Converting Courses to Sakai

Mixing Bowls

I’m sure some of you out there are great cooks who can handle complicated recipes that require exacting measurements and technical finesse. Myself? Well, if a recipe has more than 6 ingredients in the list and takes more than 20 minutes, I’m probably not interested. I admit it; I’m a lazy cook.

If I flipped through a cookbook and saw a recipe with over 30 steps, I’d move right past it and look for something more in line with my cooking skills and attention span. However, the process of converting courses from Blackboard to Sakai was over 30 steps. What would be intimidating for me in the kitchen is not nearly so scary when we’re talking about working in an LMS. I won’t pretend it wasn’t time consuming; many courses took over 20 hours to convert. But once we figured out what we needed to do and had a checklist to complete, it seemed more tedious than terrifying.

What needed to be done?

Course Documents

Activity Checklists needed to be updated with new module numbers and new points to match the new rubrics. Syllabi were moved to a new template with updated national standards, as well as adjusting the number of modules and points.

Module Numbers

If you’ve been in Sakai already, you probably noticed that the courses now have 8 modules rather than 9. The previous orientation content was pulled out of the courses and converted to a self-paced orientation to Sakai that students can complete on their own prior to the start of courses. This change was made for a number of reasons. First, several of our college partners had requested that we change to an 8-week calendar. Second, the orientation content was very repetitive for participants who took multiple PLS courses. How much value does it add to a course to do the same activities over and over? Third, it makes it easier for us to maintain the orientation when the content is just in one place instead of being copied into each course. In Blackboard, if a change was made to any orientation text, we needed to fix it in each course individually. Now we can change it in one central location.

Converting courses from 9 modules to 8 required numerous small changes. Virtually every file in the courses was affected, and each course has between 300 and 700 files. Module numbers appear in course banners, file names, activity numbers, topic numbers, breadcrumbs, downloadable documents, and more. Every time we reference an activity in an earlier or later module, those numbers had to be updated. Fortunately, a fair amount of that could be done automatically in Dreamweaver, the program we use to build the web page content for our courses. Just like Microsoft Word can find and replace “Module 2″ with “Module 1,” Dreamweaver can do similar automatic revisions. Without getting too technical, my own process for renumbering the modules was still 14 steps, plus manually reviewing everything after the automatic process was done. (Remember when I mentioned “tedious” earlier? This was tedious work—no way around it.)

Web Content

The next part of the conversion was cleaning up the web content. Much of this stage of the conversion was removing references to Blackboard and Blackboard tools (e.g., replacing “Class Discussion” with “Forum”). We also added an introduction forum (either as part of the instructor notes to start an introduction thread in the Break Room or as an activity or part of activity).

In some courses, we also revised directions and content to move from external tools to use Sakai’s built-in features. For example, Cultural Competence previously used an external wiki for collaborative work and Skype for chat. In Sakai, we can use the internal chat and wiki tools and keep everything within the Sakai environment. However, in some courses, external tools are still used. Whether we use internal or external tools for a particular course depends on a number of factors outside the scope of this post. If you’re wondering why a decision was made for a particular course, feel free to ask in the comments and we can clarify.

Sakai Content

The last stage of the conversion was putting everything into Sakai.

• Links to course content
• Gradebook
• Assignments
• Forums
• Resources
• Wiki (if used)
• Chat (if used)
• Quizzes (if used)
• Adjusting tools listed (e.g., if the blog tool isn’t used in a course, it’s removed from the list of tools)

One of the things I love about Sakai is how much faster this setup is than it was to create a course in Blackboard. There are little issues here and there, but overall it’s a much more efficient process than what we had before.

Thanks for Reviewing

We were fortunate to have a help reviewing the courses after we finished the conversion. These people went through the courses after they were built in Sakai, looking for broken links, incorrect module numbers, and outdated Blackboard references. Having a set of fresh eyes review everything was invaluable.

• Sue Brien
• Mike Carney
• Viki Gardner
• Judy Gehr
• Max Laing
• Judy Lalli
• Mindy Lower
• Pam O’Risky
• Gayle Palka
• Lance Schwartz
• Ginny Sharp

Challenges

We did have some challenges in the during the conversion. Early in the process, we had hoped that at least some of this conversion could be done automatically. Unfortunately, after working with our vendor and testing, we discovered that an automated process would be messy and still require significant hands-on adjustment. Therefore, we decided to take all the raw ingredients of the courses and convert them manually, basically building each course from scratch within Sakai.

We also know that with all the changes that needed to be made, a few things slipped through the cracks. I know I put the wrong book in the syllabus for one of my courses. I’m sure we’ll find a few incorrect module numbers and misplaced references to Blackboard tools that we missed too. With this many changes, a few mistakes were inevitable. (By the way, if you find any of those errors, please let your course mentor know so we can get it fixed for the next time around.)

Part of our system is having a master course which is then copied for each section. Right now, the process of making those copies has some glitches in it. That meant that for the January courses, we needed to manually go into each section to make the forums visible, publish tests and quizzes, and release items for the gradebook. Manually adjusting each copy isn’t a good long term solution, of course, so Leah Tucker is working with our vendor to develop a viable process.

Overall though, at least from my perspective, the course conversion process went pretty smoothly. Some initial feedback has started to trickle in as students have gained access to Sakai this week, and it seems pretty positive so far.

Your Reactions

If you’re a facilitator or trainee in a current course, what do you think of Sakai and the converted courses so far? Does it still feel new and unfamiliar, or is Sakai getting to be a comfortable learning environment? Were you suprised by anything in how we converted from Blackboard to Sakai?