A Solid CMS at a Great "Price"
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.
Sakai Video
Introducing Sakai 11
Sakai Integrations
Sakai Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| 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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Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 08, 2021
A Solid CMS at a Great "Price"
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.
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7.9
- Sakai has supported the institution in providing a platform for offering more hybrid/blended and online course options.
- Sakai has given students a "third space" where they can communicate with the instructor and their classmates about course content.
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.
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.
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9.3
- The ability to self host and customize Sakai has led to greater efficiencies and reliability.
- In all Sakai's cost of ownership is much less than dealing with an ASP and/or cloud solution.
- Sakai is continuing to improve over the years. Innovation is always happening.
- Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle
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.
6500
Sakai is used in the context of higher education. We host courses across 5 undergraduate institutions and about 2600 courses each semester. Over the decade of use we have hosted over 65,000 course and project sites. Sakai has been very economical and the development community is the best. It is one of the few LMS projects out there that continues to evolve.
1
We have one full time person who supports Sakai at the system administration level. Also, there are about six other people who use about 5-15% of their time offering support to Sakai users. These support people are instructional technologists who must be familiar with Sakai from an advanced user perspective.
- Provide a digital / online course management system.
- Provide a project based platform that can be used beyond that of the semester frame time.
- Sakai provides and works as an academic repository of sorts.
- Because we keep instructors courses available for about 7 years, hot online, it is like an academic repository.
- Sakai has project sites. These are fantastic collaborative workspaces.
- We share our installation across 6 institutions and use a single logon and it works!
- I think that it will be used to server more media type content.
- Social networking and co-curricular things are likely to increase.
- Hey, its an LMS, and it is the best of them.
October 31, 2019
Sakai -- The Mighty Have Fallen
Sakai is currently the Learning Management System (LMS) across campus. It is used for all learning management needs and is the hub for third-party plugins.
- Open-source community.
- Flexible.
- As customizable as you can afford.
- No mobile app.
- Confusing and unintuitive layout and buried settings.
- Lacking full 3rd-party integrations.
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4.2
- Sakai continues to serve the university, and faculty and students are mostly satisfied with it.
- The cost to support has been good in the past.
- As the market share slows, it's often the last to be developed by popular third-party integrations.
- Canvas
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.
December 27, 2018
Sakai is Simple and Supportive
Both the school I was in from 2011 - 2015, which was Michigan Jewish Institute located in Detroit, MI, as well as the school that I am going to be in from 2017 - 2020, which is the University of Baltimore located in Baltimore, MD, use Sakai. Courses are organized into tabs. Teachers use the program to communicate and organize grades, assignments, tests, discussions, syllabi, and files with students.
- Sakai allows teachers to send messages to students and a checkbox, when checked, will forward the message to students so that they will get the message even if they don't check Sakai.
- Students can use Sakai to find students that they may wish to contact through each course's messages tab. There is an option to email every student or you can search through a list of the student's name in each course tab if you can't remember their name, but you don't want to email the entire class.
- Sakai makes it easy for students to keep track of when assignments that teachers have uploaded are due in the assignments tab, as well as keep track of their grades in the grades tab and the progress of the course in the syllabus tab.
- While the check box to send an email when you send a message is helpful, there have been times that teachers forgot to check that box, so students didn't get important assignments/announcements.
- Discussion forums can be fun, but it's annoying to read other people's comments since you have to click into each person's comment, & it always marks the comments as new, even if you've read them.
- I think it would be helpful if Sakai warned you before submitting an assignment how many submissions or when the assignment is due, before hitting submit.
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5.3
- 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.
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.
July 14, 2018
A flexible LMS that fit our needs and wants
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.
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.
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7.2
- Sakai provided an alternative to other platforms that would have delayed the delivery of courses and full programs. Specific directives and initiatives were brought to bear from C level executives requiring delivery on an extremely tight budget. We have since been able to launch multiple programs, expand campuses and offer courses on a global scale.
- Using Sakai has meant students familiar with other platforms have had to learn how interacting with Sakai while similar, is different. We have needed to invest in creating instructional materials about the platform, provide training and instructional opportunities on best use and practice of not only Sakai but of how Sakai can be used with other tools and technologies. In some cases for instructors we've had to help them unlearn how processes work in other LMSs to recognize how they are different in Sakai.
- Sakai has provided greater ROI, where prior to using Sakai about half of our constituents were using an LMS, now more than 80% are doing so. Some of this has come about because of how Sakai works with our SIS, providing a consistent and available course site to every instructor for every course and section offered. It has also allowed us to contract with subject matter experts to create, manage, polish and reuse course structures, designs and content term over term.
- With the cost-effective storage of 1000s of course sites, we have yet to figure out how to keep tight reign on which courses contain the most up to date content, accessibility modifications and instructor-specific content. Sakai doesn't provide an over-the-top way to manage versions of a course, except by way of term to term or special name designation on course site creation.
- Canvas, Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution (JICS), Blackboard Collaborate and Moodle
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.