The Living Schoolbook

This is written as a bit of preparatory material for the Ann Arbor, Michigan OSP 2.5 Design and development meeting. I'm including a bit of history here because I think it reflects a case study on project management and product design that the Sakai and OSP communities are facing as they go forward. I welcome any and all corrections to my historical account of the story.

The rapid pace of development has been (thus far) lead by a few schools and institutions that have local interests in mind and an "itch to scratch". I think that the state of affairs is going to be changing soon, with an emerging "User Experience" working group focusing on heuristics and evaluations of new and existing tools to determine their overall usability. I expect that the OSP community and Sakai courseware tools developers will be able to form a new working group that can articulate a vision and design a system that provides a new experience for portfolio development.

Sakai is an open source effort to create a platform for collaboration and learning. An initial grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2003 funded Stanford, MIT, University of Michigan and Indiana University to combine their knowledge and expertise in software development to collaborate on this project. Over the past several years, the Sakai project has transitioned from grant funding to a foundation model, funded by the contributions its paying member organizations, which include primarily higher education institutions and a few vendors that sell support services around open source software. The egalitarian, meritocratic nature of this large open source community presents challenges to software design and development that are often not experienced in more structured environments.

As the Sakai community has evolved, the focus of the community and the definition of what Sakai is have shifted. As recently as 18 months ago, I think I recall that Sakai was referred to as a framework upon which tools could be built. By using the Sakai service APIs provided by the framework, tool developers could focus on the specific functionality of their tool and not have to worry about basic authentication, file storage and security issues typical of web based application development.

The original four institutions had built several tools (Assignment, Discussions, Resources, etc) on the framework to replace their own aging courseware systems on their respective campuses, mainly based on code from the University of Michigan. These tools had a common “look and feel”, used the same template presentation technology (Velocity) and were considered “core” tools for a Sakai distribution. Furthermore, the developers of these tools were working towards the goal of replacing essentially commodity services for which they had several good examples and that the user base had a lot of familiarity with.

During this period, Indiana University and rSmart (a commercial affiliate of the Sakai Foundation) were funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching partnered to port the already successful “Open Source Portfolio” software developed by the University of Minnesota to Sakai. They decided to use the Java Spring framework and Java Server Pages as their presentation layer for the suite of tools that would collectively be known as OSP 2.0. It is important to note that portfolio systems have not worked their way into the culture of most institutions and the implementations of these systems vary widely from institution to institution. As such, there are no strong mental models to work from since the user base expectation of what a portfolio should be has not been firmly established.

The design team charged with redesigning OSP for the Sakai based system decided to make several changes and extensions to the Minnesota system. Portfolios were to be assembled from XML content snippets authored by students and presented by an XSL processing engine to achieve a web-based portfolio. The system is extremely configurable; so much so that “out of the box” the software does almost nothing and requires a great deal of XML design and development in order to customize it for the specific implementation requirements. I believe that the system needs to be drastically simplified and the workflow streamlined for particular uses. One primary use of portfolio software (and one we are very interested in promoting as a School of Education) is to support students to reflect on their learning and to solicit feedback on their progress toward their own learning objectives.

I think that these two development efforts were happening in isolation from each other, the team developing the “courseware” side of Sakai (Assignments and Discussions) had very little connection with the OSP designers and developers. When Syracuse University began using the Open Source Portfolio software in 2005 we realized that there should be a strong connection between the courseware tools (in which students create the bulk of their content) and the portfolio tools if they were to support an emerging assessment strategy in the college that was focused on assessment of student portfolios. Presentation of the concepts at Sakai conferences and in discussion lists proved that our simple idea made a lot of sense to educators. While no formal “evaluations” were done, we definitely heard the experts in the field respond positively to the general idea. The “infinitely configurable” design of the OSP software was widely seen as an impediment to the adoption and use of the software and the community is currently looking for suggestions for improving the design of the software to support a few basic workflows and teaching strategies or “interaction styles” between teachers and learners.

In the following few blog posts I will explain the organizational tasks that I think need to be accomplished by teachers and students using this software during the various stages of one style of portfolio development, the formative journal.