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Sakai is used by our university to both teach classes and to organize/deliver committee materials. Sakai's use by faculty varies by …
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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…
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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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DEMO 002 Download Course Materials from Sakai LMS
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DEMO 001 Submitting Assignments on Sakai LMS
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Demo Suku Sakai di Depan Kantor Gubernur Riau
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Sakai (2006): IMS Common Cartridge Demonstration
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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 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.
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| Mobile Application | No |
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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!
- Recommendations
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.
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(1-3 of 3)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 18, 2015
Sakai at UD is our workhorse LMS in need of some grooming
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?
- There seems to be a bit of a learning curve with the Sakai interface, but it recently enjoyed a refresh of its design aesthetics at UD. Students and faculty generally have a positive experience with Sakai.
- Sakai has allowed guests to UD or individuals taking continuing ed courses to access course materials without needing to go through an extensive process of creating a UD-specific account.
- Canvas
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.
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.
- For American Public University System, Sakai seemed an effective tool. As with any technology though, times change and with changing times comes new technological possibilities. At its implementation stage, Sakai had a positive effect in adding to the ROI and is built as a desktop online learning system. Currently, there are many competitors in the market probably worth looking at further if one wishes to push the leading edge with regards to mobile possibilities, multimedia etc.
- Sakai was useful as a resource system in tying online library resources to the university online curriculum. It allowed for library/university curriculum connections that otherwise would not be possible. We actually won several awards with our Sakai/Online Library/Libguides online curriculum integration.
- For an online for-profit university in the early days of online learning Sakai was a great tool. For land based universities transitioning to online learning modalities, Sakai is still a fair option in terms of hybrid learning possibilities and enabling an online resource folder for every physical class. Sakai is definitely not leading edge but more proven system stability undergoing versioning processes.
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.
1800
At my previous institution, American Public University, most of the infrastructure staff used Sakai. At that time, this was approximately 1800 faculty, a department of instructional technology designers, a media department, an online library of 22 librarians, all students at the university (at that time, 125,000, circa 2013). Other business areas represented, university marketing, business analytics and core IT.
Because American Public University System was based around Sakai, there were a large amount of staff devoted to the program. These were divided into core IT and backend systems, multimedia designers, instructional designers, online librarians, technical support staff, various staff connected to backend server and database operations, system security and other IT functions required for LMS management. A smaller online program at a physical university would require decidedly less.
- Online Learning: Teaching Classes (Main Framework)
- Archiving Classes: Main Framework
- Courses and Larger Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Programs
- Sakai was used as a framework for a larger faculty MOOC (APUS)
- Sakai was used as a shell for resources for hybrid physical/online classes (Texas State)
- Sakai was used for large section introductory university classes (introduction to Research, Freshman experience etc)
- Expansion of physical classes into online modalities
- Non traditional workshops
- Frameworks for learning symposia
- Adding Forum Comments
- Setting up Textual Assignments
- Submitting assignments
- Multimedia is challenging in Sakai
- Web 2.0 collaborative functions are challenging in Sakai
- Mobile Learning possibilities are challenging in the Sakai interface
September 15, 2015
Why Sakai? It's a great fit!
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.
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.
- We took our time converting from Blackboard, and now 85% of our credit faculty/students are using Sakai.
- Our faculty is now looking for more hybrid/blended opportunities and are investigating and using more interactive tools with students, such as creating YouTube videos, Office Mix (PowerPoint voice overs), and web conferences.
- Not only do credit faculty/students use Sakai, but so do other employees for large and small projects and training, as well as non-credit faculty and students in Continuing Education, Basic Skills and Adult High School.
- Moodle and Blackboard
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.
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.