InfobITS - The Technology Newsletter of the UH Community

During the summer of 2007 ITS conducted a series of workshops using the open source Sakai collaboration and learning software. During one of these workshops we mentioned that we were looking for a name for the service rather than calling it UH's Sakai service. Following the workshop one of our faculty recommended the Hawaiian word "laulima." The Ulukau online Hawaiian Electronic Library defines "laulima" as "Cooperation, joint action; group of people working together; community food patch; to work together, cooperate." After consulting with a Hawaiian language scholar we agreed; what better way to describe an online learning and collaboration service for the University of Hawai'i community.

Rather than presenting a feature list of what "Laulima" does, this article focuses on some of the new capabilities available with simple Laulima tools. Future articles will get more under the hood and describe advanced features for teaching and collaboration.

Making files available for students
If you want to make documents and other files available to your students or a group it would traditionally involve two steps. First getting the files onto a "server" (e.g. webserver or WebCT) then creating an html file that points to those files so users can click on a link to download the files. Laulima's "resources tool" addresses this in a single step. You upload the file using "resources" and your web browser, or if you want to upload multiple files at once WebDAV access is also available. Students view the same "resources" area as you do but in a view and download-only mode. So once a file is uploaded it's available for student access. Of course you can control when the student can access and view files as well.

Using the resource tool to inform users on the copyright status of files
One of the biggest problems with dealing with media online is that it's pretty easy for the user to get a file and say, 'no one told me that I couldn't share this file.' In Laulima you can "set the details of a file" such that when a user attempts to view or download a file, they will receive a notice regarding the copyright status of that file. The user has to acknowledge and agree to that notice in order to view or download that file. To enable this while in the resource tool click on a file to select it, then chose "Revise Details" from the "Action" menu. In the revised details screen select the appropriate copyright status then check off the Copyright alert checkbox, scroll toward the bottom of the screen and click on the "Update" button.

Contacting students
Laulima's announcement tool allows you to send announcements to everyone in your course or collaboration group. The announcement goes directly to the user's UH email account. If you use another email account to read your email (i.e. hcc.hawaii.edu, soest.hawaii.edu) be sure to forward your UH email to this account. In fact, the start of each semester would be a good time to remind your students to do this as well.

Adding the email archive tool to your course or collaboration group creates a mailing list for your course. All messages sent to this list are archived and a search function is available to allow you to find unique messages. To add a tool to your Laulima course or collaboration group click on "Site Info" in the left menu area, then "Edit Tools" from the "Site Info" screen. You'll see a listing of available tools. Click on the checkbox for "Email Archive" (or any tool you want to add) then follow the prompts after you click on the "Continue" button.

Receiving student work
Adding the "dropbox" tool creates a folder in your course/collaboration tool resources area where students can upload files to you. You can place files for the student in this area as well. All files are time stamped with the date and time that the file was uploaded.

Reporting student grades
Laulima has a separate "gradebook" application, but for those who do most of their record keeping via a spreadsheet such as Excel, "Post-em" is an easy way for you to post student grades. When a student logs in they see only their grades.

In your spreadsheet select all the grades that you want to report to your students. At the top of each column have a title for that grade (e.g. assignment 1) and include a column containing the UH Username for the students. Save that selection as a CSV file (comma delimited format, each data item separated with a comma and one record to each line).

Enter Laulima's "Post-em" tool, click on the "Add" text link, add a title, upload your file and continue from there. You can add multiple exported spreadsheets to "Post-em", this is particularly useful for courses that have many entries to their gradebook.