Identifying Key Tools and Functions within Sakai (AIMS)
If you are new to using AIMS, you may appreciate some orientation to key AIMS tools and functions.
- Assignments: Instructors can create space for students to upload submissions, from informal reflections to formal written assignments and projects. Instructors can select the grading approach within the assignment. Assignments are best for instructors who wish for the students’ work to only be viewed and assessed by the instructor.
- Announcements: Instructors can send mass e-mails or messages to the whole class community via the Announcements tool. The benefit to using Announcements over e-mail is that instructors do not need to collect individual student e-mail addresses and that the messages are archived in the course AIMS site.
- Chat: The whole class, instructors and students alike, can engage in a “real time” text-based, instant messaging conversation. Messages received in Chat remain archived and can be read outside of synchronous time too. This can be a nice way for instructors and students to communicate nimbly without needing to use voice-based chat and without needing to use any outside apps or resources.
- Forums: Instructors can create threaded, written discussion forums for instructors to engage in written (or audio/video) dialogue with each other and respond to written prompts.
- Resources: Instructors can post key course documents, like readings, assignment sheets, and activity descriptions in this space.
- Rubrics: Instructors can create and share grading rubrics for use in AIMS tools such as Assignments, Forums, Tests & Quizzes, and Gradebook.
- Syllabus: The Syllabus tool provides a place in the course site for the instructor to post a syllabus and for students to access the syllabus.
- Lessons: Instructors can organize course content into several chunks or groups of learning content. The pieces of information that students will access, including the syllabus, assignment sheets, activity descriptions, and outside links and resources, can be grouped together in the order that students might access those resources during a synchronous or asynchronous class session. Modules can give students access to readings, activity descriptions, outside links, and assignment submission links all in one place.
- Wiki: Instructors can create content for students to read or access that is not already created in a separate website or in a Word Document or other kind of document. The settings for Pages can also be changed so that the page can be edited by both instructors and students to create a class Wiki.
AIMS Help
AIMS full HELP table of contents.
For more information about getting around in AIMS, please see our guide on Navigating in AIMS*.
For more information about getting started in AIMS please check out the following:
Remixed By: Michael Wright Director, Academic Technology and Sharon Combs-Eisenbarth LMS Admin and Web Master
Teaching Effectively During Times of Disruption is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Adapted from “Teaching Effectively During Times of Disruption, for SIS and PWR.” Feel free to remix for your own institutional contexts!
