A flexible LMS that fit our needs and wants
July 14, 2018
A flexible LMS that fit our needs and wants
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sakai
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.
- 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.