Sakai 12 Release Notes

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Dec 14, 2021 by Wilma Hodges
3 min read

About Sakai


About Sakai

Sakai is a collaboration and learning environment that is evolving to be a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE). Sakai is part of the Apereo Foundation suite of open source tools for education.

Sakai is used in many ways, from traditional courses with online components (such as resource management and forum-based discussion) to more advanced online approaches (such as flipped classrooms and fully-online teaching). A special distinction of Sakai over other LMSes is its built-in support for dedicated project work sites, which allows organizations and project teams to coordinate project administration, share resources, schedule activities, develop collaborative work products and track progress towards completion. These project collaboration spaces are widely used by student groups, faculty committees, thesis committees, strategic planning teams, re-accreditation teams and others tasked with important projects beyond the classroom.

Sakai 12 offers significant improvements to the user interface in terms of accessibility and universal design, collaboration, analytics and learning assessment, and interoperability. Development goals for Sakai are to become more nimble, lighter, and more responsive as a product and as a community.


Technical Notes and Maintenance Release Information

click the picture or here for the technical release notes


above image by https://www.flickr.com/photos/92334668@N07/ under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ with modification of text box adding Sakai 12 technical notes

Sakai 12.1 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

Sakai 12.2 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

Sakai 12.3 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

Sakai 12.4 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

Sakai 12.5 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

Sakai 12.6 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

Sakai 12.7 Maintenance Release - Fixes by Tool

New for Sakai 12

  • Improved look and feel. New skin. More attractive and functional.
  • Improved responsive design, better performance on mobile devices.
  • Gradebook performance enhancements, plus a number of minor interface improvements such as progressive rendering of student grades for large classes, and a new feature which allows instructors to view and adjust final grade distribution.
  • Refactoring of Assignments tool. Makes Assignments more maintainable and easier to enhance.
  • A new "Commons" tool for social connections
  • New Site Info display widget.
  • New modern interface for the chat tool. 
  • Lessons has a new optional subpage left menu navigation feature. In addition, a number of useful enhancements such as a forums widget, announcements widget, calendar widget, resources widget, and personalization of text, 
  • Test and Quizzes (Samigo) - Extended delivery of assessments for select individuals and groups. 
  • Test and Quizzes (Samigo) - use of tags/labels for taxonomic organization of question pools and easy discovery of relevant questions per discipline.
  • Test and Quizzes (Samigo) - Hot spot (using images) question types are now responsive (aka works well on mobile devices).
  • Better support for Mathjax.
  • Support for IMS Content Item, including a "shopping cart" ubiquitously available in the rich text editor.
  • Hibernate 4 Upgrade (from 3.6.5 to 4.3.11) . Alleviating technical debt.
  • New Course Management CSV loader.
  • Pluggable plagiarism detection integration containing support for 4 external providers: Turnitin, Vericite, Compilatio and Urkind . 
  • More easily leverage the use of a content accessibility checker plug-in to our rich text editor. GPL licensed. Requires work by system adminstrator.
  • ElasticSearch (open source search library) refactored to support multiple indices. Opens up new possibilities for search features (like the use of tags/labels for Test and Quizzes mentioned above).
  • Accessibility improvements.

New Features in 12.6

  • Gradebook now scales grades when point value of item is changed.
  • When adding a gradebook item, you can now choose to create the existing item and add another from the same screen.
  • The gradebook item options to "Release Items to Students?" and "Include item in grade calculations?" can now be selected independently of each other.
  • Students may now view maximum points possible for an item even if they don't have a grade for that item.
  • Gradebook now has an enhanced empty state that prompts users to add gradebook items if there are none existing.
  • Tooltips have been added to help guide the user when adding new gradebook items.
  • Gradebook Category color does not change as long as the name of the category remains the same.
  • New property to activate auto-favoriting for particular user types.


Sakai 12 Readme - useful for Change Management (select here)

Complete Feature Summary

Complete List of Features, Tasks, and Contributions