7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:30am Introductions: What do participants hope to get out of the day? What question/s do you hope to get answered?

9:30am – 10:15am Ginsu -- Slicing and Dicing Data for Sakai!
Speaker: Adam Hauerwas, Faculty Support & Integration Specialist, Providence College

Top chefs everywhere use quality knives to prepare delicious meals. At PC we slice and dice data from Banner to prepare "dishes" like you've never seen! We built a middleware server between Banner and Sakai to make not only course sites, but also sites for student advising, academic majors, and school-wide elections. The structure of the middleware server will be discussed, as well as the sites it creates. Learn our "recipe for success" and hopefully try something new with Sakai!

10:15am – 10:45am Post-implementation challenges in Sakai: Growth in Usage, Support Requirements and Understanding
Speaker: Stephen Jaegle, Lead Programmer/Analyst University Computing Systems, University of Rhode Island

Since implementation, Sakai usage has grown in user numbers and utilization rates, and users have grown in sophistication. Higher level support issues have been replaced by deeper tool functionality issues, issues with replicating sites for new terms and deeper tool utilization, including new demand to include multimedia content, capture lectures and video conferencing. We share our experiences with managing growing requirements.

10:45am - 11:00am Break

11:00am – 11:30am Online Course Evaluations at Tufts - Year One
Speaker: Will Humphries, Sr. Software Engineer, Educational & Scholarly Technology Services, Tufts University

Teaching evaluations for three schools at Tufts were administered via Sakai for the first time in Fall 2012. In this presentation, we'll review that ongoing project, highlighting key decisions, outcomes, and challenges. We'll give an overview of the Sakai CLE Evaluation tool, focusing on its strengths and weaknesses. This talk should have some useful info for anyone whose university may move, or has moved, evaluations online - we'd like to finish with some discussion, so we can learn from your experiences too!

11:30am -12:00pm  Sakai: A Work in Progress
Speaker: Linda Beith, Director of Instructional Design, Roger Williams University

One of the drivers for the choice of Sakai as the learning management system at Roger Williams University was the integrated e-portfolio. We’ll be sharing some of the challenges we’ve faced with implementing the current OSP that have driven us towards the substitution of Google Sites. In addition, we’ll share the development being done on custom templates for course creation that are directed towards the needs of a particular school as well as specialized templates to guide the creation of our distance courses for faculty new to distance teaching.

12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch

1:15pm – 1:45pm Development Opportunities & Challenges in an Open-source Community
Speaker: David Hirsch, Director of Academic IT Strategy, Yale University

Many schools adopt Sakai because, as an open-source platform, each campus can meet local needs by making changes to the source code. Yet when is it sensible and sustainable to make local customizations? How can we discover and leverage customizations made by other schools in a sometimes chaotic, open-source community? And how best to manage campus expectations regarding new development, when just because we can make local changes doesn't always mean we should?

1:45pm – 2:45pm Sakai Users Panel
Panelists from schools across New England, (Yale, Wellesley, URI, Marist, Providence College, Roger Williams, and Tufts) will share their experiences and present potential solutions to problems that SIG participants have identified. Come prepared to discuss your institutions current challenges and concerns.

Panelists:
Adam Hauerwas, Faculty Support & Integration Specialist, Providence College
David Hirsch, Director of Academic IT Strategy, Yale University
Neal Hirsig, Senior Lecturer, Tufts University
Stephen Jaegle, Lead Programmer/Analyst University Computing Systems, University of Rhode Island
Reba-Anna Lee, Associate Director of Academic Technology, Marist College
Jim Mezzanotte, Sakai Functional Consultant, rSmart
MacKenzie Stewart, Instructional Technologist - Digital Publishing , Wellesley College

2:45pm - 3:00pm Wrap-up, Next Steps: New England Sakai Schools Community – Do we want to collaborate further? Get together regularly to support each others work?

3:00pm End