After 18 months as a pilot project, SmartSite becomes the primary online course management and collaboration system for UC Davis starting fall quarter.

That means instructors, researchers, staffers and students are gaining a new set of tools to help them work and learn together online, with features that far exceed the course tools available through the MyUCDavis Web portal.

The people behind SmartSite expect higher demand for training and support as the value of working with wikis, online discussion rooms and electronic assignments becomes clear to more of the campus. Faculty proponents say SmartSite will help inspire instructors to consider their teaching and research tasks more thoughtfully, deeply and purposefully.

"SmartSite can help you organize your life (and) save time," said Kirk Alexander, SmartSite program manager in Information and Educational Technology. "It offers a better set of tools to distribute your course materials, or to manage communications with your students

"And," he added, "it can help you catch up with the technology your students already use."

As of summer, about 14,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and 4,400 staff members have used SmartSite in some form, from one-time experiments to frequent use. The School of Veterinary Medicine has adopted its version of SmartSite (known as CERE, for Collaborative Educational Research Environment) for all of its classes.

SmartSite offers users two types of sites — for classes or for projects — plus the tools that make the sites useful. (To create a site, sign up at smartsite.ucdavis.edu.)

Instructors typically set up one course site per class. The project sites can be created by anyone on campus, for anything from research to organizing clubs or sharing a staff assignment.

SmartSite currently offers 24 tools. People can select as many or as few as they want; the default list for new sites is 13. Some faculty members in the pilot program advise new users to try just one or two tools while they get the hang of the system.

The wiki, chat and resources are three of the top features so far. They help instructors and staffers work in ways that are already familiar to students who started using online technology in grade school.

The wiki lets people write or edit a shared document online, useful when writing group reports. Nutrition professor Roger McDonald, for example, has his students use the wiki to write a collaborative project on a subject concerning the biology of aging.

The chat tool is handy for holding office hours or group discussions over the Web, a popular feature among students the night before tests. The resources tool lets users store material electronically and controls who has access.

SmartSite runs on Sakai, an open-source software developed by a group of about 100 universities and similar institutions, including UC Davis, specifically for higher education. Each member of the Sakai organization can create new tools, which other members can adopt if they want. The software is updated yearly, and in fact SmartSite installed two upgrades this summer to prepare for the fall rollout.

The full-scale arrival of SmartSite does not mean the course tools offered through MyUCDavis are going away this fall. However, the campus plans to retire the MyUCDavis ourse tools in about a year.

The old tools became difficult to expand, prompting the campus to start discussions about looking for a new system a few years ago. Based on a recommendation from the Campus Council for Information Technology, Sakai was chosen, because it offers a stable system that should keep up with the evolving needs of faculty, staff and students.

Other features in the MyUCDavis portal will continue. So will some familiar access points. Faculty, for example, will still be able to find the online grade submission tool through MyUCDavis.

Help is available for faculty who want to transfer materials from MyUCDavis course tools into the SmartSite format.

Plus, the campus has increased the number of SmartSite workshops this fall by about 25 percent compared to the spring, accoding to Steve Faith, faculty technology training coordinator.

"A person who doesn't know anything about SmartSite can usually obtain a basic working knowledge of how to use it in about two hours," said Faith.

Lessons from the pilot phase give some idea of how the tools work in practice.

Kristina de Korsak, a graduate student in linguistics who used 10 SmartSite tools in a class she taught on Language, Gender and Society last winter, told a session on SmartSite at the Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology in July that the tools helped several categories of students. She defined them as the "computer-oriented, the risk takers, the creatively inclined, the taciturn, and the students with challenges."

Bill Buchanan is a senior writer for Information and Educational Technology.