This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Stellar's Tipping Point
You know what the killer feature was that led to Stellar being the course management system of choice at MIT? Automatically synching the membership page with the registrar's enrollment data. Once we did that Stellar had a steep increase in the number of class websites requested. We started off with a class list that instructors maintained on their own, adding whichever students they like, or letting the whole world in. But maintaining those lists was a source of more work, and they looked to Stellar to reduce their workload.
It's such a boring feature to be the big sell. But it is a core piece of functionality, and without that Stellar was like a car without seats. You had to bring your own seats with you.
The basic functionality we need to work on for our Sakai pilot is simply better class list management, starting with registrar feeds. Administration, especially course management, is a weak spot for Sakai. As it stands now, Sakai classes don't even have a visible class list. The sectioning efforts under way will help, and I hope to get better acquainted with the status of those efforts in the next few weeks.