How the Sakai Community Works
Trying to flesh out a structure with placeholder content. Content not to be taken seriously just yet. CDF
A Higher Ed Community
The Sakai community is at its core a collaboration of higher education institutions, but it also includes commercial affiliates and encourages their contribution. The central mechanism that facilitates this broad collaboration is a liberal, commercial-friendly open source license.
The Sakai community represents a coordination of institutions as much as individuals, and also a full variety of contributors - from pedagogists to designers, from end-user support staff to senior administrators - interested in the role of this software in furthering the academic mission. For this reason the range of contributions, projects, decisions, etc. differs markedly from a traditional, technically-focused open source project. We therefore call it community source.
The Sakai Foundation
Sakai Partner Organizations
While the Sakai software is free to download and use, institutions committed to its sustainability, coordination activities, and the infrastructure that supports them contribute to the Sakai Foundation.
Institutional Representatives
Contributors
Much of the Sakai community revolves around the development of a software product, but coding software represents only a fraction of community activity.
The Sakai Product
- Sakai is an enterprise-friendly, service-oriented platform that enables web-based support for various user groups in educational institutions.
- Sakai implements open standards wherever possible and releases open source software with a liberal, commercial-friendly license. It supports open courseware and open educational resources.
- There is a strong Teaching and Learning community within Sakai that seeks to ensure sector-leading CMS/LMS/VLE features are available on the platform.
- Distance Learning is specifically supported
- Face-to-Face teaching is specifically supported
- Portfolio use cases are specifically supported
- There is a strong Research community within Sakai that seeks to ensure sector-leading VRE features are available on the platform. This includes inter-institutional research collaboration features
- There is also a strong community with interest in Content Management and Collaboration features for other education-related activities, such as Clubs, Societies and Administrative groups.
- Not all campuses will necessarily deploy all features, nevertheless:
- There is a desire for both a consistent user experience throughout the range of features and an open platform that allows ready integration of best of breed 3rd party applications. We recognize that this creates a challenging dilemma for user experience.
- There is a desire to create solutions with market-leading accessibility and usability