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The university's license for the learning-management system WebCT will expire in October 2009, and will be replaced with a new program, Sakai.
University Provost Dan Rich said Sakai is a course management system used by approximately 130 other universities.
Rich said Sakai will provide university faculty and students with a superior course-management capability.
Education professor Fred Hofstetter said he has been working closely with the Sakai program and was one of the first professors to use the Sakai software in one of his courses last Winter Session.
"For the past four months, I have been totally immersed in Sakai," Hofstetter said. "I have investigated its nooks and crannies, and with the help of my students who enrolled in my Winter Session courses that used Sakai, I have developed a method of designing a Sakai course in such a way that students find it intuitive to use."
He said he has experience designing his own course-management systems and volunteered to pilot the Sakai software to help the university make an informed recommendation on the critical decision to switch systems.
Hofstetter said he had success with Sakai during a Winter Session course and is now considering converting all of his courses to Sakai software.
Information technologist Mathieu Plourde, stated in an e-mail message that when learning-management systems were new, universities had two options: to buy a software-management package that could only partially answer their needs or develop their own solution, which was difficult and costly.
Plourde said Sakai is a middle ground between these two extremes.
"Sakai is an LMS framework that was created as the result of collaboration between multiple universities who wanted to share the burden of developing a home-grown LMS," Plourde said. "The idea here is to start from somewhere and to customize, instead of re-inventing the wheel."
Rich said that despite recent problems with WebCT, the software switch is not directly related to the Web site being inaccessible for the first few weeks of Spring Semester.
"The transition to Sakai was anticipated long before," he said. "However, the failure of WebCT this semester does confirm the need to move to a more reliable course management system with access to improved support services."
Plourde said Sakai is another step in developing digital literacy among students - a skill set the university believes is vital to students becoming life-long learners. He said some of the tools available in Sakai that were not a part of WebCT include "wikis," blogs, podcasting and portfolios.
A "wiki" is a Web page anyone can edit, he said. Instead of a professor pushing information to students, a wiki is a collaborative effort to gather and negotiate, as a whole class, learning resources and projects.
"We believe that courses should go beyond content delivery," Plourde said.
Mathematics professor Louis Rossi said he especially values the wiki tool, which allows his students to write collaboratively.
"In mathematics and science, being able to write legible mathematics is critical," Rossi said. "The Sakai wiki tool includes embedded LaTeX which is the standard for writing mathematics."
Hofstetter said he made an instructional video to help professors set up their own Sakai course pages. He will also be offering a new course titled EDUC885: Sakai Web Design, devised to share Sakai course design techniques with other faculty or graduate assistants interested in learning how to maximize online learning.
As for student usage, Hofstetter said Sakai is insightful.
"If a system is so difficult to use that you must make a movie to teach students how to use it, you should probably keep looking until you find a system that is more intuitive," he said.
Rich said current users of the Sakai Partners Program include Harvard University, Yale University, Dartmouth University, Brown University and numerous other institutions who helped in editing the program.
Hofstetter said the University of Delaware looks forward to introducing Sakai.
"We literally could not be in better company, as we now work with the finest colleges and universities to evolve future versions of Sakai," he said.
Rich said the transition to Sakai will take place over the next year and a half, and all new course adoptions will use the system.
He said current WebCT courses will be transitioned to Sakai on a timetable agreed upon with the course instructors, and all Web-based university course management must transition to Sakai by October 2009.
Plourde said Sakai CLE is an efficient software package, but what makes Sakai exciting is its community of users.
"Sakai has been developed by universities and colleges for universities and colleges," Plourde said. "Who knows the educational need better than the educational institutions themselves?"
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