:.....

ANU hosted the first Regional AuSakai Conference on 5 and 6 November this year. The AuSakai conference highlighted how universities around the world are using Sakai to facilitate collaboration in their teaching, learning and research communities. Sakai is a software application used to create online collaboration and learning environments. It is the application underlying the University’s collaborative workspace, Alliance.

The ANU Alliance community project was piloted during first semester this year, and is currently being used by over 1,600 staff and students across campus. Using Alliance, members of the ANU community can create worksites for collaboration by using different tools and features such as announcements, calendars, forums and wikis.

Researchers and PhD students can use Alliance to share their research findings with other researchers locally as well as overseas. Students might build a site with a discussion board to assist with communication and resource sharing on a group project. A committee might build a site to share reading materials, agendas and minutes, to discuss items outside meetings and to list meeting schedules. Collaboration team members from outside ANU can also access specific project sites if they are invited to join by the site owner.

ANU is a Foundation member and one of 99 worldwide partner universities of the Sakai Community. Sakai Partner universities include MIT, Indiana, Hull, Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, Nagoya, Stockholm, Twente and University of California (Berkeley, Davis, LA).

To find out more about how ANU is using Sakai, or to start work on your own Alliance worksite, visit http://alliance.anu.edu.au