Over the course of the next three semesters, the University will replace the Instructional Toolkit with Sakai, a new research and classroom forum.
The program, highly specialized for the University's academic program, will give students and faculty new class management opportunities, according to James Hilton, vice president and chief information officer at the Information Technology and Communication Office.
"A system like Sakai provides a much broader group of tools than Toolkit did," he said.
According to Michael Korcuska, executive director of the Sakai Foundation, the program has a number of standard functions such as blogs, more syllabus functionality and assignment submission that Toolkit did not support, and the University can further specialize the program once it is adopted.
"The system will, at minimum, include all the features of Toolkit, but it will be a single environment that supports course content and course administration and [will] provide collaboration tools for researchers, thus helping to blur the distinction between the laboratory and the classroom, and between knowledge creation and digestion," Hilton said, adding that Sakai was also a good choice for the University over other new technology because of its innovative design.
"The unique thing about Sakai is how it's built," Korcuska said. "A lot of different organizations who contributed money, and people developed] the software so it is free of licences for people to use, and its flexibility supports different teaching styles."
According to Milton Adams, vice provost for academic programs, Sakai is a perfect choice for the University to build a common interface for all students and faculty and allows the faculty to build more specific programs from within the system.
The program is currently in use at University of California-Berkeley, University of Michigan, Yale, Stanford, and Indiana University, according to Hilton.
For students and faculty at the University, the program has already been implemented on the level of research collaboration, he said.
"We have had the research aspect running for a year now and next year people can start to migrate over to the new system when they want to," Hilton said.
According to Hilton and his colleagues, the goal is to make the switch as easy as possible for professors and students.
"Toolkit is not going away anytime soon and professors are going to want to [change programs] as easily as possible so I don't expect it to be completely effortless, but we know we need to make as effortless as possible," he said.
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