NWACC Award Application

Practice:
CLEo - implementing the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment
Institution:
Whitman College
Department:
Office of Technology Services

Description

CLEo (Collaboration and Learning Environment [online]) is Whitman College's successful implementation of the community source Sakai Project. Whitman is the first U.S. institution to completely and successfully migrate from a commercial vendor to the Sakai platform, and was recognized in a "Sakai Spotlight"by the Sakai Community.

Whitman began using Blackboard Basic in Spring 2000. Four years later, however, the lack of features and integration capability in the Basic version and the prohibitive cost of upgrading to Blackboard Enterprise became a critical issue - an issue we shared with Faculty members using Blackboard. After considering various options (including the upgrade or migration to another commercial product), Faculty and IT jointly decided to pursue an open source solution, and ultimately Sakai.

The success of our implementation is characterized by our partnership with passionate Faculty members at Whitman College and by collaborative relationships developed with colleagues from other higher education institutions. Faculty were involved from the onset - in the decision to pursue open source, and in their participation in the Pilot project, identifying needed features and priorities for implementation, and for marketing the product within and outside Whitman. Moreover, this project enhanced (and sometimes restored) Faculty's trust in IT. Anytime we ran into technical difficulties beyond our expertise, the Sakai Community stepped in to help out. In turn, we've assisted number of other institutions with their implementation and contributed resources to enhancements in core pieces of Sakai. Our involvement has put Whitman on the international map.

Innovation

Involved Faculty from the onset
It's one thing to say that users should be involved in the entire life-cycle of a project. Actually doing is an entirely different matter.
IT found itself with a problem - a proprietary vendor system with many unused features, continually rising support costs, and the need to pay exorbitant fees to get a handful of features we needed along with even more we would not use.
After extensive study of the problem and potential solutions, we presented the problem and our recommendation of open source software, specifically Sakai, as a viable solution to Faculty that had used Blackboard. The idea was well-received, and attendees formed a Sakai (later to be named CLEo) pilot group to help guide the process, provide candid feedback and help set release cycles.
The pilot group met regularly to discuss issues as well as set priorities for IT staff time and software release cycles. Members of the pilot group were those that had used Blackboard most extensively and were therefore the most apprehensive about the change. The collaborative nature of the pilot gave the participating Faculty a strong sense of ownership and investment in the end product. As a matter of fact, when the Claremont Consortium invited Whitman College to speak to IT staff about the CLEo pilot, it was a Whitman Faculty member, not IT staff, who made the presentation.
Since our production launch in August 2006, we have formed an advisory committee as an extension of the successful pilot group. The advisory committee evaluates both feature/enhancement requests from regularly-conducted Faculty satisfaction surveys as well as upcoming developments in the Sakai community to determine which are most pedagogically relevant to our institution.
New Frontier: open source for the end-user
At the time we were examining alternatives, open source had proven very successful for infrastructure pieces - Linux, Apache web server, etc. - but was still unproven for end-user software. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was still months away when we began our research and desktop Linux was struggling to enter the market (it still is). After carefully researching the open source offerings, Sakai was ultimately chosen, as it most closely matched our list of criteria - most-used features in Blackboard, enterprise integration, scaling and sustainability).
Going against conventional wisdom
At all stages of the implementation, we've encountered the sentiment that Sakai is only viable for large institutions with Java developers. There was only one other liberal arts school (Carleton College) looking at Sakai when we started our pilot, and most of our colleagues in liberal arts were fairly discouraged about the knowledge and staff requirements required to implement it. We discovered that is scales down as well as up so that it's a viable option for a school of any size.
Designed for our needs
Due to the modular approach of Sakai and the general flexibility allowed by open source software, we were able to deploy a system that was customized to fit the needs of Whitman. We have only deployed the features we need, and the look and feel is much more customizable than Blackboard was. Because of these factors, it was necessary to give it a name unique to Whitman College. It is powered by Sakai, but it is our very own system.

Benefits

The primary beneficiaries of CLEo are the Faculty and Students that use it day to day, but IT Staff and the College as a whole have benefited as well. The primary ways in which Whitman has benefited are:

1. Fostered spirit of collaboration between Faculty and IT
Faculty were involved in creating CLEo from the very beginning and feel a strong sense of ownership. As a result, the majority of the "marketing" done is by CLEo Faculty who share their excitement with their colleagues. The goodwill generated in both camps has helped to further collaborative efforts in other arenas.
2. Improved integration and customization
The open and modular architecture of Sakai has allowed us to integrate tightly with our central authentication system and student information system. Unlike Blackboard Basic, users provide the same credentials they do for other applications to gain access to CLEo. Course enrollment information from the Registrar is synced twice daily with CLEo.
The flexibility has also allowed us to create new tools, such as a photo roster based on our new digital ID card system and RSS capabilities that enable easy and secure podcasting.
3. Renewed interest in online course tools
The success of CLEo has generated a considerable amount of interest in Faculty who had not used Blackboard, largely due to word of mouth advertising from other happy CLEo users. We have even won back a Faculty that had been alienated by the previous CMS - "I'm using it quite a bit and enjoying it - much better than my first experience with Blackboard."
4. Drastically reduced support requests
Due to the tighter integration with enterprise systems, we've all but eliminated the two major support items we had with Blackboard:
What remains now of support inquiries are of the "How do I do [x] in CLEo?" variety.
5. Controlled Costs
One of the prime factors that drove us to evaluate alternatives to our Blackboard Basic was consistently large increases in software support and maintenance costs. Using a community source product, we can accurately predict our overall costs as the primary components are hardware, staff time and optional membership dues.
6. Increased our exposure in higher education community
Due to our participation in the Sakai Project, we have increased awareness of Whitman College among IT professionals and educators around the world. We are the third school to be featured in the Sakai Project's "Powered by Sakai" series (see Links section).

Replicability

Given the fact that Whitman succeeded with a lean IT staff and limited resources, this practice can be replicated at any school, regardless of size. Our key findings are:

Costs

As the software is freely available, our cost components were staff time, hardware, Sakai Foundation membership and travel.

Staff Time
The pilot phase required a half-time commitment from the project lead and one quarter time for the trainer/application administrator. Additional developers spent roughly 20 hours total each for the pilot phase.
Now that the system is in production, the project lead commits one quarter time and the trainer/application administrator spends approximately one-eighth time.
Hardware
Pilot hardware, a single dual-processor server, was approximately $4,500.
We've spent approximately $18,000 for our production hardware, as we are moving toward a high-availability configuration with separation of the application and database servers. In addition, both components are physically redundant for high-availability and disaster recover. The redundant database servers will also be used by other database-intensive applications, therefore the cost for this component is distributed to other applications as well.
Sakai Foundation membership
While not necessary, Sakai Foundation membership provided a level of legitimacy when discussing the project with administrators and college leaders and helped to show our commitment to the long-term success of Sakai. It also covers the cost of conference registration for members of your institution (see next item). It is by no means a requirement for a technically successful implementation as the same resources are available to any member of the Sakai community.
Travel
Sakai conference attendance is also optional, but we've found it important for establishing and maintaining relationships with others from the Sakai community. Each conference usually offers a developer training component as well, which has proven beneficial to orient our staff. There are two conferences each year - attendance is free for Foundation members, plus airfare, hotel and meals.

Contacts

Principle Contact

Names and email addresses of others responsible for the practice

Training & Application Administration

Developers