Sakai: Collaborative Learning And Course Management System
A while back we brought you reviews for a number of Learning Management Systems such as Moodle, ILIAS, Open Elms and SkyPrep. Sakai is another Learning Management System we thought was worth exploring.
Sakai is a Java based software platform, which is operating system neutral. This LMS platform is a product of collaboration between various educational institutes, (including the University of Florida), which have made the distribution and consistent upgrade of this open source software possible.
The Sakai Workspace
The Sakai collaborative environment provides a portal page which can be customized to include your institutions logo and color scheme. When you login to Sakai for the first time, a pop-up provides you with a tutorial regarding Sakai features. Whenever you login to Sakai, you will start with your Workspace which will contain your personal content. This workspace can be used by students, teachers and even fellow researchers for collaboration on projects, submission of assignments, social collaborative discussions and the like.
Collaborative Learning Environment Software
Sakai contains many features that you are likely to find in a typical course management system, such as live chat, discussions, gradebook, etc. Moreover, Sakai can be used with social media integration, voice threads, for distribution of tests and assignments and more.
Sakai Feature Overview
Sakai is best suited for spearheading research and group projects in educational institutions by providing students and faculty members with e-learning resources for effective collaboration.
- Sakai can be used for providing a number of services to your students and faculty members such as:
- Video and audio recording services
- Voice thread discussions
- Easy mechanism for creating, distributing and grading students assignments and tests
- Distribution of essential study material to students via Sakai
- Social media tools enable creating (e.g. blogs) and sharing user content with integration for social media tools and websites such as photo sharing websites, social libraries, wikis, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Compatibility and Requirements
As Sakai is operating system neutral, it can be run with Mac, Windows or Linux distributions. However, as the reliability of OS other than Linux distros is less known, therefore, it is recommended to run Sakai on Linux, be it CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Open SuSe, Red Hat or even Ubuntu.
The latest version of Sakai, i.e. version 10 has been primarily tested using Java 7. The recommended application server is Apache Tomcat 7.
You can find out more about detailed compatibility and deployment of Sakai and test drive a demo version via the link given below.
Go to Download Sakai
