Catching up with Sakai

August 31st, 2006

Via Edufilter and reproduced with permission.

Here is an interview with Brad Wheeler; a co-founder of Sakai and current serving Vice Chair of the Sakai Foundation Board.

What was the driving force behind setting up the Sakai project?

Rational economics and strategy for the future. In 2002, IU assessed continuing to advance our very popular home grown “Oncourse” system or to buy from the commercial marketplace. The public report is available - A Course Management System Strategy for Indiana University. Neither was a great option. Our economics were very favorable with great control of destiny in our homegrown system, but as an island, I knew we would struggle to keep pace with the very best innovation for teaching and learning. Michigan had reached all the same conclusions. We agreed to share code in 2002 and that ultimately led to what became the Sakai Project concept (with others) in late 2003.

What has the uptake rate been like? Is it meeting your expectations?

For the eight campuses of Indiana University, Sakai is already our default Course Management System. We’ve had over 90,000 unique logins and auto-load it with over 26,000 courses each semester. Some faculty moved last year and others are moving this year as we prepare to retire our old system.

Beyond IU, the uptake has been at the right pace. I’m delighted with the breadth of engagement from five continents. The project is only now 2.5 years old and has put out five releases. I think the 2.2 release really puts Sakai into full consideration for those that were waiting for a little more maturity in the software. Changing a CMS is a three year venture for most institutions, so many are now in the pilot evaluation year.

What is different about Sakai when compared to other OSS CMS systems such as Moodle or Drupal? Why do you think people should choose Sakai?

Since I’ve not taught with Moodle or Drupal, I can’t speak to relative strengths. I can say that Sakai was conceived as a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for enterprise-scale use. It is being used for eScience, scholarly portals, university committees, and all forms of collaboration in addition to supporting residential and distributed education. We saw this as a way to move to a Faculty Workbench concept where many of the tools they need for their teaching, research, and service roles are all there together. Likewise, students can use it for their teams and committees beyond courses too. One of our faculty recently told others on a call with a National Science Foundation project that “we do everything in Sakai for our collaboration.” A slight exaggeration, but its use beyond courses is accelerating quickly.

The broad community is also very important. The Sakai Conferences are now really about everything it takes to succeed – training, support, system administration, etc. The explosion of sharing among the Sakai community at the institutional level has been a remarkable development during the project’s second year.

Sakai is open source - can anyone contribute to the code base or become a member of the project?

Absolutely. Sakai has a very active Developer community and many improvements have come from individuals as well as developers who work in universities. There are a set of committers and review processes just like many other open source projects. The technical community works on a meritocracy.

Can you give us a scoop on some new features/initiatives Sakai users can look forward to in the near future?

I’m very excited about the Sakaibrary work to further integrate licensed library content into Sakai. See Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. There are some very cool synchronous tools for audio/video/whiteboard being developed in the UK. The GradTools work from Michigan is also a good one to help grad students through their degree programs. Sakai is laboring hard with IMS on the Tool Interoperability and Common Cartridge work. The 2.2. release also has full integration with the Open Source Portfolio. This helps mainstream courses, portfolios, collaboration, and more into a common, open platform. Faculty and students can then readily invoke the tools that serve their needs. I knew we were on the right path when an academic department called me recently seeking for us to deploy a Sakai tool built at another university that they had seen at their professional conference.

How do you see the recent Blackboard patent award effecting Sakai development?

It is difficult to see how these attempts to assert patent rights are in the interest of students, faculty, and tax payers. IU’s deployment of these enterprise-class concepts for educational software date to 1997 and 1998 as documented in the WikiPedia entry, thus we’ve made no changes in our plans nor am I aware of changes from others who are working together through open source sharing. The Sakai Foundation has retained the Software Freedom Law Center and Eben Moglen to advise us on these matters as assess the veracity of the patent claim and other efforts to limit the free sharing of educational software that has long been a value of higher ed institutions. Our announcement.

With the emergence of companies such as RSmart it seems to me the often heralded argument that OSS does not have the same support as commercial tools is no longer valid. What do you think about the whole OSS vs Commercial CMS argument?

Is someone really still talking about that? With 13 Sakai Commercial Affiliates and competitive bidding on support and implementation services around open intellectual property, I’d say “argued, answered…dismissed.” Our commercial affiliates have no IP claims on the work of the Sakai Project, and yet they are choosing to be great contributors in many ways. In a field of sixteen candidates with .edu’s having about 85 votes and .com’s having about 11 last year, Members of the Sakai Foundation elected Chris Coppola of rSmart to the board. Why? Because rSmart had been working in the discussion groups and helping the community. Markets work. Other affiliates are doing likewise too.

What are the technologies behind Sakai?

Enterprise Java is the core, but we’ve got connectors for tools in other programming languages as well. We are database agnostic. We use web services, Spring, and Hibernate.

And let me add one more…..

Sakai has shown colleges and universities how to invest together and develop software using open source practices. We are repeating that with the Kuali Financial System that will have its first release in early October, and a Research Administration System announcement is forthcoming. These projects, more than anything, represent a new Coordination Model for higher ed to pool and leverage its resources. It is working because it is held together by incentives rather than contract. Everyone has walk away rights to the code at any time. The value of the community entices them to participate.

Entry Filed under: Learning Management Systems (LMS)