Case Studies

About

Brock University is a 18,000 plus student university that is growing into its new comprehensive status. It is located in the Niagara region of Canada and named after Sir Isaac Brock, a valiant major general that was instrumental in defending Upper Canada against the United States during the war of 1812.

Pilot and Translation

In 2006 Brock University's Provost and the university’s CIO charged the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) to evaluate WebCT CE 6’s future and other open-source alternatives such as Sakai and Moodle for use as Brock's primary Learning Management System (LMS) starting in the 2009 academic year.  As WebCT Inc. had recently been acquired by Blackboard the university wanted to make a choice between staying with the current vendor-based LMS or migrating to an open LMS that would provide more portability and interoperability of teaching and learning content.

A representative, multi-disciplinary, advisory group was struck.  The advisory group choose to co-ordinate a pilot, feeling that it both had a lot offer and at the same time was relatively unknown.  Hands-on testing was also conducted of Moodle and other Canadian universities were contacted about their experience with Moodle as one of their LMSs.

The pilot of Sakai 2.3 was conducted for the 2007 academic year. Instructors had the option to include the course that they were teaching in this pilot and 50 courses and 27 instructors choose to take part.  All Brock University students were able to login to the pilot Sakai system.

A formal survey of participating instructors and students was conducted.  Students and instructors appreciated the simplicity of Sakai, with instructors noting the low barrier to entry and highlighted that Sakai’s level of complexity scaled proportionally to the complexity of the online course.  Instructors also saw Sakai as being better suited to hybrid courses, Brock University’s primary use of its LMS.  The results are posted on-line at http://kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Pilot

This group that conducted the pilot submitted the results to the University Senate and the Provost.  A decision was made by the Provost and Vice-President to implement a Sakai-based system as Brock's Primary LMS starting in the 2008 academic year, with Sakai being the sole LMSs available on campus by the 2009 academic year.

Implementation

In fall 2008 and winter 2009 Brock University had two LMSs running in production: WebCT and Sakai.  Brock University’s licence to run WebCT, then Blackboard Learning System CE, was in its last year and Brock University was in the process of transitioning to Sakai.  A significant investment was made in hardware to run the new Sakai system, reflecting the university’s commitment to improving the LMS more than increased needs for the Sakai system.  These parallel systems were a minor coordination inconvenience for students staff and faculty made because it did ease the transition, moreover the contrast all experienced underscored the need for the change.  Having two parallel systems in production was only financially feasible because the new open source Sakai system did not require any licence payments.  Instructors were left to choose if they wanted to continue to use WebCT/Blackboard for a final year or start fresh in Sakai.

During the fall 2008 and winter 2009 period while both LMSs were running in parallel the CTLET worked with a small one-time team of students to perform the fairly straight-forward (in most cases) conversion of courses from WebCT to Sakai 2.5.  All of the 2007 courses were converted to Sakai sites.  Instructors were contacted asking them to visit a web site where they indicate which of their previous courses they would like to have converted to Sakai - failing that only courses from past year was assumed to need converting.  The students, working part-time from their own homes, had completed the conversion within six months.

At the beginning of the 2009 academic year Brock University's Sakai system, locally known as Isaak (an anagram of Sakai and in tribute to our namesake Sir. Isaac Brock), became Brock's sole LMS.

Current Use

Isaak, Brock University's Sakai-Based LMS, often tracks more than 2000 online users during daily peaks.

In the 2010-2011 academic year Brock University had 2825 course sites created in Isaak/Sakai. This equates to roughly three quarters of all full and partial credit courses at the university. More information can be found at http://ctlet.brocku.ca/lms-review/

Reflections

Isaak, Brock University's Sakai-Based LMS has allowed Brock University to integrate innovative pedagogies into teaching and learning both in the elements that are delivered on-line and those that are delivered off-line. Brock University has benefitted from an LMS that offers many features that support teaching and learning all ready to go as soon as the instructor needs them.

Brock University has been dealt with some minor bugs with released versions of Sakai, however quick responses from the broader community and the reassurance of not having anything that could not be investigated locally in the system has been reassuring.  Further knowing that the institution has the option, if it so chooses, to remain on any ideally-idiosyncratic version of Sakai that suites Brock University indefinitely puts students, staff, faculty and administrators firmly in control of our own relationship to the LMS.

The robust and reliable system has ensured students and teachers are willing to include it in critical parts of courses, such as group work and assessment.  The variety and flexibility of the tools Sakai comes with, and the ability to add tools from other universities contributions, such as the sign-up tool, along-side our own minor modifications gives the system a feeling like its been designed for Brock University, but gratefully, not by Brock University.  At the same time, the lack of assumptions about the structure of a course and in some cases a minimal feature set, encourages the integration of other tools where appropriate and for the most part this is easy to do.

After the transition the increase in resources by the IT department and the CTLET (teaching support) is proportionate to the growth in use, and involves the same support individuals as the previous commercial system. The biggest change has been the requirement to stay active in the community in order to find answers and plan.

The simple, straightforward design that behaves as all other modern websites do allows content and teaching and learning activities to be the focus.  It may actually be only skin deep, but the simplicity of Isaak/Sakai, that was commented on during the pilot process, still holds true today.  The system has is an even more integral part of the university than the previous LMS at the level that one only really notices when its gone; a situation that has not occurred since Brock University transition to Sakai.