The Collaborative Technologies Lab is engaged in research and development of tools which facilitate collaboration, focusing on the needs of research and learning environments.

THE SAKAI PROJECT

Collaborative Technologies staff members with many years of collaboration technology experience are working in partnership with Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) on the Sakai project. They are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable collaboration and educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. Sakai is being used by these institutions to build their next generation collaboration and learning management systems. Sakai builds on and is informed by the experiences gained through the development and use of the first generation course and project management systems here at UM, and development work on the precursor to Sakai, the CHEF framework. More information about the Sakai project can be found at http://sakaiproject.org.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

Our current focus is on Sakai and tools that will plug into the Sakai framework. We have completed the transition from our legacy UM.Coursetools and Worktools systems to Sakai based CTools. and are preparing for a Sakai 2.0 based CTools release to support the Fall 05 term. The 2.0 release will include the tools familiar to CourseTools and WorkTools users, as well as additions that are being developed here and by Sakai partners. New tools coming from Sakai partners include Gradebook, Syllabus, Test & Quizzes, and Melete (a content authoring tool). As more institutions become part of the Sakai Educational Partner Program, we expect to see many more tools available for use in class and research collaborations in the coming terms.

CONTACT

For more information contact ctools@umich.edu