Sakai

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.

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.

Sakai is great if you need a less expensive LMS. You will likely need to have internal developers or pay developers to keep it running, but this might be cheaper than the alternatives, like Blackboard, Canvas, D2L etc.
Adopting Sakai now would be a very risky proposition, as their user base continues to be eaten by Canvas. Open source is great when there is a thriving and growing community to support it, but the largest public institutions that used and developed for Sakai have been leaving in droves, causing development to stagnate.

It is a good organization tool for schools and possibly businesses. When a company or educational system wishes to convey & allocate assignments, Sakai is a good resource tool for creating a calendar, monitoring progress, sending feedback, having ongoing communication, & sharing information with students, teachers, colleagues, & management.

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.

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.

Sakai works well in higher education in all sizes and nationalities of institutions. It also works well in businesses for training and communication purposes. LAMP has documented is usability in missionary and religious outreach institutions. Flexibility is such that it should work well in primary and secondary education, depending on how specific programs and courses are designed.

There are probably better applications for medical and clinical settings.

This system no longer meets the needs of the university and developers have been abandoning the project. Adopting it now could only lead to user frustration, as adoption of another LMS platform would be inevitable.

When considering LMS options, there have been many steps forward in integrating open-source plug-ins that I don't see Sakai having in the version I've been using. While not as active on the learning forums as I could be, I find that platforms like Moodle or NovoEd provide value-added features that are critically important to today's assessment focused higher ed environment.

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.

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.

I would think how easy is the LMS to learn would be one of the first things to ask.

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.