[Using Sakai] LMS evaluations & comparisions?

[Scott Siddall]

It’s good to have data so here’s more:    Sakai has 6-7% of the US higher
ed market according to the Campus Computing Survey.   The data were
gathered from about 500 US institutions of higher ed who chose to
participate.



                Scott





*From:* sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:
sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] *On Behalf Of *Charles Severance
*Sent:* Tuesday, October 30, 2012 12:20 AM
*To:* sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
*Cc:* Gregory Guthrie
*Subject:* Re: [Using Sakai] LMS evaluations & comparisions?





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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