MITC position on CHEF / Sakai

Tom,

I understand that Earlham College is considering adopting Moodle as a course management system. I wanted to be sure you were aware that, partly as a result of MITC's and Earlham College's experiments with CHEF this academic year, it is likely that NITLE will be joining Sakai as a Sakai Partner, and that this open-source route might have particular benefits for colleges in ACM/GLCA. As I'm sure you have read, Sakai will combine into one system the four OKI-compliant course management systems from Stanford, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and MIT. The combination will also include UPortal and OSPI, giving it portal and electronic portfolio components. LIke MITC, this project enjoys the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - and (unlike us) also of the Hewlett Foundation. As a major initiative across multiple sectors of higher education, Sakai is worthy of consideration at our member campuses, and I would like to encourage you to consider it for Earlham College - which, because of your early role with CHEF, is potentially a leader in these efforts.

Information on Sakai is available at http://www.sakaiproject.org/, with information specifically on the Sakai Partners program available at http://www.sakaiproject.org/press/sepp_press.html. Sakai will allow the campuses participating as partners to be at the table as this initiative moves forward and will, in the partners program, have a priority on developing a community to sustain and support the software. Along with Alex and Manuel, I have personally met with Jim Farmer, who is facilitating the Sakai Partners program, and have found him to be very much interested in our participation. He has offered possibilities not stated in the public information about the project, such as a regional workshop for people from our campuses on Sakai. Given our existing relationship with CHEF, we in the Midwest are uniquely well positioned to take advantage of Sakai, and MITC would be able to play an active part in support and development of the emerging system.

Should this be of interest to Earlham College, we would recommend adoption of CHEF for the coming year and then of Sakai for the 2005-6 academic year; the transition from CHEF to Sakai would be straightforward (since the CHEF architecture forms the basis for Sakai). As you know, Manuel Rendon of our staff has experience in installing and configuring the releases of CHEF that have come out this year and can be called upon by technical staff at the campuses to provide them with support in this area; he has already provided this support to technical staff at one member campus other than Earlham. While a new release of CHEF is expected this summer, you can see the current MITC installation at http://www.midwest-itc.org/chef/portal. Also, anyone at Earlham can experiment with CHEF by following the guide at http://www.midwest-itc.org/Share/Docs/CHEFGuide.html.

Nancy

Nancy Millichap
Director of MITC, the Midwest Instructional Technology Center
Associated Colleges of the Midwest/Great Lakes Colleges Association
535 West William, Suite 302
Ann Arbor, MI 48103

Nancy,

We are close to a decision but it is not to "adopt" anything at this point. We installed Moodle this spring and have a few faculty on each -- CHEF and Moodle. We have been deliberating about the two and the pluses and minuses. Our decision is likely to be that we continue in a "trial mode" for another year using both Moodle and CHEF. Because we can work with Moodle on campus there may be some modest tweaking of the system to meet our needs. We will continue to use CHEF and take a wait and see approach toward SAKAI.

Earlham is of very mixed minds about Moodle and CHEF/SAKAI. Let me layout the concerns about CHEF/SAKAI and why that suggests Moodle to us:

1. We wonder how much influence liberal arts colleges will have in the development of CHEF/SAKAI. With four large universities driving the development how can we effectively participate?
2. SAKAI/CHEF are not written in programming languages for which we have expertise therefore we will have to invest in that staff development in order to do any customizing or integrating with other systems.
3. A remote instance of SAKAI/CHEF presents obstacles, so even with the programming expertise, integrating CHEF with the campus information system in order to populate courses is problematic.
4. There is concern about the security of data, especially student grades, over an open network.
5. We need to be able to support language instruction --Arabic, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Latin-- Moodle does that but I don't believe SAKAI/CHEF do.

Tom Kirk