A practical and efficient scheme for data synchronism of Sakai CLE
1.
2. About Me
A graduate student of TJU
A developer of Sakai CLE
An English beginner
3. TianJin University
Established in 1895
A national university under the direct
administration of the Ministry of Education of
China
15,620 Undergraduate Students
10,139 Graduate Students
2,953 PhDs
4,489 Faculties
4. Sakai in TJU
2011: We were using Moodle
2012: Secondary development of Sakai CLE
Localization
Single Sign On system(Based on CAS)
Data Synchronism
New tools
5.
6. Sakai in TJU
2013: Beta testing & launched
Until Now:
12443 users
425 active sites
7. Data Synchronization
User management
Each student or faculty should has an official
account in Sakai
Course management
Course and roster information should be inserted
into Sakai
12. Faculty Login
SSO(CAS)
Create a new
site/Update
request
Other Activities
LocalDatabase
(Sakai)
UserInform
ation
CourseInfor
mation
Add the user
information to
local
Add the course
information to
local
13. How we solve it
Get information by Webservice
Simple/Efficient
Security/Permission
In 2013, our new e-learning system launched and until now, there are more than 12 thousands users and 425 active sites in this system. Our university is a new adopter of Sakai and we are trying our best to encourage teachers and students to use it.
There are three specific problems that we should solve. “Transfer the information” means that we get the information from remote database, and then copy the information to the local database. OK, let’s solve these problems.
Our method is based on this idea: we just care about those information which is required, and we only update the existing information. We don’t have to transfer all the course information, all the user information to the local database and maintain an update process.
It is a workflow about it. When a user request an update process to the Sakai Server, the server would check whether the information has already existed in the local database. If not, send a request to the remote database and then the remote database could return the required information. Then the Sakai Server will insert the information to the local database.
This is an specific example about a teacher’s activity. When the faculty login, the SSO system will check whether the user is valid, if so, the Sakai server would get an account from SSO system, if the account is not in the Local Database, the server will request the remote database to get the User Information and added this user in Local Database. Same method is applied to transfer the course information.
This is an example of webservice. This webservice returns a string that contains all the course information related to the teacher 997127 in term 12131. It looks like a select statement.