Sakai Virtual Conference Notes

This year we've already shared notes from Anthology Together in Orlando (for Blackboard Learn), InstructureCon Online (for Canvas), D2L Fusion in Boston (for Brightspace), and MoodleMoot Global (for Moodle). Today we're going to add notes from Sakai Virtual Conference 2022. For dozens of readers . . . we'll see.

Decline and Survival of Sakai

Understanding a 2022 Sakai conference requires a basic understanding of the system's history and decline. Sakai was created in 2004 as a free community source system combining functionality from multiple US research institution homegrown systems, primarily from the University of Michigan's CHEF LMS. Sakai is administered through the Apereo Foundation.Sakai's focus initially remained on research institutions in the US, although it expanded by the early 2010s. The peak of Sakai was around in 2010 in North American and Europe, and it has steadily declined since then, with just a handful of new implementations since 2014.

Sakai has had a greater impact on the LMS market than just its market share numbers suggest, however, as the project (and key people involved in Sakai) were major inspirations and contributors to open standards acceptance. In a way, you can thank Sakai for the wide usage of 1EdTech (the artist formerly known as IMS Global) and its Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standards.More recently in the US, there has been a broad flight from Sakai, with NYU, University of Rhode Island, Indiana University, Wake Forest University, UNC, Rutgers University and many others migrating, usually to Canvas and secondarily to Brightspace.

From the US to Spain

The system is not gone, however, and one of the reasons that Sakai continues today and even spends marketing dollars at Educause (see previous newsletter) is that the center of community development has shifted from the US to Spain. There is a group of Spanish Universities that informally have organized as S2U (Spain Sakai Users). S2U is largely funded by European Union funds as part of Plan Uni-Digital but with member institutions contributing additional funds based on their specific needs. Consider the historical market share chart filtered down to just Spain. Only Moodle and Anthology (Bb) Learn have a greater market share, although you can see Canvas in red quickly approaching Sakai's level.

In the US, the center of the Sakai community appears to be on Longsight, a hosting and services provider, and secondarily with Unicon with similar services.

Overview of Conference

[You referenced conference notes, Phil. What about the, you know, conference?]The Sakai Virtual Conference was held online today, with just under 100 attendees - mostly with those in the development community, both at institutions and at corporate support. The conference was held on a Sakai instance hosted by Longsight, which might have been a low cost option but did not make for an easy-to-navigate conference experience. Too many clicks to launch the Big Blue Button virtual sessions, and you had to go back to Sakai to find the next session and launch the next session.This observation captures the challenge of Sakai - the small community and lack of focus on usability leads to the existence of features but a meh experience relying on too many clicks.

Roadmap

The feature session was a presentation of developments from Spain's S2U, listing their ongoing development work:

The Office 365 priority is really about video conference integration with Microsoft Stream, including the sharing of users and groups between platforms. Yes, the updated version associated with Sharepoint and Teams and OneDrive. Additional development is based on rubrics, assignments, and grade books, etc.

To get a sense of just how much Sakai has moved to Spain in terms of development, the session on product roadmap was framed as "how do we complement the work done by our colleagues in Spain?"

SakaiPlus

One reason for the renewed marketing of Sakai seems associated with the new SakaiPlus initiative led by Sakai's previous leader Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck).

The basic idea is that you do not need to fully adopt all LTI Advantage standards for a full LMS. SakaiPlus creates a teaching platform that sits on top of existing LMSs and relies on the base LMS for overall infrastructure such as SIS integration. You don't need to replace Canvas or Brightspace or Moodle, just use Sakai on top of them and take advantage of our tools. You know, that old chestnut.

Overall

I hope this context and description of the Sakai conference is useful, at least from a historical perspective and update on what's happening, if not from an competitive LMS evaluation perspective.