As a result of being involved in a local elearning project at my university, we have choose a free community software as the platform technology for delivering our offer.
Back to October, 2004, choose Sakai as our elearning platform was an act of faith, but also a strong believe that their its were in fact better than the ones from other alternatives. Then, Sakai was just in its first version and little or almost no documentation and references were available.
This means that we needed to work it a lot. Results from use test and run, we find our way across some problems as the use of portuguese characters, the Webdav compatibility, the interface issues, and some other issues that were first hand problems and that they are now past history. Anyway, we were able to provide a month later, a pilot test for an academic year. It start with just two classes from one of us (first semester), and grows to almost 60 professors involving more than 120 classes (overall, it reaches 1000 students and teachers), gathered between the most entusiasthic tech guys, from diverses areas such as nursering, environment, linguistics, and of course, technology.
After this first year pilot, our top administration saw the potential and provide us with resources and an official virtual university hat that allow us to start production for a second year with more resources and better hardware. From begining, 2004/05, as pilot, to a one year in production (2005/06) leaves us to the establishment of the UFPUV, the Virtual University of Fernando Pessoa University:
http://elearning.ufp.pt.
In the begining of the new year (2007), we will have more news and further advances in using not just the technology, but also the elearning concept in order to take full advantage of SAKAI and try to innovate in its use.
Try the following Youtube video for a description of SAKAI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SkGi_tKBL4To know more about SAKI, visit
http://sakaiproject.org/
