Sakai v20.1 LMS — Chapter 4: Lessons

abc101
5 min readOct 22, 2020

Lessons tool

According to the Sakai help, “Lessons is a tool that allows an instructor to organize resources, activities, and media on a single page. You can have as many Lessons pages in your site as needed. With Lessons, instructors can organize the course by unit, module, week, topic, or any other grouping that makes sense for the site.

Simply, Lessons is a page and users can create multiple Lessons(pages).

Let’s try it!

  • Single page

Sakai says Lessons is a page. A page that Sakai mentions is a web page. We know that we can add many sections with items such as articles, videos, images, etc. So, Lessons can have same things. What kinds contents and how we can add in the Lessons(page).

Click the “Add Content +”, then you’ll have “Add Content” box. The box shows all contents that you can add in the Lessons(page). Let’s add some text.

Click the “Add text” in the “Add Content” box, you’ll have web based text editor. It is CKEditor, the most popular web text editor.

Input some text and “Save” it. I will use Lorem Ipsum.

Great!

Add another text by same ways. Click “Add Content+”, “Add Text”, and save it.

Hmmm… Okay, What it the small box?

Save it.

Lessons is just a page. Sakai v20.1 does not have “Layer” tool for the page design, so it shows a very simple page.

Current developer version has “Layer” tool but the developer version has many errors. I don’t recommend using the developer version.

Developer ver.
Developer ver.

OK, let’s go back to the single column and add another content called “Subpage”.

Type the page title, “Week 1” and “Create” it.

You will have an empty page with the manual.

Let’s add some text. Click “Add Content + > Add Text”. Write something and save it.

Go to the top “Lessons”.

The top “Lessons” shows the subpage as a link only. If you want to design the page, then you have to design it in the “text editor(CKEditor)” box. Let’s change the first text. When you move mouse over the article, options will appear. Click the “edit” icon.

You will have the “CKEditor” again. There are many HTML tools. I just add a template. Click the “template” and

add “Instructor Insight Panel.

You can resize the text editor box using the right bottom small triangle. Save it.

The text editor(CKEditor) of Sakai is very powerful but it is a little bit hard to learn. I will post about the CKEditor later.

  • Add one more Lessons Page

You can add one or more Lessons pages. Click the “Moore Tools” and choose “Add More Pages”.

Type the “Page Title” and save it.

You will have another page.

It is easy!

  • Remove items of Lessons and a Lessons

To remove a Lessons page, Click the “More Tools” in the page you want to remove and click the “Remove page”.

and click “Remove” the popup window.

This is the soft remove method. The page and contents are in the back side. Let’s check it. Click the “Index of pages” in the Lessons page

and there are pages that I removed.

To remove them permanently, check pages that you want to remove permanently and “Delete selected pages”. The pages will be removed completely.

DO NOT REMOVE ALL “Lessons” PAGE!

If you remove all Lessons from your course, then you can’t get back it. If you do, then there is no more lessons tool in your course. The administrator is the only user who can add the tool in your course again.

To remove a content from Lessons page, move your mouse over the content that you want to remove, and click the “Trash” icon.

Click the “DELETE” from the popup window. It will be removed completely.

  • Reorder

You can reorder contents of page. Click the “Reorder”.

Drag and drop items to reorder them.

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