What should I know about the "Preview Course in Sakai 25" copy process?

Prior to the upgrade to Sakai 25 in August, instructors may benefit from previewing one of their courses in the new version of Sakai. With the Preview Course in Sakai 25 form instructors can copy an existing course site from Sakai 23 (https://sakai.plu.edu) to preview it in Sakai 25 (https://sakai-demo.plu.edu). Once the form is submitted, the copy usually takes a few minutes or so to complete. In some cases it may take up to 5 or 10 minutes. Instructors encountering a problem with the form are encouraged to notify the Sakai Support Team (sakai@plu.edu) and state the title of the course site the instructor attempted to copy to Sakai Demo.

Note that student rosters, groups of students, and student submitted content will not be transferred to the sites created in Sakai Demo through this copy process. Only instructor content will be copied to Sakai Demo, and unlike the upgrade to Sakai 25 that will occur in August, not all of an instructor’s course site content can be copied to the Sakai Demo server.¹ The table below distinguishes which content associated with the most common Sakai tools instructors should anticipate will be copied to Sakai Demo. Furthermore, most of the content that is copied will appear in “draft” mode, an outcome similar to the result of copying content from one site to another with the Site Info tool.

Also note that two pseudo-student guest accounts are also added to sites that were created through the Preview Course in Sakai 25 form. Instructors may use these accounts to experience the site as a student user. To login with these accounts, please see the steps in the article, How do I initialize and secure my pseudo-student guest account?

As instructors experiment with Sakai 25 on Sakai Demo, they are encouraged to contact the Sakai Support Team (sakai@plu.edu) if they identify bugs or other odd behavior on Sakai Demo. Though Sakai help and support documentation for Sakai 25 during this time will still be incrementally under development before the August upgrade, the Sakai Support Team aims to smooth this transition to Sakai 25 as much as possible, including the resolution of Sakai 25 bugs prior to August.

Finally, instructors should note that any content copied to or created on Sakai Demo is for experimentation purposes only. Any content in Sakai Demo will not be transferable back to PLU’s primary instance of Sakai: https://sakai.plu.edu. 

See also How can I prepare for the Sakai upgrade?

1. Note that while content for some tools cannot be copied to the Sakai Demo server, such content will be available in Sakai 25 after the August upgrade of sakai.plu.edu. The unavailability of this content in Sakai Demo is merely an artifact of a process that is not uniformly supported across all Sakai tools for transporting Sakai content from one instance of Sakai to another.

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Need support? Contact sakai@plu.edu.