Sakai Questions

QUESTIONS FROM THE IT TEAM OF ESSEX COUNTY COLLEGE

1) What are the reasons for selecting SAKAI as your favorite learning management system?

• Rice had a deployment of Web CT that had some traction 4 years ago.  The  timing was right with the Sakai consortia, the purchase of Web CT by Blackboard and the desire for Rice to support an open source initiative.

2) What is your SAKAI infrastructure?

3) Which database version did you choose to use for SAKAI Installation?

4) Which operating system version are you using for SAKAI?

5) How frequently do you apply SAKAI patches?

6) Who provides you SAKAI maintenance and support?

7) How do you resolve SAKAI issues?

8) What are the resources that you use for resolving SAKAI issues?

9) How is SAKAI integrated into Banner?

10) Did you develop the integration tool or acquired it from a third party?

11) What are the programming languages used to develop such an integration tool?

12) Can you share with us the integration tool?

13) Do you offer strictly online or hybrid courses?

14) What are the SAKAI best practices that you adopt?

15) How frequently do you purge the SAKAI data for previous semesters?

HARDWARE AND INFRASTUCTURE QUESTONS

16) What are the server specifications? (manufacturer, hardware and software specs, VMWare)
17) What type of storage do you use for the servers?
18) What type of backup system do you use?
19) Where are the servers hosted? (any cloud computing)
20) How do you load balance access to the system?
21) What is your Internet connectivity? (T1, DS3, DSL )
22) What is your client connectivity speed?
23) Any issues with client software when accessing the system? (eg. Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, toolbars)

OTHER ISSUES:

24) We know that some data from Banner tables such as: Roster, Course, Course Section, etc needs to be exported into Sakai in a CSV format. Does that data need to be parsed?

25) Which Sakai tables need to be populated from external data source?

26) Can you explain to us how you achieve mapping of fields from Banner to Sakai Course Management API