Sakai

Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as user-friendly and there were issues with administrating it. I don't think most of campus used it, actually. We changed to Sakai and haven't looked back.

Every few years we evaluate LMSs. Each time Sakai comes out ahead due to cost, customizations, and the Sakai community. We like to keep things in house because it allows us an extra amount of reliability and control that you will have to give up when running most other solutions. Sakai is an LMS that is here for the long run. They can not be purchased by anyone and it does not look like it will go away any time in the intermediate future. There is much stability in Sakai.

Sakai will check most of the same boxes as Canvas as far as features. Students can receive feedback, emails, comments, grade and submit assignments, etc. However, everything is going to be a bit more difficult with Sakai. Finding something will take more clicks. Sakai is more flexible since it's open-source. If there's a feature you really need, you can develop it yourself (at your own risk). Integrations with third parties are much easier and faster with Canvas than Sakai.

Courses are organized into tabs. Teachers use the program to list assignments with due dates for students in each course. Students use the program to upload assignments before they are due. Teachers upload syllabi along which the students can follow the progress of the semester. Teachers return assignments with grades and feedback. Grades are organized with weights/percentages for students to keep track of their progress in a course. Students use the program to contact their fellow classmates or teachers through messages on Sakai, or emails that are sent to their school account. When a teacher wants to send a message in Sakai, they can also check the email check box so that the students will receive the message in their school email in case they don't check Sakai. Teachers can upload files for students to use, such as PowerPoint Presentations or PDFs. Teachers can create discussion forums for students to communicate about class discussions. Teachers can create tests and quizzes in Sakai for students. Sakai is easy to use, whereas I personally have no idea how to use Blackboard because no educational system that I have been involved with has used it.

When considering an LMS there are multiple factors to consider, and typically those factors are not co-equal amongst all stakeholders. Some institutions select an LMS based on C-Level directive; others narrow the field based on feedback from the largest constituent user base or as feedback about how the current platform lacks. In any case regardless of these variables, the final word comes down to "fit". Fit for us was best defined by feature set as compared to our (then current) LMS, cost, and ROI over time. Launching multiple online programs and courses over a 5 years and doing so with Sakai allowed us to re-invest the savings from our LMS budget into faculty development, publicizing and developing courses strategically and deliberately and in having a better seat at how we needed the LMS to work rather than being dictated to by our LMS provider. Sakai is not Canvas or Blackboard. In speaking with an ID about Blackboard, "it's just so ugly, and there are things I really have to hodge-podge together" Having used Canvas, it's just sort of 'vanilla' and the interface is confusing (from an educator's standpoint). Sakai as an LMS is nimble, flexible, fully functional, practically unlimited and connected (just like the global community that supports it). A market-share chart may indicate a low number, but that number may have more to do with the solidness, responsiveness an resilience of a platform over time that just keeps working well. Sakai has areas that need to be improved, but I feel we have a say in when, how fast and how much I can spend to make those improvements reality. We're more than satisfied with Sakai, we're elated.

Sakai and Moodle seem to be neck and neck. I much prefer a proper LMS over a WordPress LMS Plugin. Sakai was much more robust than a simple plugin solution.

We were for a year or two on WebCT, which has been acquired by Blackboard. It was hard to learn and difficult to administer. Changing to Sakai not only meant a great deal of financial savings, but it was easier to use and more responsive to institutional and consortial needs. We had all the tools and capacity of WebCT in a much easier and more affordable environment.

I did not personally select Sakai. However, it is fairly easy to use and customize. That being said, this product is being abandoned by developers/universities and should not be adopted by an organization.

I was not part of the selection committee, but I believe the ability to white label Sakai was very significant to the choice being made. In another institution I taught (not the one in which I used Sakai) the decision was made to go with MoodleRooms due to the need for support on customization issues.

We selected Sakai for our purposes (copyright/IP education) because students were familiar with the interface and the assessments worked just as desired. Though Canvas could serve as an ideal alternative and is used robustly here at UD, we have chosen Sakai for its familiarity to our group--Canvas is a relatively new arrival. Google Sites would not provide us with the functionality required, though I imagine some home-grown system with Google Forms could serve our needs in a pinch.

Sakai is a fair competitor to other online learning systems (i.e. Blackboard, Canvas, Desire-to-Learn). Essentially, Sakai is simply a different flavor of similar models for online learning management systems. It is more different from Moodle and Moodle's social networking possibilities but not quantitatively better or worse. Having said that Sakai does not present a new 'paradigm' for online learning but essentially presents a standard 'learning management system' with a few different bells and whistles. There are areas from a newer generation of LMS systems, say EdX, Coursera, Udemy models that shine brighter in certain respects (collaboration, Web 2.0 possibilities, incorporation of video) and there are areas that other systems do better. It would be beneficial when doing a learning management system comparison to look at the pragmatic goals of your institution and learning program infrastructure and conduct a cost benefit analysis. The other larger point that should be made is that Sakai is an open source application compared to say other vendor hosted or purchased applications with the associated possibilities and challenges therein.

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.

Our faculty found Moodle difficult to use-we tried at least two different releases of it with different vendors. It may have changed greatly since we worked with it in 2010-2012, but that was our experience.

Blackboard was what we were familiar with, but some of its tools were difficult to use (Gradebook), it was expensive, proprietary, and at the time we were testing it (Version 9), it was unpredictable.