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Two Decades of Sakai at UdL: Reflections, Challenges, and the Road Ahead

It’s been a long time since I last wrote an article, but the recent gathering with fellow members of the Spanish Sakai community inspired me to share a few thoughts on our years of using Sakai at the University of Lleida (UdL) and its future. Two Decades of Sakai at UdL: A Commitment to Innovation Since September 13, 2004, the University of Lleida (UdL) has maintained a strong relationship with the Sakai platform. Over the past 20 years, UdL has focused on advancing ICT support for teaching and learning. From its initial launch with an early version of Sakai (1.0rc2), the platform has been a key tool in meeting the university’s educational needs. UdL chose Sakai to replace WebCT, opting for an open-source solution that aligned with its commitment to free software at the time. In the early years, UdL played an active role in developing Sakai. A notable contribution was the internationalization of the platform, making it easy to translate without modifying the source code. This effort he...
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LooWID

More than two years ago Juanjo Meroño and I started the project LooWID ( www.loowid.com ). As many of you already know it's an open source videoconference platform based on WebRTC that allow users to join in small rooms and share webcam, screen and audio and share files directly from browser to browser. Eduardo Rey has been also involved designing and implementing the interface and that helped a lot to have a nice platform. It has been an good experience since we moved to make it open source instead of offering just as a service. Before we opened the project we tried to get feedback from friends and family and there were some interesting results. We asked them to fill a survey to guess what business model would be the best for LooWID. We were concerned that we should offer it as free but we needed to find a way to fund the infrastructure, and perhaps if the project grows contract an small team to work on it.  We were asking about the way the project must be funded. There were...
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Sakai Video Plugin Test Fest

Finally we got an stable version of Sakai video chat plugin based on WebRTC . We had to solve some details to work in a cluster environment but finally we can offer you a release candidate. Now, our intention is to know if that feature can be included on the main Sakai code, for this reason we prepared a TEST fest to achieve to purposes: - Get any bug we missed. -  Enable the Sakai community to test that functionality. That would help Sakai CLE members to decide if it would be interesting to put in the trunk on not. We prepared a Sakai site at University of Murcia's QA server with the instruction to complete a test of functionalities of video calls. If you want to participate, you must create an account at here , and join to the Test Video Chat Test site. There, you will find the instructions we wrote there. You will see that in that site you will find a sign-up tool to coordinate the availability of people to test each other.
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Synchronize Sakai content with an Android device

The Sakai CLE offers a WebDAV service to connect from your computer to the contents of a Sakai site as if they were folders in your computer. Normally all WebDAV clients can edit directly files and folders.    Today, mobile devices like smartphones , tablets or ultrabooks allow us to work directly with these files everywhere, although working always on-line maybe is not the best. We must keep in mind that it's easy to lose the network connection so will make it impossible to work on these documents. You must look for a tool that allows you to work directly with documents in your device and synchronize with the server to avoid having to download, edit and reload the document manually each time.   There is a free tool called WebDAV File Manager for Android, developed by Shigadroid , that allows to work with WebDAV services letting you to synchronize...
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Connecting Sakai to Wordpress

LMS platforms have fairly long been consolidated at universities as on-line learning support tools. For a long time they were exposed to disappear because of the low level of interoperability to third-party services they offered. Finally, as a result of that need together with the mobility nature of teachers and students between institutions (and consequently on its LMS), interoperability mechanisms were implemented to bring the required tools to their users. Tool interoperability allows to connect remote tools inside LMS environment, keeping them contextualized by the courses or activities from they are called. There were some attempts like IMS-TI (IMS Tool Interoperability) or Campus Project, but it was not until the emergence of IMS LTI   1.0 (IMS Learning Tool Interoperability) that TI technology became more popular.   Nowadays, you can find several examples of LMS that implement IMS LTI  like Angel, Moodle, BlackBoard, D2L, etc. M any of these LMS, i...
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Are MOOCs just a fad?

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms have burst into the lives of millions of people.  The concept was born in 2008 by Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander inspirated by the course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" designed by George Siemens. But the true impact came in the fall of 2011 with the "Artificial Intelligence" course offered by Stanford University. Since then millions of people have received courses in any of the platforms that have emerged (coursera, udacity, edX,...). Now, the burning questions that people ask are: What is the pedagogical value of this course? Are we simply dealing with a fad like already happened with Open Course Ware (OCW)? There are already a lot of responses and formed opinions, but I will give you my own. I don't see MOOCs like a fad. I see that more like a normal, necessary and inevitable step to the new learning model. In my opinion,  the really interesting  thing  of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course ) is ...
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