Sakai Announcement Dilemma

One thing I learned early on about using technology in my courses is that I have to be creative and persistent because the technology doesn't always work the way you planned. I've been experiencing that a lot this semester working in Sakai. It really takes some ingenuity to keep the class running the way I think is best.

Let's start with announcements. I feel that podcasts and videos are best received if they are part of the initial announcement students see when they first log in to the course management system (CMS). In Blackboard, you can have the announcements be the first page students see when they log in, and I can make it the first menu item for easy access. In Sakai, the announcement page is buried on the menu. It is listed 7th and many students don't bother to click to go read announcements. There is an option to have a window in the first page in Sakai open an external webpage. I tried posting the course blog link in there but it just made a mess. Plus the available space is so small; it only showed 1/3 of the page, and it would redirect to the whole page after a few seconds leaving Sakai all together. This was not good.

What would work better is if I could put an RSS feed from a blog in there and it would show the posts from the blog as announcements. You can do this on the announcement page, but not on the front page. In fact, this is what I do. I post all announcements on the course network blog (Ning) and then I run the RSS feed through the announcements in Sakai. I do the same thing in Blackboard, and it works flawlessly in Firefox and okay in IE. But in Sakai, there are problems in both browsers.

Like I said earlier, I like to post podcasts, screencasts and videos, with the flash players, in my announcements. They play fine on the original Ning site and in Blackboard, but not so in Sakai. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with how I'm using the feed. In Blackboard I'm using Feedburner to create html code for the feed and I paste that into one announcement that then displays 5 posts from the original blog right in the announcement. It updates instantly when I post a new announcement. In Sakai, my only option is to add the RSS URL in a box. I can't add the html code for the feed. As a result, not all of my flash players will play the audio. Videos seem to work, but not all of my mp3 files. I've tried changing the flash player; for instance, the Google player will work sometimes, but the Yahoo! player will not. My work around for this was to post the URL of the podcast (mp3 file) right in the announcements. Those links work.

So I've seemed to find a work around for the podcasts, but there doesn't seem to be one for making the announcements a bit more accessible.