Sakai 20 Release Notes

About Sakai

Sakai is an open source collaboration and learning environment. 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 20 introduces the new Sakai Grader UI in Assignments and also offers significant enhancements in ease of use, workflow improvements, cloud storage integrations, and more. Development goals for Sakai are to become more nimble, lighter, and more responsive as a product and as a community.

New in Sakai 20

  • In Assignments: New Sakai Grader UI with document preview in the browser for student file submissions, as well as a progress bar for student submissions

  • OneDrive and Google Drive integration in the Sakai file picker
  • In Site Info: the Date Manager allows instructors to update all due dates in a single page, and Auto-Groups enhancements simplify the process of creating groups in a site
  • Several Gradebook enhancements, including: equally weighted items within a weighted category, full screen mode, resizable columns, a new Section column, and the ability to Message Students directly from the Gradebook
  • User Activity tab in Statistics provides detailed user data for instructors, and students also get a view of their own activity
  • In Tests & Quizzes: ability to restore deleted assessments, flag individual questions as extra credit, and schedule assessment feedback display start/end dates
  • New CK Editor templates available throughout Sakai in the rich text editor
  • Student name pronunciation feature in Profile
  • "To the top" button to jump back up to the top of the page
  • Updated UI in Podcast tool
  • And more!