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| Latest release | 2.4.1 / September 21 2007 |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Course Management System |
| License | Educational Community License |
| Website | www.sakaiproject.org |
This page is about the software project, for other meanings, see Sakai. Sakai is a community of academic institutions, commercial organizations and individuals who work together to develop a common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). The Sakai CLE is a free, community source, educational software platform distributed under the Educational Community License (a type of open source license). The Sakai CLE is used for teaching, research and collaboration. Systems of this type are also known as Course Management Systems (CMS), Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).
Sakai is a Java-based, service-oriented application suite that is designed to be scalable, reliable, interoperable and extensible. Version 1.0 was released in March 2005. As of July 2007, Sakai is in production at over 150 institutions and being piloted by over 100 more. A map showing many of these is available.
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Background
The development of the Sakai CLE was originally funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation as the Sakai Project. The early versions of the software were based on existing tools created by the founding institutions, with the largest piece coming from the University of Michigan's "CHEF" course management system. Sakai, in a play on the word “chef”, refers to Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai. The original institutions started meeting in February 2004. Each institution had built a custom course management system:
- Indiana University: Oncourse CL
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Stellar
- Stanford University: CourseWork
- University of Michigan: CTools, formerly CourseTools, based on the CHEF framework
- uPortal and the Open Knowledge Initiative were also represented.
On October 5, 2007, the University of Virginia announced that it will be implementing Sakai throughout the university instead of the ToolKit. Once the first version of Sakai became publicly available, the original five institutions invited other institutions to join through the "Sakai Partners Program". The partner institutions contributed to the program financially and by submitting code to the project. As the project phase neared completion in 2005, the Sakai Project set up a foundation to oversee the continued work on Sakai. In 2006 the Sakai Foundation named Dr. Charles Severance, who previously had served as Chief Architect, as its first Executive Director. Development work is currently supported by community members (resources provided by academic institutions and commercial affiliates as well as individual volunteers) and the Sakai Foundation. The number of organizations involved is now well over 100.
Software features
The Sakai software includes many of the features common to course management systems, including document distribution, a gradebook, discussion, live chat, assignment uploads, and online testing. In addition to the course management features, Sakai is intended as a collaborative tool for research and group projects. To support this function, Sakai includes the ability to change the settings of all the tools based on roles, changing what the system permits different users to do with each tool. It also includes a wiki, mailing list distribution and archiving, and an RSS reader.
Sakai Community and Foundation
The Sakai community is an international alliance of universities, colleges and commercial affiliates working with standards organizations and other open-source software initiatives to develop and distribute freely enterprise software applications using Sakai's community-source approach. Many institutions in the Sakai community are members of the Foundation, but joining the Sakai Foundation is not required to use the software or participate in the community. The Sakai Foundation is a member-based, non-profit corporation. It encourages community-building between individuals, academic institutions, non-profits and commercial organizations and provides its members with an institutional framework for their projects. The Foundation also works to promote the wider adoption of community-source and open standards approaches to software solutions within the education and research communities. The Sakai Foundation currently organizes two conferences each year.
