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Sakai

Sakai

Overview

What is Sakai?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Sakai = Success

10 out of 10
September 15, 2015
Incentivized
We use Sakai as our LMS for the university. It is used for the entire university. It helps guide the day to day student/ instructor …
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Popular Features

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  • Learning content (5)
    8.0
    80%
  • Course authoring (5)
    8.0
    80%
  • Progress tracking & certifications (5)
    8.0
    80%
  • Mobile friendly (5)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

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What is Sakai?

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…

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Product Demos

DEMO 002 Download Course Materials from Sakai LMS

YouTube

DEMO 001 Submitting Assignments on Sakai LMS

YouTube

Demo Suku Sakai di Depan Kantor Gubernur Riau

YouTube

pompa dc sakai demo produk

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Sakai (2006): IMS Common Cartridge Demonstration

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Richmond Sakai White #2 Deba 180mm Quick Look 30P

YouTube
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Features

Learning Management

Features of LMS and LCMS systems, related to designing, administering, and consuming learning content in an educational, corporate, or on-the-job context.

7.9
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is Sakai?

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 and tested by community members and are then made available for others to use outside of the packaged Sakai product releases.

Sakai Video

Introducing Sakai 11

Sakai Integrations

Sakai Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(22)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users recommend exploring Sakai thoroughly and spending time on it to discover its useful functions. They suggest attending Sakai community events and talking to other institutions using the platform to learn more about its pros and cons.

Users advise knowing the customization limitations of Sakai and coming up with creative solutions to make it suit your class or project's needs. They recommend testing Sakai with real courses and faculty before switching to ensure it meets user requirements.

Users suggest integrating Sakai with other tools like Piazza for additional functionality and comparing Sakai to other services with better support. They recommend considering alternatives and choosing the system that best suits your needs.

Overall, users emphasize the need for thorough exploration, customization, testing, and consideration of alternatives when using Sakai.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-8 of 8)
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Sarah Daggett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sakai is used by our university to both teach classes and to organize/deliver committee materials. Sakai's use by faculty varies by preference; some use it heavily, others don't use it all. It could be used to augment a fully F2F class or can be used to deliver a fully online class. For committees, they use the folders to keep track of past documents and, paired with alerts, to let committee members know when new, significant documents have been added.
  • Sakai is pretty flexible. Within its framework, you can create whatever kind of folder structure you want/need and can turn on or off options easily.
  • Sakai is fairly simple/straightforward in design. I haven't heard many issues from students in using it.
  • I would say Sakai is OK to navigate through. Depending on how many folders you have and how deep they go, it's nice to be able to click back on a root folder, but I also find their navigation a little clunky.
  • Sakai doesn't fully integrate with our SIS. Consequently, faculty will call us saying a student is still on their roster in Sakai when the student actually dropped. This means the faculty member needs to manage their own Sakai roster. Students will be added to the roster automatically, but not dropped.
  • This may not be a Sakai problem, but faculty seem to get really confused about how Sakai relates to our SIS. We've had faculty tell students their grades were "posted," only to find out they just meant they were updated in the Gradebook of Sakai. They hadn't actually posted the grades in our SIS. We've tried to explain this a variety of ways, but there's something about Sakai that makes them think that somehow it's part of our SIS - when they look totally different!
  • Sakai's navigation can be flat/clunky. They rely on a root navigation system like Windows Explorer that kind of works, but also can be frustrating, depending on how meandering the documents/files for a class goes. The menu on the left is straightforward, though, and can be customized, which is very nice.
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.
Jason Smith, DPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sakai is being used as an LMS at Pomona College as well as the Claremont University Consortium which includes four other undergraduate colleges and one graduate institution. The business problem that it addresses is that of providing learning materials to students, creating interactive and collaborative environments for students, faculty, and staff, as well a number of additional instructional activities.
  • The Sakai product is "REAL" open source project that is part of the Apereo Foundation. It is the only LMS on the market where students, faculty, and staff can have a say on how Sakai evolves. It is a responsive and vibrant community based product.
  • Sakai is technically rock solid, scalable, and robust.
  • The possibilities of Sakai are endless with LTI (Learning Tools Integration).
  • Sakai is highly customizable, configurable, and can be automated easily where other LMS's can not, especially those hosted in the cloud.
  • Sakai has a bit of improvement to do in standardizing some of its tools.
  • There is the perception that Sakai is hard to install and administer, this needs to be worked on.
  • Built in video conference functionality would be excellent for Sakai.
  • Sakai needs to handle rich media types better.
The Sakai LMS is very well suited for any organization that requires a rock solid LMS that can be customized to meet specific needs of an organization. Sakai is a "TRUE" open source project with a genuine roadmap for the future. It is not constrained by profit motives or a vendors bottom line. Rather it is a community LMS where users actually have input; it is an innovative governance modal for enterprise software.
Dave Eveland | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sakai as an LMS is used across our organization. This includes all of our programs at all levels: from our fully online PhD program all the way down to individual courses taught in face to face contexts by our full-time and adjunct faculty instructors. Sakai provides course sites for every course based on the information provided in our student information system. While most of the use is for organizing and running courses, some departments use it to organize and hold meetings, store department-level documentation and to distribute and archive important communications.

Providing a means of organizing course materials and documenting learning is a huge task for any institution or entity tasked with providing training or education to it's constituents, and Sakai does this. With assistance from instructional design professionals, course sites in Sakai become a place where student learning is documented, facilitated and archived - often for review by auditing entities for quality and adherence to industry level standards.
  • 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."
  • Sakai's assessment feature could be improved, streamlining and making the assessment function much more simplified. Assessment in any electronic format is complex, but the workflows dealing with assessment import, creation and management of assessment data could be improved or made to be more consistent. It is confusing, for example, that assessments are split between a "working" state and a "published" state.
  • The gradebook or grade reporting feature in Sakai is somewhat clunky to use. While it does boast a spreadsheet look, feel and function, doing so in a browser window with multiple items and hundreds of students makes grading even for TAs difficult. Some of our instructors leverage the Classic gradebook instead of the newer interface because the view or function is more to their liking.
  • Discussion forums or how conversations are managed can be a bit confusing with Sakai. Sakai provides multiple ways in which discussions can be organized - some of which are for large groups of students and some which are more confusing. The discussions area doesn't allow students to share images easily, to up 'vote' or 'recommend' certain posts or sections to peers. There's no way to badge or otherwise highlight certain levels of 'attainment' for students in discussions. It's also difficult to assign grades to discussions.
Sakai is well suited for any size institution or training organization looking to use an extremely flexible, well-supported and extensible LMS that doesn't sacrifice budget for useless options and extra features. The community that is Sakai (by way of students, instructors, teachers, administrators, information technology professionals, instructional designers and developers) all make Sakai what it is. Sakai can be paired with multiple LTI tools, streaming services, conferencing and plagiarism detection platforms and student information systems to ultimately help students meet with success. As we have a very limited IT staff Sakai is hosted off-site, but are still able to provide support to our faculty with very little extra effort. While Sakai is not as well-known as platforms like Blackboard or Canvas, because we're one of just a few clients, requests to our host for second or third tier assistance are resolved pretty quickly. We recently had an instance where all of our users were unable to login; this turned out to be an issue with host configuration rather than Sakai itself. Sakai is not perfect: "Auto-saved draft" text disappears sometimes, question pools are difficult to share among faculty, the forums interface could be modernized and progress analytics surfaced more easily to students.
Keira Dooley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Sakai as the primary LMS for the college for eLearning students to take online classes.
  • Separates each type of learning into intuitive areas
  • Allows for flexibility with integrating other systems
  • Easy to set up basic courses
  • When I used the system a few years ago, there were several small bugs. Most of them we were able to work around, but they were annoying.
  • Again, when I used the system a few years ago, it would have been nice to have an easier way to implement attractive templates.
Well suited for online learning where instructional developers are present to assist instructors. Less appropriate for instructors to develop on their own without technical assistance from instructional developers.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sakai is one of two LMS platforms implemented at the University of Delaware. It is used extensively in tandem with the Canvas LMS to provide students and instructors with a web-based portal for assignment submissions, gradebook-keeping, lecture recordings, assessments, and more. It is also leveraged by staff and various research groups as a group-editable collaborative site. Within our department, we use its assessment and gradebook functions to educate students on copyright infringement and intellectual property concepts. It addresses the business problem of needing a highly customizable web-based workspace and digital resource repository for the various groups represented in an academic environment.
  • Customized, timed assessments with automatic collection and calculation of results
  • Organization and delivery of resources to a defined set of participants
  • Rapid creation of course sites via importing from and/or duplicating other sites
  • At UD, Sakai is only officially supported in Mozilla Firefox, even though a multitude of users are accustomed to IE, Chrome, or Safari as their primary browser. This is a limiting feature that must be honored, as one key feature--timed assessments--are prone to failure or bugginess in these three unsupported browsers.
  • The desktop/full-screen version of Sakai (e.g., the non-mobile site) relies on HTML frames, an archaic means of page layout, to display the main content. Some course site designers employ this by porting in a web page or other content into this frame through insecure means that Firefox will block by default, leaving the end-user with the top navigation, left sidebar of buttons, and a blank main content area. An end-user must dismiss Firefox's security warning and have it "stop blocking" what it deems "insecure content." Could this be improved?
It seems well suited for rapid creation of new course sites for each new semester, so this may appeal to faculty who are timid about tech. The site is not responsive, though it does automatically load the mobile site on a mobile device, though assessments and couple key features are not available on mobile. It would be wise to ask how important this is in the decision making process.
Raymond J. Uzwyshyn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Sakai now at two organizations, American Public University (APUS), an online for profit university and Texas State University, a large campus state university. At American Public University Sakai was the main online Learning Management system. It was utilized across the organization as the main tool and engine for students and faculty as the online learning system for the university. At Texas State, Sakai is used on a more selective and limited scale. Here, it is used for a smaller cohort of online classes but it is also used as a support (resource) system for hybrid courses. Sakai addresses the business problem of 'online classroom' management. Essentially, the system can build an infrastructure for faculty and students for learning. For faculty, it provides an infrastructure system for say a semester 'course' arcs and online learning infrastructures. For students, it is the main online system for receiving assignments, taking tests, dialoguing through forums with other students etc.
  • Easy to Use Basic Online Learning System: Sakai does the basics for learning online well. Outlining course lecture material uploading, linking for faculty, forums for students
  • Pragmatic Text Based System: Sakai is solid for text based assignments, both student entry and faculty presentation and overview.
  • Familiar Interface: The Interface for Sakai will be more immediately familiar to both faculty teachers and students as the model is well established in interface design.
  • Lack of Multimedia Features: Sakai is not great for video integration, either uploading or chat based video or integrating new video features into the interface and shell. It is not particularly good for say recording audio or more sophisticated multimedia integration.
  • Lack of Web 2.0 features. Sakai is not great as a Web 2.0 social media learning application. It is definitely from an early but still present model of learning management systems and has remnants of its first generation architecture.
  • Lack of User Experience Design: Sakai is basic in its user interface design. In this way it is approximately a generation back with regards to web 2.0 interface design or higher attention to 'learning' design aesthetics and integrating with online 'learning methodologies.
Sakai is a fair standard learning management system. It is very well suited to standard 'text' based asynchronous online learning modalities. It is less appropriate for 'live' online learning classes. It is not overly suitable for scenarios where the learning requires a lot of 'collaborative' group work or large classroom 'MOOC' like environments. In this way, it is more of a first generation learning management system.
September 15, 2015

Sakai = Success

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sakai as our LMS for the university. It is used for the entire university. It helps guide the day to day student/ instructor interaction be a positive one.
  • User friendly, easy to navigate
  • Interactive friendly. You can link other resources to help students learn the course concepts better.
  • Stable platform. There are a few updates from time to time but it has never gone down in my years of using the LMS.
  • The calendar function is a bit confusing to set up.
  • The LMS works great. I don't see any real problems with it. It is one of the best ones I have dealt with in my 13 years teaching.
I would think how easy is the LMS to learn would be one of the first things to ask.
Becky Roehrs | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sakai is being used by 85% of our credit faculty and 5,000 credit students in online, hybrid, and face-to-face course and project sites as well as by non-credit faculty, employees, and students. Five years ago, we found our LMS needs had grown so much that we couldn't maintain our Learning Management System ourselves. At that time, we were using Blackboard and the primary LMS's in use at educational institutions were Moodle and Sakai. We formed a faculty/staff LMS committee that tried out different vendors providing Moodle, Sakai as well as Blackboard.

Overwhelmingly, our staff preferred Sakai, even though our Community College System was leaning strongly towards adopting Moodle and Blackboard. Why? Faculty said they felt like they were using Blackboard, but it was "Blackboard" working the way they wanted it to... Sakai is created by and for education, and it felt like a good fit.
  • The Gradebook is easy to set up and use for trainers, faculty and students. You can use points or percentages, weighting or no weighting. If faculty have problems with the Gradebook, it's because they have come up with an unusual grading system, not because the Gradebook isn't working right!
  • The majority of the tools are group aware, so we can merge a number of sections for faculty teaching multiple sections of the same class. It saves them a tremendous amount of time. Any faculty member can use groups with Forums, Assignments, Test and Quizzes, Lessons, Announcements, Email and you can view groups/sections in the Gradebook and of course the Roster. Here's a list of the tools: https://sakaiproject.org/node/94
  • Instructors and students like to use Lessons, as the go to location for their videos, images, documents, and links to Forums, Assignments, Tests and Quizzes, and instructors can set up Student Pages in Lessons, which allows students to create a "portfolio" or "project, using all the tools the instructor can (videos, images, documents).
  • A number of different universities and colleges created different tools, so the Sakai community (of educators and developers) are working with usability experts to improve our primary tools that should be ready with the release of Sakai 11 at the end Spring 2016: Lessons, Tests and Quizzes, and the Gradebook (I thought the Gradebook was already user-friendly).
  • The Sakai community is continuing to improve Sakai's accessibility: "The goal is to meet all of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A and AA Success Criteria".
  • The wiki tool is a bit clunky, so the community is looking at other tools to replace it. I'd like to see the blog tool updated as well, but it may not be as popular a tool when compared to what many colleges use, such as WordPress.

Here's my list of key questions to ask when selecting your LMS:
1) Are you going to support Sakai in-house or hire a vendor? You'll need staff dedicated to maintaining it if you want to support Sakai in-house.
2) Is it important to you to use an open source LMS or proprietary LMS? Sakai is open source, like Moodle.
3) Many LMS's look the same to students; what are important features in an LMS to your faculty?
4) Do you want an LMS that is easy to train faculty to use? Sakai is very similar to Blackboard; Moodle is not. Our faculty felt comfortable working with Sakai very quickly.
5) Do you need an LMS that integrates well with other tools? The Sakai community has become leaders in LTI integration. We use Sakai with Turnitin, BigBlueButton (open source web conferencing), WIRIS (math editor), and a number of publishers.
6) Corporate clients do use Sakai, but it is focused on educational institutions, faculty, and students.
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