Sakai Reviews & Product Details - Page 5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.

I love how intuitive it is to access my grades; I also enjoy how I can view my class schedule in a block style format, so I can visualize long open spaces of time that would be best to fill in with more credits. It's also quite easy to contact my teachers and access any documents I need to complete my assignments that they have posted online. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike how when you log out of Netbadge, sometimes it says you haven't, and you have to restart your computer to log in properly and get access back into your account. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the best features in Sakai as a platform involve the sense of community that intentionally attempts to bring together those who use Sakai with those who develop it. Being able to reach out and directly influence how the platform continues to grow is a direct result of the Open Source movement. Being able to speak directly to and with developers, helps to provide a much more clear outcome for what educators want from an LMS.

Open Source does not mean free, and while Sakai is open source, the ROI is significant. Anyone can contribute to the improvement, betterment and effectiveness of the platform. The proximity of faculty, administrators, students, IT, and others to developers makes the platform responsive - it's really rewarding when a suggestion you make to the global community is accepted and adopted as an improvement in the platform. You feel as if you have and can make a difference in making something better for not only your own institution, but for the wider global community.

Without a doubt though, Sakai isn't just about leveraging a technology that's less expensive than the rest. As one of the projects adopted by Apereo, the community is also about connecting the technology with it's intended use - teaching and learning. Sakai is feature rich - including many tools that would cost 'extra' in other platforms - allowing faculty and course designers to develop traditional, fully online and hybrid courses at their institutions.

Of the features in Sakai, the Lessons area is the best. It brings together content and places it in context for students to access. Some faculty have even found it to be a great organizational tool for their traditional courses. Lessons brings together the ability sequence and organize instructional content in a way that 'makes sense'. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Every product, platform or service has it's 'areas to improve', and Sakai is no different. If Sakai was perfect, it would likely cost a lot more to implement, use and maintain.

One area I can see Sakai improving is in the syntax/terminology used throughout the user interface. In some cases (as happens with some open source content) it's difficult to insure continuity and uniformity throughout a product - with so many contributors to a platform it's not always easy to make sure everyone agrees just on how a particular feature should look or function.

Another area of improvement would be in how student progress is tracked. Sakai can functionally provide feedback on page views, assessment scores and engagement in a course, but it's tough to quantify all of that into a summary that provides a quick overview of individual student progress - this is especially critical in online courses.

Another area of improvement would be in authentication - providing a second level of authentication the way many banking institutions do. Our current implementation leverages enterprise level username and password encryption technologies, but any more having a second level of authentication is not only common but in some cases expected by federal guidelines or standards for authenticating student identity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like best Sakai's user friendliness and ability to create and launch a new course - from the ground up in under a day. I also like Sakai's flexibility with design, course assignment and exam structure. Lastly, I like the student experience. Students of all ages and demographics adapt to Sakai within minutes, which ultimately contributes to their success. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a few things I would add to/change about Sakai if I could. First, I would like to see more roles available for the administrator without having to use delegated access. It would be helpful to have an additional classroom roles successful as "administrator" so "instructor" isn't the role with the highest level of authority and the same as the administrator. Instructors (faculty) do not need the same authority or abilities as the administrator. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Online resources for courses and customized course/site creation per client. I like that we are able to host many different types of sites and that a student can be a part of many of these different types of class sites per term. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lack of integration with our present course offerings through Ellucian Colleague application. We could have it integrated with active directory, but it would be great if it worked with WebAdvisor as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The organized structure to the design and ability to easily access different subject tabs. It is also nice to be able to have a site that contains every subject for my institution so that I don't get confused and disorganized storing all of my information in different places. I also like the visual appeal of the site, as I feel that it is aesthetically appealing and comprehensive. One of the nicest aspects is also being easily able to communicate with others in my institution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Only certain tabs can appear with subjects at the top of the page at a time. In addition, I feel that the dashboard was being worked on throughout the entire school year so I was unable to access it although sometimes I wished that I could. Also, it would be nice to have a search bar so that I can look up key words and find information more quickly and easily. Also, the "news" option tab does not seem to be functioning, and I get a red alert saying that the service is unavailable. Fixing glitches such as this would help make the site better as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sakai is very user-friendly and accessible, and allows everything to be accessed from one single source. It made my life as a student very easy to organize, as every material I needed, for multiple classes, was available through this site. I also appreciated the features I did not readily associate with my class, such as feedback and media, were available to me and my professors. As an administrator for a class, I always had an easy time setting up a Sakai site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish there was a more seamless transition between active and inactive sites, and a way to organize inactive sites that are still being used from the completely irrelevant ones. I appreciate that the material on each site remains available to the user, but wish that was a little more accessible.

Another issue I ran into was simply communication via Sakai--some would post in forums, message boards, etc., but not everyone would. I don't know how, but it would be nice to find a way to get all users on the same page about interacting through the site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Everything is in one place, and I can find everything I need for my classes. CTools puts grades, announcements, assignments - everything I need - in one place. It also allows for different types of assignments: forums, discussions, and short-answer assignments are available through the site. It is also nice that it is the only place I turn in essays and papers; rather than using TurnItIn or e-mail, I can send all my essays through CTools, and then receive feedback in the same place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The format of the page could be better. It isn't as intuitive as I'd like.

It also seems impossible to remove myself or turn off notifications for pages/groups that I am in. For example, I am no longer interested in healthcare and yet I continue to receive 5+ emails a day from announcements from their CTools group page. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love that all of your classes can be accessed through the same site. It's great that students can go to one spot to see announcements, download powerpoints and other notes, and submit homework all on the same site. Plus the chat feature is extremely helpful when you need to ask a quick question. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface could be updated to be slightly more modern. It would also be great to have access to all prior classes, not just the site but the content that was provided when each class. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.