Migrating from Sakai?
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Matt.C.408
Posts: 5 🌱
Welcome Sakaigers, you come from an amazing community of folks across Higher Ed who made a big impact in the post-secondary LMS space when change was needed, and the Sakai community has allied with D2L before.
Some things that might help you:
- Importing Courses: Server-side/Admin-only Sakai archives can be imported into Brightspace - Lesson's Common Cartridge export is rarely useful.
- Lessons:
- New Content Experiences' 3-level deep limitations, versus Sakai Lessons sub-page depth that was probably only limited by 32-bit integer space. Cape Town is/was automating reformatting exports to flatten them. Brock University recommends instructors use
- Student Pages - no clear replacement, but Discussions or open web/domain-of-ones-own approaches might help.
- In summary: Lessons does some great stuff, that is very hard to replicate exactly in any other LMS. As always, the best content in any LMS is built within that LMS.
- Question Pools: Sakai “Question Pools” are groups of questions managed across a user account that can be shared amongst instructors. Brightspace “Question Pools” are exclusively a section of a single quiz into which questions will be drawn. These questions must be stored first in a repository called the “Question Library”. Thus, Brightspace’s equivalent is the Question Library, and Question Pools are the specific instances of randomly drawn questions.
- Sakai Tools Compared to Brightspace tools (based on work originally done by NYU - thanks)
- Public links for ideas etc - It's not public, and links don't work, but it exists in the Product Idea Exchange (PIE). Once you SSO log-in, then the links will work (Like JIRA, or a similar vendor's Community).
- Roster tool: Permission to see the Classlist is global or kinda' per role, not per course (please support PIE D9482).
Mostly Administrator Stuff:
- PA System - There isn't one as Sakai executed it. An alternative might be adding a custom widget to the home page. A little JavaScript can help it load content from elsewhere too. is NOT analogous!
- Publish site - it was helpful to coach instructors on making their site available to students.
- JavaScript and Brightspace only widget to alert instructors
- JavaScript and PHP server widget to restore the "Publish Site" button (LTI 1, working on advantage etc.)
- Sign-Up tool - Carleton University's Matt D. has created a scheduling tool BrockU is piloting in 2024 (Thanks!)
A little more on how Brock University went from Sakai to Brightspace.
Hope this helps.
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Answers
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Hi Matt,
Great post! Thanks for sharing Brock University's experience & lessons learnt during your LMS migration project.
I'll flag your post with our Community Team to see how we can make this information more prominent/visible for clients migrating from Sakai to Brightspace.
Thanks again, Chris
