Top Rated Sakai Alternatives
The open and non-restrictive nature of Sakai is a perfect fit for a research-led institution such as Oxford. It is easy to open us access to course sites to students who are not officially members of that degree programme. The open nature of Sakai allows cross-fertilisation of ideas between diverse disciplines and offers students the opportunity to step outside of traditional course boundaries.
Sakai has all the tools you'd expect of an enterprise learning management system and the next release (due at the end of 2015) makes a giant leap forward by offering a fully responsive system that works equally well on a mobile phone or traditional desktop. One of the most useful features is the simple way that staff (faculty) can use the Lessons tool in conjunction with the WYSIWYG HTML editor to hand-craft fully-accessible web pages offering simple pathways through complex learning material.
Sakai is open source software which means there are no licence fees but more importantly means that Sakai can be customised to mirror the way that a particular institution operates. Sakai development follows the community source model which means that anybody who has implemented a good idea has every chance of being able to get their work into future releases of the software. This approach is both more dynamic and more democratic that insisting that all code modifications must pass through an over-worked central development team.
The Sakai user and developer community is excellent, it has weekly virtual meetings and is very good at offering support to both new and established users. Being part of the larger Apereo community is important as this provides good governance and allows the Sakai community to benefit from the experiences of other Apereo projects such as Xerte, uPortal, Apereo OAE and CAS.
Apereo is like the Apache Foundation for educational open source software and appears to be going from strength to strength. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sakai is quite complicated to set up which means that staff members cannot easily experiment on their own - generally the system will have to be deployed and configured by a central IT team.
The fact that it is written in Java is a double edged sword: it provides the infrastructure to allow Sakai to be used as an Enterprise system with tens of thousands of concurrent users but it does put a larger overhead on code development than (say) a system written in PHP or Python. Having said that, Sakai's excellent support of IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) means it is simple to plug in external educational tools which of course can be written in any language. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
97 out of 98 Total Reviews for Sakai
Overall Review Sentiment for Sakai
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I love the tools access on the left-hand side of the screen that allows professors to create multiple folders and upload different resources. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
When submitting assignments using the textbox, it is never automatically saved and you cannot open it in two windows at one time (even if you need to access a different class). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sakai has a lot of features and works fine for many applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Unfortunately, the interface is very clunky and often very buggy as well. It doesn't have good support and generally it just doesn't do anything it sets out to do very well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The entire interface of Sakai/Laulima is very intuitive and straightforward. The title of each function exactly demonstrates its purpose. The drop-down menus are self-explanatory. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The interface can use some improvement on its appearance. Currently, the looking of the LMS is very simple and not even pretty. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Easy-to-use template for instructors to enter their materials. You can easily make short quizzes with multiple choices or fill in the blanks. For numerical answers, it also allows a range of values to be accepted (to account for round-off errors etc.). Assignments can also be randomized in terms of the order of the questions (to inhibit cheating in tests), and also the options for multiple choice/match the columns can be randomized. The way the software is set up, you don't need to know much about html scripting or syntax to have a full website-like functionality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Very slow especially for large class sizes -- the gradebooks take extremely long to load and interact with. The biggest issue with Sakai is that you cannot easily upload a gradebook from Excel to Sakai. The manual task of inputting grades is not fun at all. Also, the UI is not very intuitive -- you usually have to dig around to find a certain thing. Sakai has a tendency to bug out randomly -- the biggest losers are students while answering quizzes or tests. Also, the inefficient UI usually means that you have to go through too many clicks to accomplish simple tasks. The "back" button on Sakai is another huge bug as the software freaks out and behaves unexpectedly every time you hit back. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It has a complete and advanced online community, which collaborates to be completely useful. The community has developed a responsive user interface and is working to comply with all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sometimes you have to wait until the money and resources are available to work on the project that you consider important. In the four years that I have been involved, the community has always found a way to find the resources needed to make updates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sakai works for University of Hawaii by having different tabs for resources, syllabus, modules etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sakai does not allow students to open new folder into new tabs. If it is clicked to open as a new tab, the same exact tab duplicates and will not open the page that it was clicked into. Copying and pasting is very difficult and it will not offer and typo suggestions Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sakai features a wide variety of built-in tools to help build out an online hub for classes. Tools like grade entry, file storage, homework assignments, and more can make a classroom website accessible for both students and teachers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While the user-end of the website is relatively intuitive, it can sometimes be tricky to make the site do what you want it to. In general, you can make it work once you give it enough elbow grease, but it certainly isn't perfect in this regard. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Integrated calendars for students and integrated plagiarism checks help students maintain pace in completing assignments while helping instructors keep students accountable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sakai can be difficult to use when uploading a new class workspace. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The best feature is the organization of the website. I like how there is a favorites tab that has your favorites appear in the top. Also, the ability to go back to previous classes was very nice and helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The user interface was a little buggy. To organize favorites, it was difficult, but once organized, it was ready to go. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
