As you prepare for the new semester, you may be copying content from a previous semester’s Sakai site to rework and use for a new instance of your course.
To ensure that your content shows up properly in the new site, you should double-check some specific areas of your new Sakai site to look for some minor issues that can crop up when using content from a previous semester. It can be helpful to have a teaching assistant or staff member help you with this process.
Text Editor Changes and Lessons, Syllabus, Announcements, etc
The Text Editor used to create content across tools in Sakai, such as Lessons, Syllabus, and Announcements, was updated at the beginning of Fall 2021. If you are importing a site that used text formatted with colors, fonts, or font sizes applied or was originally created and pasted in from a word processor, you should inspect the imported material to see if it transferred properly.
The Text Editor was updated to conform with new standards for web content and accessibility and Sakai will attempt to reformat your text to conform to these standards. You may have to make some adjustments to the text. Details on the update and how to reformat old material are in this blog post.
Warpwire and Lessons
If you add Warpwire to a Sakai site, that library is specifically associated with that site. So, if you want to use the videos in the library in a new site later, you need to add Warpwire to the site to create a new, empty library for the new site, then import the videos from the old site.
Consequently, if you are pointing to Warpwire videos in a site library in Lessons, when you copy those Lessons pages to the new site, the videos in Lessons will not be visible to your students, even though they will work for you since you, as the instructor, have access to the older site and it’s associated Warpwire library.
If you have links to a course site Warpwire library in Lessons pages that have been copied over from an older site, you will need to edit the Lessons pages, linking the videos in the Warpwire library for the current site. You can see instructions for copying videos from one library to another at this support page.
Lessons Sidebar Navigation
You may be importing Lessons from an older site that enabled navigation using an expandable menu on the Sakai site’s sidebar, such as the example below.
If, after importing, your navigation menu imports without the expandable menu, such as the below screen capture, you can re-enable it by going to Site Info and Manage Tools. On the right side of the screen, below the list of tools on your site’s menu, click the checkbox to “Enable Lessons subpage navigation in the left tool menu”.
