Sakai vs. SchoolSpeak

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.

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Specifically speaking, SchoolSpeak is best used and only really utilized in education. From K-12 it serves a great purpose in terms of parent interaction and direct communication with parents about child performance, attendance, and scores in school. At younger ages, I think it will be even more appropriate for it to be used to create strictly parent platforms for helping them enroll in things they can do at home for their kids, teach their own children, and monitor their own children—especially if they are stay-at-home parents, homeschooling, or the children are not enrolled in school yet. I think a great idea would be creating a parent portal for newborns with daily activities to do from birth through age three, when they may go to pre-school. This is the only additional option I think that SchoolSpeak could serve.

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• 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."

• One thing it does well is one of the tools it incorporation, volunteer forms. These forms work for parents, teachers, and students. One of the hardest things to do is to get confirmation sign-ups and support. This streamlines the process of organizing events.
• The gradebook interface is easy to use and understand. In order to take attendance, complete grades and give assignments, SchoolSpeak actually is an easy platform to learn and is smoothly integrated.
• Archiving of past classes is easy to do and important because schools need to retain records for a long time after students have moved on.
• The platform lets you organize students and find them quickly by graduation.

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• The coming upgrade will address many issues, the visual presentation of sites and courses
• The Forums (discussion) tool is not natively integrated into the Gradebook, but needs another step to connect the two.
• The Wiki tool is awkward and not WYSIWYG. But I understand that is common with wikis in most platforms
• The Help documentation could use some focus on student needs rather that course developer needs

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• It can definitely have room for improvement in the design and template options. Using a more appealing layout like WIX or WEEBLY offer, but integrating the school speak platform into it would be a wonderful layout and great functionality.
• I would love to see social media integration. For business courses and media courses, there should be the ability to have social platforms connect directly and load within ShcoolSpeak. Social Media is the newest marketing strategy and it is left out of functionality here.
• Custom font downloads would make the design much easier and more attractive. The fonts they allow you to use are basic and overly common.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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No, I don't

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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.

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Moodle Rooms is a free platform but involves the need to be computer savvy. It is easy to use as well as SchoolSpeak. However, SchoolSpeak does have a direct communication platform with parents something that Moodle does not currently offer. This itself is a huge competitive advantage. The comparison then becomes, would you like to do less work but purchase SchoolSpeak, or do more work using multiple platforms but they are free. The SchoolSpeak platform does offer much more for the investment. Longer term and with full school integration, the investment is worth it. If you were to mandate using a platform, it should be SchoolSpeak because there are fewer risks associated with having to coach and education teachers, and less risk of complaints.

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• 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.

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• Positively speaking, it has a positive ROI. Although expensive, the platform does solve issues that we as educators have in giving parents daily information about their child in school. It is difficult to email all parents or call all parents, but a one-click platform really saves time and is worth the investment.
• Negatively, there is a cost associated, and therefore, sometimes teachers can be given more work instead of buying a platform like this. Using other free tools could be more time consuming but cheaper.
• Using School Speak we have seen parent involvement increase.

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