Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.
N/A
Sakai
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Sakai is an open source learning
management system provided by the Apero Foundation. The LMS provides what it
calls Core and Expanded Features. The Core Features encompass an integrated
tool set that is tested by the Sakai community members and is then included
with each new release. The tool set can be configured by: instructors,
students, research investigators and project leaders. The other set of tools, known as “Contrib
Tools” are specific to Sakai tools and innovations that are developed…
My (internal) project build team consisted of three people - one with experience setting up an LMS previously, and two with no experience. I have experienced 'out of the box' builds before and they are rarely intuitive and/or easy to navigate and set up. This was not the case with Absorb LMS. The eLearning modules and face-to-face support provided was thorough and there was a lack of unneccessary complexity to setting up the platform. My novices now know there way around every inch of the platform and love using it. This was not our first LMS, but it may well be our last. The functionality (from reporting for admins to ease of access for learners) far exceeds our previous experiences and we have a product that looks great, works seemlessly and that we are very proud of.
I've used Sakai to supplement my Public Speaking class. Public Speaking is very much a F2F type course, so I didn't use Sakai much for course content delivery. However, I did use it to post my syllabus, post my lecture slides, communicate any class announcements, and to conduct a final exam for the class. Building the final exam was very simple and I was easily able to swap out questions to vary it from term to term. Before I was a staff member and lecturer, I used Sakai as a student. My instructor used Sakai to varying degrees. I really appreciated it being the one-stop-receptacle for all-things class related. If I somehow lost an assignment instruction sheet, I could rely on it being posted there. For multimedia work it was lacking, at that time, but I know Sakai has been updated over time and I hope that part of it has improved. If I was ever frustrated by Sakai, it was because faculty used it in a piecemeal way. It's fine not to want to use the gradebook, but don't enter some grades and not others. It's wonderful to upload class documents to it; but don't do some and not others. Whatever way you're going to use Sakai, commit to it and use it well. Your students will thank you.
Customizing the user interface was fairly simple and our learners WANT to use the platform because it looks so nice.
Admins have so many tools at their fingertips to pull reports, create new users, author new courses, and more!
Absorb LMS has been the solution to so many problems we had experienced in our previous LMS: ease of use, course library, course authoring, tracking, reporting, etc.
Sakai is flexible, providing a way for our customers (instructors) to customize their courses while staying in line with consistency and continuity of course design. This has allowed our courses to be far less cookie-cutter and stale. This is mostly accomplished through Sakai's LTI functionality and it's Lessons tool. This is particularly notable because not every course is the same, nor should it be. Our faculty and course developers can draw from OER resources, course text publisher assessment quiz banks and pull in content from sources from our library databases and services like YouTube.
Sakai is customizable, allowing us to pair it with our student information system to automatically create and track with student registration data - including adding new students and removing students who have elected to drop a course. The customization features also include being able to create course templates for individual schools or courses using specific tools or sequences of tools as well as a way to personalize content for students when they engage with each lesson.
Sakai is stable in the market. We have been using Sakai for almost 10 years and continue to see it improve; responding to changing trends in browser technologies, mobile platforms and accessibility requirements. Multiple programs offered over the years have been recognized by outside organizations like BestColleges.com for our programs and given high marks by students taking the courses offered in Sakai.
Sakai allows our faculty to inform it's continued evolution. We work closely with the developers, having a front seat to how things can work and function for our faculty. There have been multiple occasions where faculty ask, "Can Sakai do this?" and the answer is never "No."
The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
more education around Absorb analyze essentials
How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
Sakai is a good general learning management system - it is not leading edge but rather a stable system with standard learning management system features. It can be fairly easily customized and is fairly easy to learn from both student learning and faculty administrative vantage points. New paradigms for online learning though are emergent so the current field should also be investigated with competitors.
It is very intuitive, not just from an admin perspective to manage courses and track completions, but also from a learners' perspective. It is very easy to find courses, search for courses, and track personal course progress. The interface is well designed, which makes it simpler for our audience to navigate the portal and find what they are looking for
When faculty are preparing courses from term to term, a portion of the content is static within a specific discipline. The time it takes to import past lessons into new versions of Sakai can be an inefficient use of my time. When I want to add new content and edit from the old content, it's reliant upon me to cut and paste the content from term to term rather than simply import and edit from a backup.
We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team
We have experienced infrequent issues with things like load times on reporting, or pages timing out, but for the large majority of our time within the system things have worked as they should
[...] is a ROCK star- having her as part of our support team has been a game changer. She is a true problem solver at heart and has an unique ability to retain who we are as a company and match that with what can help us most. She has been a game changer for our internal admin team and is supporting us through a business review to help guide us in the best direction on our constant growth.
Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends.
The training was comprehensive - there were existing modules to learn functionality but working with Absorb staff, and receiving recordings of those walk-throughs, made a rapid understanding of the LMS achievable and covered the necessary material that was needed and allowed for specific questions to be addressed.
The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.
All sites provided at least a basic LMS platform, and Talent was probably the closest in terms of features and like-for-like comparison. Ultimately, none of the others had the same level of course creation and it would either have meant outsourcing or spending a significant amount of time building the courses which was not ideal as we would still be paying for the service during this time. Absorb had the best course creation software of all evaluated which is why we chose it, although it was also by far the most expensive of those evaluated.
As an adjunct professor, I didn't pick Sakai for the university. I have experience with Moodle, Blackboard, eCollege, iBoard and now Sakai. I would have to say that Sakai is one of my all time favorite LMSs to use as it is very easy to navigate.
We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.
We work directly with Kirsten Spak, who has continuously provided timely and quality help for myself as the lead and our organization. Kirsten has helped us ensure that we are going about things as efficiently and is always willing to walk through things to demonstrate suggestions and functions. As we look to expand our offerings further, Kirsten has helped strategize for the best approach, which has helped our workflow and the end-user experience. As we are still relatively new users, but using the LMS every day, Kirsten has been very patient and provided clear instruction on processes when we were unsure of what to do and has been able to troubleshoot, with her team, functions that were desired but not availability at the time, to provide us with solutions.
Lighter administrative load, we went from 20-30 support tickets per month to 1 or 2.
Our course setup and configuration time now takes less than 5 minutes. In our previous system it took us close to 15 minutes to publish a course.
We have been able to push administrative responsibilities to department level administrators, because of the ability to have department level admins, who only have access and control of their department users and content.
Sakai makes it easy for students to monitor grades which puts their minds at ease.
Sakai makes it easy for teachers to assign and receive assignments from students.
Communication is one of the most important and one of the most taxing parts of an educational system. Sakai makes this process just a little bit easier.
