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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

View all 11 features
  • 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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  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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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

YouTube

Sakai (2006): IMS Common Cartridge Demonstration

YouTube

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

(1-14 of 14)
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Sarah Daggett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Jason Smith, DPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Chani Loeb | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Dave Eveland | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Keira Dooley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Terry Golightly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Customizability--LTI plug-ins allow an organization to shop for the tools which are important for success. There is an increasing number of these tools which are becoming available, from course authoring tools to portfolios to clickers and so on. The community is sensitive and responsive to demands for more of these tools.
  • Skins--Institutions can make the product their own in look and function with skin changes and tool selection.
  • Affordability--As open source, Sakai is supremely affordable. Even with professionally purchased hosting services (totally optional) the low cost is a real strong point.
  • Range of tools--The tool options available, especially when expanded with LTI tools, is truly impressive
  • Participation in the greater Sakai community--Sakai is a community-based tool. Outside of our collaboration at LAMP, we also participate in the world-wide conversation about how Sakai should be developed and how courses can be managed through Sakai.
  • The coming upgrade will address many issues, the visual presentation of sites and courses
  • The Forums (discussion) tool is not natively integrated into the Gradebook, but needs another step to connect the two.
  • The Wiki tool is awkward and not WYSIWYG. But I understand that is common with wikis in most platforms
  • The Help documentation could use some focus on student needs rather that course developer needs
February 05, 2016

Sakai

Samantha J. Blevins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Organization of content
  • Customization of course navigation and content
  • Small learning curve compared to other systems
  • Ease of use and customization of ePortfolio
  • Tests and Quizzes
  • ePortfolio
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Sakai is a great collaboration tool for researchers to work with sponsors from different organizations. Uploading files and using the chat module is extremely efficient for getting work done without having to make a conference call.
  • Sakai's module is a great interactive tool for our students to use when taking tests or quizzes. Their grades are tied to a grade book tool, which saves a lot of time when having to grade by hand.
  • Would like the Wiki tool to be more user friendly for interaction with others.
Andi Sciacca | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Transparency and ease of access for content - the modules were clearly labeled and easy to implement.
  • Grading features on assignments - the gradebook was very easy to access and in-assignment-grading was a time-saving and efficient feature.
  • Media-rich environment - compared to other LMS options at the time, Sakai was ahead of its competitors in terms of permitting media-rich assets.
  • The linear, scroll-of-death aspects of the early forums made it difficult to engage learners in peer-to-peer commentary.
  • The updates to the lessons tool provided no easy way to import material from old lessons, except through cut and paste.
  • The test and quizzes interface can be cumbersome.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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?
Raymond J. Uzwyshyn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
September 15, 2015

Sakai = Success

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Becky Roehrs | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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