Sakai@USA Blog

Our Sakai “instance” at USA is now up and running!  You can check it out at http://ecampus.southalabama.edu/.

If you would like to join our Early Adopters Group and/or get an account and a course shell to start developing, email either ecampus@usouthal.edu or rmgray@usouthal.edu.

The Sakai Community is an exciting, up-to-date, flexible LMS. It offers support, a wiki about the program with community written experiences, Teaching & Learning Groups, Community Events, and more. Sakai is not just a program, it is a community of caring individuals who are passionate about enhancing learning.

The Sakai Community has a frequent update schedule. This means that if there is a bug in the program, a feature that could be useful, a security patch, or some other important aspect of the program that needs to be addressed, users won’t have to wait for some type of resolution to be made.

Sakai offers many significant advantages as an LMS, particularly its flexibility and its rich array of features.  Sakai not only has more features than other LMS systems, it also has the best versions of those features in many cases. Two primary examples of this are its superior visual editor and the Tests & Quizzes tool.

Indeed, one of the most important considerations in authoring an online course (or any web-based presentation of text) is where the actual writing takes place.  Most LMS’s seem to assume that faculty will compose their text in the online visual editor, but most faculty prefer to do this in their word processor, most commonly Microsoft Word.

Word, however, tends to not play well with these editors, adding a lot of “garbage code” in the background, making control of formatting almost impossible. Sakai’s visual editor contains a “Paste from Word” button that filters out most of that background code (Moodle also has this feature, but it does not do as good a job of cleaning up the code or of preserving the intended formatting).

The Sakai Test & Quizzes tool also allows for pasting appropriately formatted exams directly from Word, turning a long and tedious process of copying and pasting each question stem and answer option individually into a couple of clicks.

Another one of its advantages is its gradebook.  Its sophisticated gradebook offers distributing, weighting and grouping of gradable items, all in a familiar, spreadsheet-style design that allows for easy and efficient setup.

Sakai offers several Web 2.0 elements, most notably integration with Google Docs (and other Google tools) and the most sophisticated and useful RSS feed offerings (including the capability of instructors and students to subscribe to discussions, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other course tools, as well as the ability of instructors to import RSS feeds from other sites). Sakai’s blog and wiki tools are on par with any other systems’, and its podcasts feature exceeds any of the capabilities of other systems.

Sakai’s syllabus tool allows for either the posting of a file (e.g., a PDF or Word document) or a section-by-section option that allows for parts of the syllabus to be made public.  Its help pages are excellent; its content repository features are highly functional and easy to use; its search feature is rich and global; and it has built-in portfolio and a project collaboration systems.

Sakai does not have many weaknesses, and one of its main weaknesses could also be considered a strength:  Sakai is so flexible with so many tools that faculty could be overwhelmed or confused by the abundance of options.  Sakai’s templating options, however, allow faculty to choose from a more digestible menu of choices

The University of South Alabama has decided to adopt the Sakai CLE Learning Management System for its online and blended learning support.  Over the next several months, we will begin a systematic transition from eCollege to Sakai, and this blog will provide information about both the transition and the new Sakai system.

Sakai is an open source Learning management System (LMS) created by the collaboration of individuals at major universities whose goal is very similar to yours: “to enhance teaching, learning, and research.” It was developed by academics who care about making the best possible system for teaching and learning, not the one with the most commercial potential.

The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) system is a bit different from what many of you are used to, but once you spend some time with it, we believe you will find it very powerful and flexible.  We look forward to working with you in Sakai!