- Review -

 

Shaping future e-learning in Higher Education

Free to use, free to develop, freedom for education

What was the European Sakai-Day?

Next Generation e-learning is determined substantially by advanced systems integrating collaboration and learning. Covering these challenges will become a critical factor for competitiveness in higher education. Open source solutions for collaborative learning environment will on a strategic level allow universities to share competence and take advantage from existing state-of-the-art-solutions as well as to contribute to the future development of the environment – so enabling the community to participate and to join resources, efforts and knowledge in e-learning.

Sakai is an open source environment for collaborative learning, initiated from the Universities Michigan, Indiana, Stanford and the MIT. It is one of the largest open source software projects in the world of e-learning. By now approximately 100 institutions are represented in the partner programme for research and development. The Sakai Foundation has been formed to back up and govern the multitude of activities taking place within the worldwide community. The primary goal is to deliver the Sakai application framework and associated tools for learning, teaching and collaboration that are designed to work together.

Among the Sakai partners there is a growing community of European universities and institutes and there are already a number of Sakai implementations around Europe. As we are seeing more and more interest for Sakai in Europe, Luebeck University of Applied Sciences (LUAS) has taken the initiative to create a forum to focus this interest, and those interested, in the first European Sakai Day. LUAS and its e-learning spin-off oncampus GmbH are delighted to welcome Sakai friends and newcomers to the world of Sakai on the first conference specifically designed around Sakai for a European audience.

Key objectives of the European Sakai Day

• to promote the open source Sakai approach in collaborative learning and its architecture towards European stakeholders in E-Learning
• to build the European community of practice by exchange of experiences, developments and practices
• to adress the European perspective on Sakai adapting and deploying the framework in the context of the Bologna-process and Lisbon-strategy
• to encourage transatlantic community building for future expansion of Sakai both in use and in development

Who came to the conference?

Everyone who was seriously interested in Sakai, open source, communities, e-learning and pedagogy and who are interested in the state-of-the-art in e-learning, online learning and the impact of the European context. As well as everyone who are already using Sakai, or thinking about it. There were more general sessions (mainly on the first day), but also sessions that focus on pedagogy, content creation and implementation issues (mainly on the second day).

Sakai is more than software, it’s a community!