Concurrent Sessions

Implementing Sakai at Shepherd University: Technical Perspectives

Mon 4:30 – 5:15PM — Governors Ballroom 6
Matthew Gorman, Shepherd University

This is a companion presentation to one offered by Lauryl Lewis, instructional technologist at Shepherd University. Ms. Lewis’ presentation focuses on the training and user interaction aspects of our Sakai deployment. This presentation will cover technical topics: Setting up the host database and server, the Tomcat web application server, interfaces to Banner and Active Directory, and creating separate test and production instances.
Shepherd contracted with rSmart, a leading integrator of Sakai and other open source systems, to perform much of the work and provide second-level support. With much interest rising in West Virginia and elsewhere on open source solutions, and alternatives to Blackboard in particular, a close-at-hand deployment of Sakai can offer many lessons to institutions looking at alternatives in the learning management system market. Open source doesn’t mean zero cost, but Sakai has proven to cost less to support than WebCT for Shepherd University.


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