Sakai, according to to UIT Instructional Design and Technology Specialist Hannah Reeves. "Faculty will have all the opportunity to get whatever they want," Siesing said.
Tufts will also have access to the tools of other Sakai users, which include universities nationwide, according to Reeves.
"You're free to participate in a much larger community of universities and corporations that are developing software for education," she said.
Within the Sakai system, students will have their own workspaces that could potentially allow them to keep work past the end of a course, according to Siesing.
"You've got your learning experience that you're constructing over time, and you can draw artifacts from courses and bring them into your personal environment and save them, and that travels with you," Reeves said.
Siesing said that Sakai's portfolio capabilities were beneficial for students. "We had done a three−year pilot here with the open source portfolio environment and that is now integrated into Sakai," she said. "It will help with accreditation at the university, and it also helps individual students to track their learning and accomplishments over time and showcase their work."
Reeves added that student organizations will also be able to use Sakai to communicate between members.
"We're really thinking about this not just as our own course management system, but as a collaboration and learning environment, so you can do all sorts of collaboration, from courses to your dissertation in 10 years, research projects to Habitat for Humanity," Reeves said.
Siesing said the move to Sakai reflects the general educational shift toward greater collaboration between faculty and students.
"Initially, learning management systems were very one−dimensional," Siesing said. "Now, the paradigm is that students can actually contribute and share resources with each other, and the tools represent that change and facilitate that new way of working."
