Sakai is not a box or a set of predetermined pathways into which you plug in your content. Sakai is a highly flexible and capable framework that works best when you approach Sakai with a vision focused on outcomes. Sakai will support your vision for teaching and learning but it’s important that you understand how content is stored and presented to your audience.

Sakai stores content in an internal repository. Sakai can store the simplest, most fundamental pieces of content (an image, for instance) and it can store very complex pieces of content (an entire textbook in PDF, a link to an external program or even a complete web site). [If you store file types that are understood by your web browser, they can be displayed directly by your browser. If you store file types that aren’t suited for display in a web browser, your browser will offer to download, save or open the file with a desktop program of choice.] Sakai can even create and present highly structured lessons based on international standards, but let’s hold off on that discussion for a while.

The Resources tool in Sakai provides a means to manage content in the repository. When the Resources tool is added to a worksite in Sakai, a separate “container” for that worksite’s content is created in the Sakai repository. So the content managed by the Resources tool in “My Workspace” is kept separate from the content managed by the Resources tool in “English 101.” Learners in English 101 can’t see the content in your workspace unless you explicitly grant permissions for the content on an item-by-item basis.