Sakai: Lessons

Lessons

Lessons is a flexible tool for adding content to your Sakai site.

• With the Lessons tool, you can share all kinds of content with students, including web links, documents, videos, and links to assignments, tests/quizzes, and forums.
• You can also create weekly subpages to organize your content, so students can find the week's materials and assignments all together in one place.

If you're teaching an online or hybrid course, it's important to use the Lessons tool to organize the content for each week of the course. (The Lessons tool can be useful for face-to-face courses as well.)

Getting Started

• What content should you add to Lessons?
  • Based on information gathered from experienced instructors, here's a template you can use to organize and add content to your lessons: Word document | PDF Version

Basics

• Sakai 11 User Guide: Lessons
• Intro to Lessons (Create Subpages/Add Text and Links): Video | Handout
• How to Build a Well-Designed Subpage: Video | Handout
• Embedding (Displaying) YouTube videos in Sakai: Video Handout
• Linking and Embedding Films on Demand videos in Sakai: Handout

Intermediate

• How to link to an assignment, test/quiz, forum topic, and link to a website from a Lessons page
• How do I record an audio clip using the Record Audio Clip tool (pdf)?

New Features in Sakai 11 Lessons

Add color to Lessons content areas, add horizontal section breaks, add content above and below your present content

• Getting Started with the Lessons Tool (Duke University) Instructions | Video

Working with Sections and Columns

• How do I create multiple sections on a Lessons page?
• How do I create two columns on a Lessons page?
• How do I merge columns and sections to one block?

Interactive Features

Checklist

With the new Checklist feature, instructors can add a "to-do" list to any Lessons page, which helps students stay on track and allows instructors to view their progress.

• How to create a checklist in Lessons (UNC) Instructions | Video

Question

Instructors can add a Multiple Choice or Short Answer question directly to a Lessons Page. The questions can be graded (correct answer specified) or used for polling (no correct answer specified).

• How to add a question to a Lessons page

Student Content (aka Student Pages)

The Student Content feature in Lessons is great for student projects. If you enable this feature, students (or groups) will be able to create their own pages in Lessons, containing text, web links, pictures, videos, and links to documents.

• How to allow students to add content to Lessons
  • Students can work on their individual student page, or groups can work together on a student page
  • Comments can be added to each student page
  • Peer review rubrics are available; but you must inform students of peer review deadlines
    • A peer review rubric is available for each page or you can add your own peer review rubric
    • Students can self-grade or grade peers or groups