Sakai Reviews

I really enjoy sakai because it was very simplistic and informational for class

It would crash on my computer sometimes which was inconvenient

Easy access for students to get their grades and assignments and for submitting assignments.

What I like best about Sakai is that courses are separated and you can favorite courses that will display on your main dashboard. I also like how there is separated tabs within each course that details what that tab is and has those resources organized within

What I dislike is that it is not as easy to use as a LMS like Canvas. The interface can often times be slow. Another thing is that going back to the home page by clicking the back button will often just take you back to the beginning of the tab, it is a bit hard to navigate at times

I use Sakai as an LMS in college. Professors post their resources on Sakai as well as tests and quizzes. It makes grading much easier as it has an automatic grading feature.

Our users are very happy with Sakai. Their evolution the last years has been awesome, specially the UX/UI improvements in Sakai 11 with the responsive design and the Lessons tool new features.

I am not a real developer, but when I have done a development (a patch for a bug, a small feature...) the community has helped me, reviewing the code and guiding me to follow the best practices. And my code has been finally merged into the repository, becoming part of the product and being available for others. I think this is not possible in other open-source LMS, and of course neither in the propietary alternatives.

The lack of contribution of many adopters. Open source needs resources to survive, no matter if work or money. And about money, with a little investment of a small percentage of the cost of other propietary solutions, Sakai would be really awesome.

Is the LMS / collaborative work environment of my university (1000 employees / 9000 students)

Intuitive and accessible platform, great for professors to post, grade, and comment on assignments, and for students to upload assignments. Easy to access and track grades.

I'd like to see a mobile app that would increase mobile functionality. It'd be great for students to be able to post/upload/view grades on an app and for instructors to manage, post, etc.

Sakai is used by many of the nation's best institutions of higher learning, and there's a reason for that. It's a high quality product unparalleled in its field.

Collaboration, course assignments, and teacher-student communication.

Sakai has the most tools when it comes to learning management. The features it offers in terms of lessons, interactivity with others, announcements, polls, tests and quizzes, etc are just too good to not take an advantage of. It is also customization and easy to use. The documents are easily accessible and you can also plan, manage and distribute courses among students in a more effective manner.

Setting up this software can be quite complicated and can even even take a lot of time.

This software is for businesses and not for individuals who run their own businesses. Sakai LMS makes your business run smoother, efficient and cost effective. Even though the entire software is quite expensive, the worth and value of this software is totally realized with the usage of this software.

Sakai has been a blessing for me. I can do a host of different things with the help of Sakai. Previously, I used to send out notifications and announcements for students to read. Now, I just have to post in on Sakai thus saving me time, paper and resources. Polls can be taken regarding the opening up of new sections and tests/ quizzes resources are even uploaded directly for students to go through themselves

Why do I like Sakai?

Sakai is open source, free (no strings), reliable, easy to use, and has an excellent user community. I like it that a vendor isn't telling us what tools we can use, we're not stuck with tools we don't like, nor is one person or a few telling us what we can do. The Sakai user community decides on the direction of the LMS and what tools will be updated and how. Our college heavily uses the Gradebook, Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Discussion Forms and Lessons (for organizing content). We also provide project sites for all of our advisers. We have over 5,000 credit students; 85% of our credit instructors are using Sakai, about 20% of our courses are online, another 15% are hybrid.

What do I like about the new features in Sakai 11+?

Our college is using Sakai 2.9 and upgrading to Sakai 11.2 soon-I've been one of the Administrators and an online instructor for 4 years. The latest release, Sakai 11+, has been updated with responsive design, is mobile-ready, accessible, has a new Gradebook that works like an Excel spreadsheet, and most of the core tools have been streamlined and updated to be even easier to use, such as Lessons, and Tests & Quizzes.

Create Organized Online/hybrid/supplemental classes:

In my online classes, I can easily import a course where I've added weekly Lessons subpages. If instructors use Lessons, they can create a very organized class for students-students can find all of their weekly materials in one location.

On each weekly Lessons subpage I can display:

YouTube videos or EDpuzzles or PlayPosit videos embedded with questions; display images/diagrams, link to Office Mixes (narrated PowerPoints) and/or documents, and I provide links directly to the weekly discussion, assignment, and/or quiz. I also add links to screencasts I've made to my assignment instructions.

Other Sakai/integrated tools I like to use:

I also provide web conferencing with BigBlueButton (an open source web conferencing tool), provide surveys to get updates from my students on how the class is going, provide blog posts for variety, and allow students to post in the Chat Room for quick questions/answers. I post all of the due dates in the Calendar. At any time, I can make the class grades visible to students in the Gradebook (this is a simple Gradebook setting, that displays weighted grades, and has been updated to also display points or percentages as well).

What do other Sakai instructors use?

Some of our instructors like to use Lessons Student Pages, where students can create their own "project sites" and post videos, images, links to documents, and links to web sites. Other instructors like to create groups-most of the Sakai tools are group aware, including Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Forums, and our web conferencing tool BigBlueButton, Assignments and now Lessons Student Pages also allow peer review/grading for collaborative assignments. Other instructors like to use Turnitin, the plagiarism checker tool, as well as Turnitin's Grademark tool.

As a Sakai Administrator,:

It's easy to set up classes and projects. We've automated the site creation and instructor/student enrollment between our Colleague registration system and Sakai. We use Active Directory authentication, and Sakai is just one of many systems our students access with the same userid/password. We do have a Sakai vendor and a vendor for BigBlueButton, who keeps our system up 100% and provides excellent customer service. We also use LTI to link to various tools (such as links to textbook publishers).

I highly recommend Sakai, and would be glad to discuss our experience with others.

This is a community of users, so like any open source community, you need time, money and resources available to make updates. Luckily, the money and resources usually do appear when we need them!

The Test & Quizzes tool has been updated (simplified settings), but it will become more streamlined as money/resources become available.

Of the tools, the Forums/Topic tool is clunky; I'd like to see a replacement. Since different people created different tools-some don't work like the others-this is one of those tools.

I'd like to see the Blog integrated with the Gradebook, and I like how simple it is..but there are two blog tools and we have to pick one to support.

The community has looked at a replacement for the wiki tool, but nothing open-source has really caught our eye.

Lessons in Sakai 11+ has been seriously upgraded-now you can create columns, sections, colored backgrounds, and is streamlined, so it looks excellent.

* Free, Open Source (really open-source)

* Has an active educational community donating new Sakai tools, updates, training, and support

*These are tools we use with Sakai in addition to the core and contrib tools: BigBlueButton, (an open source web conferencing tool), WIRIS, a math tool, Softchalk, YouTube, Turnitin (investigating Vericite),

* Small organizations to large (100,000 students) use Sakai

* Actively working towards meeting W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A and AA Success Criteria, IMS Common Course Cartridge

* Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI v2) standard to integrate with third party learning tools and other systems

* Other tools Sakai integrates with: Adobe Connect, BigBlueButton, Kaltura (video/multimedia), Open Meetings (Conference tool), RSS Feeds, SCORM Player

We had to upgrade 4 years ago, and at the time, our users didn't want Blackboard or Moodle. It would have been easier to go with one of those two LMS's since most of our state's Community Colleges use them. But we really like Sakai.

It's reliable, which is extremely important. Sakai meets our instructors teaching and learning needs and our students rarely have issues other than resetting their passwords. With the added collaboration abilities available for group/peer assignments in Assignments and in Lessons Student Pages/Content tools, it meets the growing needs of our online/hybrid instructors and students. We'll now have responsive, as well as accessible content for our users, and the latest version has a professional look and feel.

I have gone through the all the tools which are exist in Sakai LMS, and each tool has its own priority to reduce the problem of Mentor and Mentee. I have taken the classed to the students by using even other LMS tools but which are not user friendly as Sakai tools. I like mostly Lesson tool and Test and Quizzes most and these two are important to any domain who transfer the education one among to other.

As an end user as soon as he comes to Sakai pages, giving guidelines how to use the courses, but few screens are confusing to the end user. Need to provide end user to give his/her own names for the courses. This is bit confusing to the end user.

We are solving the problems which are facing to educate the people in each and every domain,

logical, intuitive, documented ten more characters

independent development of tools sometimes shows

difficult to reconcile user numbers. short learning curve. Great for hybrid classroom. Life saver in bad weather.

Sakai allows for so much flexibility. More is given besides course sites. Project sites can retain and manage information for administrative needs and accreditation boards. Creativity can allow for designs for committees and projects way beyond the classroom.

I like that there are design options that can be explored. I especially like the conversation. Participants from all levels and all institutions can freely talk about their innovations and experiences within Sakai to learn from each other.

There is still a need for development with the aesthetic. The real functionality can be hidden in a plain wrapper. I have to remind myself that many of its graphic limitations are limitations of any website and this is not a dedicated authoring tool, but a platform for presenting instructional and administrative content. Also, there is not complete harmony in how the tools work. Different entities develop different tools at different paces. But there is real, observable development that is exciting to watch.

I know that many, many highly successful universities and businesses are using Sakai at every level of user participation. I know someone who was a trainer in the biggest commercial LMS who said Sakai has every functionality of the Big Guy and more with operating costs that were a fraction of participating in the commercial product. Training products are free and are becoming more and more available.

Our campus has around 550-600 FTE. This is a small campus that needs to work with other small campuses to have a presence in the online community. We also have few resources to invest in online development. We have been able to work collaboratively with several other institutions to share resources and group governance within our experience of Sakai. This is one of the many examples of flexibility that Sakai enjoys. Our small institution could not afford to have a commercial LMS, but Sakai is available to be maximally effective for any size or configuration of implementation. We have a top-notch LMS tool with a very affordable investment in a hosting service and a collaboration with others. That is allowing us to develop new programs and to help students who need the online component to complete their education

Sakai has a clear layout and instructions. very easy to use for beginners

the customization could be better. May be different theme and colors etc.

managing grades of student. It was very easy to upload the grades