Top Rated Sakai Alternatives
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. 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.
