and Groen, 2007) is an existing tool developed by
Edia Educatie Technologies to automate the process
of skin customization in Sakai. Although the
SkinManager allows provider to choose from the
listed archived skins, but, to define a new skin, the
provider need to have prior knowledge of style
sheets, Sakai file structure, storage directories and
graphics. The using of existing ways to customize
the skin of Sakai does not provide flexibility and is a
tedious task.
In this paper, we focus on development of tool
that facilitates the Sakai adapters to customize its
appearance. The tool promotes flexibility by
allowing the user to customize the Sakai skin as per
their requirement, via an interactive interface. In the
rest of the paper, we use the term user for the
organization or the provider using Sakai for e-
learning. Using our tool, the user can change skin by
selecting desired options in contrast to writing fresh
code for the same. Our tool focuses on
customization of existing text properties like, color
and font style; rather than text editing and reordering
of elements (menu, table calendar, button).
Here, we present SkinChanger, a tool for
customization of skin of Sakai for e-learning
providers. It is composed of three main components-
(1) Body-Skin, (2) Header-Skin and (3) Footer-Skin.
Body-Skin component allows style changes in body
of the displayed gateway screen. Likewise, changes
in top portion of the screen are done using the
Header-Skin and changes required, like, copyright
styles that are located in the bottom portion are
performed by Footer-Skin component. Each
component is further divided into sub-components
where their corresponding properties to revise the
skin are defined.
The tool is developed as a pluggable component.
It needs to be installed before runnning the instance
of Sakai. Using the tool does not require any
particular specialization or expertise.
The SkinChanger tool is implemented in Java
and developed using Sakai Wicket maven Archetype
packages based on Apache Wicket. The package
allows generation of a sample Sakai app. The app is
based on Apache Wicket which integrates nicely
with Sakai (Swinsburg, 2014). Using the Wicket
does away with the need of XML configuration files.
The versions used in the development of tool are
JDK 1.7, Sakai 2.9.x, Apache Tomcat 7.0.52, and
Maven 3.1.1.
In this paper, section 2 is a survey of related
work. Section 3 presents the interface of Sakai.
Section 4 explains the SkinChanger and its features.
Section 5, 6 and 7 discuss the main components of
the tools - body, header and footer, respectively.
Section 8 enumerates use and implementation details
of SkinChanger. Section 9 states the conclusion.
2 RELATED WORK
Several researches exist in area of customization of
interfaces. Some are specific for software like, Word
Perfect (Page, Albert and Allen, 1996), Microsoft
Word (McGrenere, Baecker and Booth, 2007), and
DISCIPLE (Dorohonceanu, Sletterink and Marsic,
2000). Others focus on customizing interfaces for a
specific purpose like, simulation (Nichols and
Stanton, 1990), multi-user interface (Rodham and
Olsen, 1994), GIS (Lopes de Oliveira, Mederiso and
Cilia, 1997), online travel planning (Jurca, 2000)
and supporting group collaboration (Dorohonceanu,
Sletterink and Marsic, 2000). The customization is
also targeted for a special class of users, for
example, blind (Winberg, and Hellstrom, 2003) and
different skill level (MacLean et al., 1990) users.
Cognitive characterstics and phycological behaviour
of the user is also used to adjust look and feel of the
interface for individual or group of users (Benyon,
1993; Benyon and Murray, 1993).
Adaptive systems are used for providing the
customized services to the user that supports
automatic customization of the user interfaces
(Cockburn, Gutwin and Greenberg, 2007; Findlater
et al., 2009; Gajos et al., 2006; Greenberg and
Witten, 1985). But adaptive approach mainly
changes presentation of content rather than interface
elements. Advance options for customization are
also provided in (Stuerzlinger et al., 2006; C.
Zeidler, Lutteroth and Weber, 2013). Eigo Okada et
al. (2008) propose a framework for customization of
menu structure and accessibility of functions using
hyperlinks.
The manual process of customization of Sakai
provides best results as by programming a fresh
code almost any element of interface can be
customized. But, it can be done only by an expert
having knowledge of programming Sakai.
Generally, use of tool reduces need of domain
knowledge and programming skills. The already
existing SkinManager (Knoop and Groen, 2007) tool
allows to change appearance of Sakai by choosing
from archived skin or defining a new skin. Both
options have their own limitations.
When selecting a pre-defined skin, it has predefined
logo, banner etc. which might not be useful for
organisation adapting Sakai. For defining a new skin
there is a need to have the knowledge of CSS
programming and expertise in Sakai.
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