Assessment of Sakai

The third of four posts about the options we have assessed: Blackboard 9, Moodle, Sakai and the Decentralized Option.

Definition

Sakai is an open source LMS that is available for free and can be customized by programmers at an institution. There is an official version of Sakai that is maintained and supported by a consortium of institutions (mostly large universities). There are also commercial providers who will host and maintain Sakai instances for a fee. Courses are structured by activity or tool. (i.e. click Discussions to participate, rather than have discussions associated with a week or a topic.)

Interface and Features

Course structure in Sakai is oriented around activity; for instance, all online discussions are accessed within the discussion tool space. This is especially different from Vista because all content is delivered through the “course content” tool rather than on customizable pages with headers and footers. While the simplicity and consistency will mean students will find it easier to shift from course to course, some faculty will feel limited by this structure. The current Sakai tool set is limited in some areas, but a significant rebuild of Sakai (Sakai 3) may be coming out in 2011. Key questions:

• What does it take to modify or add features in Sakai?
• What will change in Sakai 3?

A direct and detailed comparison of LMS features will appear in upcoming blog posts.

Transition

Because Blackboard Vista courses are encrypted, there is no official method for transferring courses from Vista to Sakai.  Even if we can locate a tool or process that makes the transfer easy, the difference in course structures will require most of the instructors using Spark to redesign their course sites in some way.

• Is there a migration tool available to us?
• How much work would this change require from instructors to adapt their courses?
• Would a switch to open source help us have better control over future transitions?

Behind the Scenes

Sakai is an open source tool that was developed by several large universities, and thus may be more suited to the scale of campuses like UMass Amherst. In our initial installation of a test server, Sakai proved to be difficult to install. Also, some of its administrative functions lack an easy interface (requiring in some cases direct manipulation of the database to make simple changes). This leads to concerns that maintaining and manipulating Sakai may be more difficult than the other open source options. Key questions:

• Could we learn enough about how it works to make improvements?
• Is Sakai’s small base of user institutions enough to keep it self-sustaining?

Get a Preview of Sakai

If you are interested finding out more about Sakai yourself. We recommend reviewing the handouts and tutorial videos at UCLA: http://www.oid.ucla.edu/units/tlc/tectutorials/sakaihttp://help.asu.edu/search/node/bb9

Comments are welcome! Please comment below and share any questions, concerns or things you like about Sakai.