Pre-Conference Workshops

Sunday Morning, June 2 (8:30 AM-12:00 PM)

CAS and Shibboleth in Action: Enterprise WebSSO and Federation Integration Patterns

The CAS server provides excellent enterprise single sign-on for the web and integrates well with a variety of applications and protocols. Shibboleth is a widely adopted and deployed product targeted at federated identity solutions between and across organizations. This session intends to provide a high level overview of both solutions and proposes to discover the integration patterns between the two based on real world scenarios from production deployments.

Implementing uPortal 4

In this workshop, we will take a deeper, hands-on look at the latest uPortal 4 release. The target audience is anyone who may be looking to adopt uPortal for the first time, or anyone planning to migrate from an earlier version of uPortal. We will review the most important concepts, patterns, and suggestions relevant to the task.

You will learn about:

 - Building, configuration, & installation

 - Skinning & branding

 - Authentication

 - User attributes

 - Groups & permissions

 - Layout management

 - Portal administration

 - Data migration tools

 - Deploying & configuring portlets

Special emphasis will be given to newer, less well-known (and less well-documented) topics.

Sakai CLE Implementation Bootcamp

This half-day seminar will focus on installing and integrating with Sakai CLE for system administrators, developers, and technical support staff. This will be an introduction to Sakai CLE and will cover the following topics:

 - What is Sakai CLE

 - Brief history of Sakai CLE

 - Installation gotchas and tips

 - Basics of branding

 - System configuration

 - Sakai admin tools and basics of site setup and management

 - Authentication and user lookup

 - Installing contributed tools and plugins

 - Integrating with other systems (Basic LTI, SOAP Webservices, REST)

 - Managing local code changes and customizations

 - Basics of Sakai development (code structure and conventions)

Participants will be exposed to everything they will need to basically install, customize, and support a Sakai CLE installation at their institution.

Sakai OAE Bootcamp - Part 1

How does Sakai OAE work? Its architecture has been changed dramatically in the last year in an attempt to resolve a number of outstanding performance and production problems. The project now targets a much higher scale and a multi-tenant cloud-compatible deployment model, where a single installation can host multiple institutions at the same time.

This presentation will provide a very detailed overview of the overall architecture and the different components and technologies. We will take a closer look into all of the following components and how they are being used:

 - Sakai OAE Widgets

 - Apache Cassandra

 - ElasticSearch

 - Redis

 - Nginx

 - RabbitMQ

We will also talk about the approach used for continuous nightly performance testing and how we are validating the desired (horizontal) scalability. Details around back-end and UI unit testing, code coverage and security testing will be shared as well.

Teaching with Sakai CLE from the Ground Up! - Part 1

Sakai CLE is a robust collaborative learning environment that offers many tools to engage students in learning experiences. Join Pepperdine University's Technology and Learning group as we build a course site from the ground up. This is the first part of a two-part series.  In Part One, we will cover topics like course management, setting expectations, chunking course content, and discussion.  We'll explore Site Info, Home, Syllabus, Lessons, and Forums to inform and engage your students. We will wrap up this session with tips/gotchas and look to all participants to share best practices throughout.

uMobile Development

This seminar will provide an overview of the uMobile PhoneGap implementation. During this session we will review the application's architecture as well as explore strategies for extending the uMobile code base to satisfy specific needs such as branding, skinning and custom feature development.

Sunday Afternoon, June 2 (1:00 PM-4:30 PM)

Enterprise Authorization Strategies - Intro to Grouper

Grouper, a project of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative, is a critical component of an open source identity and access architecture. Built by and for higher education, Grouper's access management and provisioning capabilities are uniquely suited to address the complexity and flexibility required by the modern institution. This session will be an introduction to Grouper. We will complement a discussion of Groupers concepts, features, capabilities, and usage scenarios with hands-on activities.  Come learn what Grouper can do for your campus!

Introduction to the Asahi Net International Sakai CLE

This half-day workshop will provide participants a range of real-life story-based introductions to the rSmart/ANI Sakai CLE. The workshop has two parts: (1) an overview that includes functional and technical details; and (2) a hands-on, site design and construction workshop. Knowledgeable Sakai experts will demonstrate a range of possible course or project designs of past Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award winners, highlighting how the tools created and supported learning. Faculty, course designers, project managers, students, and technical staff will benefit from this workshop.

- Why rSmart/ANI Sakai CLE?

- Making Your Way in Sakai CLE (Tools and Uses)

- Stories (and past TWSIA Winners)

- Technical Overview

- Future Directions

Portlet Development

In this workshop we will review the portlet API, comparing it to the more well known servlet API. From there we will review a basic portlet that demonstrates all of the portlet lifecycle phases via the Spring Portlet MVC framework. Finally we will review developing portlets for mobile devices, including how to detect the rendering profile being used by uPortal and responsive design patterns for automatic adaptation of portlet content.

Sakai OAE Bootcamp - Part 2

How does Sakai OAE development work? Its architecture has been changed dramatically in the last year in an attempt to resolve a number of outstanding performance and production problems. The project now targets a much higher scale and a multi-tenant cloud-compatible deployment model, where a single installation can host multiple institutions at the same time.

In the second part of the Sakai OAE Bootcamp, we will be developing a new Sakai OAE service and associated Sakai OAE widget. In this hands-on session, we expect everyone to participate and learn about Sakai OAE development and all of its components. This session will also give details on how to develop for a multi-tenant system, how to model data for Apache Cassandra, how to query ElasticSearch and how to make your service and widget available to other Universities, and more.

Teaching with Sakai CLE from the Ground Up! - Part 2

Sakai CLE is a robust collaborative learning environment that offers many tools to engage students in learning experiences. Join Pepperdine University's Technology and Learning group as we build a course site from the ground up. This is the second part of a two-part series.  In Part Two, we will cover topics like effective presentations and assessment.  We'll explore Sakai tools Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, and Gradebook; we'll also explore presentation strategies that can be used with software like PowerPoint. We will wrap up this session with tips/gotchas and look to all participants to share best practices throughout.

Update on ePortfolios Using Sakai

Open Source Portfolio (OSP) community members will demonstrate institutional implementations of the portfolio tools in the Sakai CLE, including assessment matrices, showcase portfolio templates, and the latest reporting techniques. In addition, new portfolio functionality that has been LTI-enabled for use in the CLE and eventually OAE will be demonstrated. Panel members will share actual user scenarios illustrating innovative ways to customize the portfolios in Sakai, as well as provide technical instructions and access to each innovation. Portfolio users at all levels of expertise will benefit from this session. Institutions, organizations, and vendors planning to participate include the University of Montreal, Kyoto University, Virginia Tech, Indiana University and Three Canoes LLC.