Sakai The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) is what PLU uses as our online course-ware system. Sakai replaces the BlackBoard "eCourse" system. It also represents a bi-directional relationship for the university; we not only use it for our own instructional needs, but we also invest time in the continued development of the project. Sakai is not only a cost-effective alternative the closed-source BlackBoard system, it also puts PLU in a position of collaborative work with other academic institutions around the world.eCourse vs. Sakai Up until the beginning of this summer PLU was using BlackBoard 5.0 for our online course-related collaboration. The eCourse system is close to five years old and a lot of progress in course-ware systems has since been made. This progress can be seen by administrators, students, instructors, and developers alike. The Sakai system, already, is proving itself a step well-taken.Because Sakai is free and licensed open source it has some inherent flexibility. Namely the legal ability to customize the system from the bottom up. This means that PLU will be able to make changes to the actual system. The other feature that generally comes with open source software is an extensible architecture. Because the Sakai community (which is made up primarily of developers from universities around the U.S.) knows institutions are looking for flexibility, the architecture of the program has been made modular and thus easy to augment. For instance, the Message Center tool in Sakai is not a piece of the core system. Instead Message Center was developed as a tool that can easily be integrated with the greater system. BlackBoard has little support for such extension. Another, more PLU-specific, aspect of Sakai is its use of CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, to abstract the presentation level of the system away from the technical under-workings. This allows our web developers here to customize the style and layout of Sakai to meet PLU's needs without dealing with much of anything under the hood. In many ways this interface level is the most important aspect of a web-application. Students and faculty have almost unanimously agreed that sakai is a beautiful step forward from eCourse. ContributionBecause PLU is using Sakai primarily due to its open source nature, we have a two-way relationship with the project. We not only use it here but we also put time into its development. The first project that will be taken up is a tool for Sakai that will allow BlackBoard users to convert sites to a Sakai format. This will aide the adoption of Sakai in the educational sector. The team for this project includes Aaron Gerow from PLU and developers at Virginia Tech, Texas State, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and other universities around the U.S.. |
Sakai Foundation "As a non-profit, membership
corporation the Sakai Foundation will provide Sakai developers,
adopters, and users a place to coordinate their efforts." The Sakai community recently announced its latest version, Sakai 2.4, available at sakaiproject.org/release/2.4.0/. Check out the archive of Sakai Newsletters for an ongoing less-technical overview of the system. The ECL Sakai is licensed under the Educational Commons License--an open source license geared specifically for use and development in the academic sector. |