Pearson International has chosen to build a new offering using the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment to support instructors and students in many different regions around the world, including Japan, Germany, France, Sweden and more. This demo will look at what is unique to the project and what Sakai offers "out of the box."

1. Supporting International
MyLabs using Sakai
Cris J. Holdorph
Unicon, Inc.
Nic Hanekom
Pearson International
June 10-15, 2012
Growing Community:
Growing Possibilities

2. Agenda
● Introduction
● Sakai Configuration
● Site Archive
● Permissions
● Localization
● Working with the Sakai Community
● Deploying to the Cloud
● Future Development
● Questions
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

3. Pearson International
● Pearson is a global Publisher founded in 1844
● World leading learning company
● Pearson is the largest education company and
publisher world wide
● Market leading businesses in:
○ Education (Prentice Hall and Longman)
○ Consumer ( Penguin and Ladybird)
○ Business information (Financial times)
● Maintaining strong economic and market growth
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

4. Unicon
● In Business Since 1993
● Focus on Open Source Software and Education
● Support and Services for uPortal, CAS, Sakai,
Grouper and soon SSP
● Cooperative Support Program
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

5. International MyLabs
● Provide a local-language platform for higher ed
with gradebook, assignment and assessment
● Deploy languages as quickly as possible
● A consistent experience for users to reduce
customer technical support cost
● Platform to which we can add mobile and social
tools
● Provide a platform for integration with other
Pearson platforms
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

6. System Architecture
● Authoring
● Catalogue
● Customer
● Identity and Authorization Management
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

7. System Architecture
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8. System Architecture (2)
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9. Roles
● Admin
● Publisher
● Instructor
● Student
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

10. Site Types
● Project
● Instructor Led Course
● Self-Study Course
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

11. Sakai Tools
● Lesson Builder ● News
● Tests & Quizes ● Web Content
● Assignments ● Wiki
● Announcements ● Forums
● Basic LTI ● Podcasts
● Gradebook ● Polls
● Resources ● PostEm
● Roster ● Statistics
● Calendar / Schedule ● Chat Room
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

12. System Development Tools
● Sakai 2.9.x branch
● Oracle JDK 1.6.0.x
● Maven 3.0.3
● Tomcat 7.0.x
● Hudson
● Git
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

13. Vendor Branching
● Started with Sakai Trunk, summer 2011
● Moved to Sakai 2.9.x branch after it was created
● Used Git with git-svn to bring Sakai source code
repository into Git
● Used Git with subtrees to merge sakai git-svn
repositories into a master sakai tree (similar to
svn .externals)
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

14. Site Archive
● Export Site from one Sakai System
● Import Site content into a different Sakai System
● Each Tool (Entity Producer) exports and imports
its own content
● Transfer format is xml format on Sakai System
disk space
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

15. Permissions
● Prevent Instructors from deleting publisher
content
● Allow publishers to edit / delete other publisher
content
● Require instructors to activate exams,
assignments, announcements
● Automatically publish content linked in lesson
builder
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16. Currently Supported Languages
● German
● Spanish (Spain)
● French (France)
● Italian
● Japanese
● Dutch
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

17. Future Supported Languages
● Korean?
● Arabic?
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

18. Translation Process
● Locate all translatable files (help, properties)
● Copy to simplified directory structure
● Synchronization script to copy back on build
● Work with SDL translation service company
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19. Translation Challenges
● Contributing translations back
● Staying in sync with current properties
● Hard coded text
● Dates
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

20. Date Challenges in Localization
● Month-Day-Year or Day-Month-Year or MM-DD-YYYY or ...
● Samigo - GeneralMessages.properties
○ output_date=MMM-dd-yyyy hh:mm:ss aaa
● Date Picker
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

21. Contributing to Sakai
● Testing in Sakai Community Nightly
● Creating Sakai Community Jira issues
● Fixing issues and submitting patches
● Email with project maintainers
● Challenges in area of localization
○ SDL vs community .metaprops
● International MyLabs only features
○ Preventing instructor from deleting content
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference

22. Deploying to Cloud
● Cloud Principles
○ Design for Failure
○ Loosely coupled architecture
○ Stateless
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23. Deploying to Cloud
● Cloud advantages
○ "Infinite" Scalability
○ Ease of automation
○ Ease of deployment
○ Cost saving
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24. Deploying to Cloud
● Continuous deployment
○ Continuous integration
○ Automation
○ Scalability with regions
○ Scalability between regions
○ Dev Ops
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25. Deploying to Cloud
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26. Deploying to Cloud
● Issues experienced
○ Sticky sessions – Tomcat/Sakai’s state-fullness
and lack of clustering
○ No graceful failure or scaling abilities
○ Lack of caching – heavy reliance on DB
○ Monolithic architecture – difficulty in identifying
and fixing bottlenecks
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27. Future Development
● Multi Environment (Catalogue) Publishing
● Multiple Regions
● Content Correction pushes (from
Authoring/Publishers to Instructors)
● ??
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28. Demo
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29. Questions?
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30. Cris J. Holdorph Nic Hanekom
Unicon, Inc. Pearson International
holdorph@unicon.net Nic.Hanekom@Pearson.com
2012 Jasig Sakai Conference