[Using Sakai] LMS evaluations & comparisions?

[Charles Severance]

On Oct 30, 2012, at 4:37 AM, Gregory Guthrie wrote:

> Very interesting and good inputs and replies - thanks.

I agree - Scott's reply was blog-post-worthy.

> So it seems then that it is clear that Sakai is better?!  :-)

No - Sakai is not better for all schools.  Scott's main point is that it is less about features and more about matching organizational culture to the product culture.  Sakai has about a 2.5% market share world-wide - smaller than Desire2Learn, Balckboard Learn, Moodle, or Canvas.  I think that a 2.5% market share for Sakai is perfect.  Open source is not about increasing market share at all costs.

I like to think that the schools that are willing to invest significant their time, energy, and passion in evolving a teaching and learning environment choose Sakai.  Those who want someone else to make all the decisions - choose something other than Sakai. 

Of course with companies like LongSight, rSmart and others (http://www.sakaiproject.org/node/2338) - you can have some of both worlds by hiring someone to guide you thorough your Sakai experience.

> I agree with the view that feature/by/feature comparisons are not so useful, especially in an ever evolving area like this, where features are always co-evolving among different systems. Of course this makes an institutional decision more difficult, and less quantitative.

Indeed far less quantitative.  The commercial products in the marketplace have been formed by the pressure of "qualitative" RFQ processes.   As a teacher, I think this process harms those products that design themselves to simply win in the "war of the checkboxes".   Because schools vainly search for a numeric rating, companies decide that faculty and student experience is less important than tons of features.   The resulting LMS systems look like piles of features in many ways and overwhelm the users.

For me one of the purposes of Sakai in the marketplace is to provide an alternative that is only focused on the teaching / learning user experience and by being a competitor - make the other products better.  If you step back, you can see a lot of Sakai 2.8 UI influence in Canvas - and the SP10 release of Blackboard is starting to look a lot more like Sakai 2.9 (I would say that means that the Learn UI is improving :) ).

So for some schools, Sakai is the right choice because of culture.  And for other schools, the existence of Sakai makes whatever other product you choose better.

This is why in the 2005/2006 time period nearly 40 (out of 120) schools financially supported the Sakai Foundation even though they *never* installed the product on their campuses.   It was cheap insurance to keep their chosen LMS vendor honest.  Sadly schools no longer make this investment - they assume that someone else will pay to keep Sakai active in the marketplace.  Classic tragedy of the commons.

So if you choose an LMS other than Sakai - perhaps you should still make a contribution Sakai Foundation to thank us for making that product better :)

> I thought that Scott's comments really seem to indicate that a choice doesn't matter (unless I missed something), as either Moodle/Canvas/Sakai as three main candidates all have both paths open that he describes, open source and modification, or subscription to a commercial service.

I will avoid this unless we are talking personally at a bar.because upon this subject, I can become very loud.  The open source models for Sakai, Moodle, and Canvas are *VERY VERY* different.  Don't fall into the trap to think that all "open source" is the same just because they show you their source code.  And I will stop there.

> It is interesting that edX and courser are not building on any of these existing big installed base systems, I wonder what new sorts of features they will create and introduce, and how that will drive the evolution of current mainstream LMS systems.

The problem is that the Sakai architecture is based on Java and relational databases.   Sakai can scale to 200,000+ users with the investment of significant hardware.   EdX and Coursera need to be able to handle more than 150,000 users in a single course.

I will probably be submitting a presentation to the Sakai / Jasig conference this summer that examines the architectures of these systems (Stanford's Class2Go in particular) and show how they technically support such high levels of student activity.

And if you look closely at Coursera and Stanford's Class2Go - some elements of the user interface were clearly influenced by Sakai - both products were written by Stanford students who likely had some exposure to Sakai.   Of course most of the UI of these systems is quite different from Sakai because of the need to reduce the need to have the teacher at the center of the interactive learning elements.

/Chuck

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