Since its initial release in 2005, bSpace has gradually continued to evolve along with the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software on which it is based. From the new look and feel introduced in the fall 2008 semester to its improved reliability and performance, ETS has been working with its campus partners and the Sakai community to ensure that bSpace achieves the right balance between stability, familiarity, and continuity on the one hand, and new capabilities on the other. Yet, while bSpace now provides a steady foundation for the campus's general educational technology needs, the dramatic innovations in web application design and development, and the changing user practices and expectations it has fostered in the broader online world, are not going unnoticed.
Over the last few months, several institutions within the Sakai community, including UC Berkeley, have started to outline a vision and road map for what is being called Sakai 3.0 (Sakai's current release is version 2.5). Central to this vision is a shift in design focus away from heavyweight applications and complex multi-click workflows towards smaller bits of aggregated functionality that allow users to accomplish many of their more frequent tasks on a single screen. Equally important is the redesign of Sakai's "services", or the underpinnings that, for example, enable logging in, permissions, and the exchange of data between different but related kinds of functionality. These redesigns should help further improve Sakai's usability and performance, as well as support new end-user capabilities.
Sakai UX Improvement project
The first crucial step towards realizing a 3.0 vision was taken earlier this year, when the Sakai Foundation hired a user experience (UX) lead to serve the entire community. Within a few weeks, the Sakai UX Improvement (UXI) project was born. The UXI project has been focused on reimagining and enhancing many of Sakai's fundamental user interactions: setting up sites, adding tools, customizing personal preferences, etc. The incorporation of technologies that have become standard on popular websites will, for example, allow users to accomplish editing tasks in the immediate context of a page, or customize the layout of what's known as MyWorkspace in bSpace by dragging and dropping the page elements. Recently, teams from several Sakai institutions have formed under the guidance of the UX lead to begin turning these designs into functioning software. After an intense, year-long effort to build and launch our new web/podcasting system (which is largely another story), ETS plans to join the UX Improvement effort during the fall semester in order to help simultaneously ensure that it meets the requirements of bSpace users and make a major contribution to its overall success. ETS will likely participate under the aegis of the Fluid project, which is building accessibility and usability tested software "components" that can be plugged into the UX Improvement code.
Cambridge University has taken the lead in developing local prototypes that exercise this new design and development paradigm inside their Sakai implementation. While not quite ready to be rolled out to the community at large, "widgets" that Cambridge users are currently enjoying provide the ability to integrate Google Docs into Sakai, and display recently added Sakai resources inside Facebook and the Windows/Mac OS X desktops. With Cambridge leading the way, there are plans to develop deeper "social networking" integrations with Sakai via Shindig as part of 3.0. These are all new capabilities that will have to work in concert with the designs now being implemented through the UXI project.
Integration
The theme of better "integration" has been a constant in the Sakai community even before the social networking revolution. It is looming larger than ever for ETS, after the official adoption of bSpace by UC Berkeley's School of Law and Haas School of Business. The integration of school and discipline-specific applications is not a new problem, and there are some limited solutions now available in bSpace that have been used to fold in outside applications such as Haas's Study.Net. The new development technologies and the changes to services in Sakai 3.0 promise not only to make it easier to do deep integrations, but to enable designers and developers outside of ETS to build more readily those applications serving their clientele's unique needs. Oxford University is in the midst of implementing a "hierarchy" service that can flexibly expose broader institutional structures like college, school, and department inside Sakai. Tools for the distributed administration of bSpace sites based on school or department, and discipline-specific profiles of tools/functionality that can be applied easily to groups of sites, become distinct possibilities using this service.
Assessment design and development
Our colleagues at other Sakai institutions, including UC Davis and Georgia Tech, have been working collaboratively to tackle some of the tough design and development challenges in the assessment domain for Sakai 3.0. Specifically, they are reexamining the current workflows in the Assignments and Gradebook tools, trying to adapt them to meet user goals more directly. Doing so will inevitably bring these now largely separate applications into greater harmony.
The future
All in all, it is an extremely ambitious vision. The resource and cross-project coordination hurdles are set pretty high. What is clear at this stage is that there is a growing sense within the community that the time for major changes to the Sakai platform is now. The Sakai 3.0 release is tentatively set for summer 2009.
The above, of course, begs the question "if the Sakai community finds the wherewithal to pull this off, when can I expect to see some or all of these changes in bSpace?" The answer is a presumably unsurprising "it depends". The temptation will be there to move forward quickly, given the exciting nature of what might be delivered in Sakai 3.0 and the rapid pace of technological change in the world of software in general. ETS will strive to remain sensitive to our users' collective capacity to absorb major changes, while trying our best to anticipate and respond to the inevitable pressures of shifting expectations and demands.