Yes. In fact Sakai is the number one rated Learning Management System (LMS) in the world. Don’t take our word for it; the independent Software Reviews ranked it at the top overall, giving it their Category Champion award as well as ranking it at the top in such categories as Breadth of Features, support for Student Collaboration, overall Online Learning, Product Strategy and Improvement, and Usability and Intuitiveness.
Sakai beat out such competitors as Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, and D2L Brightspace.
On top of that, Sakai is the LMS of choice by many well known universities: Duke, Notre Dame, New York University, Columbia, University of Virginia, and Pepperdine to name a few. The largest implementation of Sakai is at the University of South Africa in Capetown where it is used by more than 280,000 students.
Sakai is completely open source, which means you could download it, install it, and run it completely on your own. However, most organizations find they don’t have the technical skills or resources to do that. Running Sakai on your own would mean purchasing and maintaining servers, keeping the operating system and database up to date, applying patches and upgrades to Sakai, as well as being an expert both in the Sakai codebase and its operation for teaching and learning.
That’s where the LAMP Learning Consortium comes in. We take care of the technical details so that you can focus on teaching and learning. Our goal is to make the details of running and maintaining the technology as invisible as possible so that you can do what you love: reaching learners.
Yes. At the Curriculum and Enterprise levels we will build a “skin” for your courses that features your branding, your logo, and your color scheme. Your courses will be clearly identifiable as belonging to your organization.
Yes. Sakai follows the latest protocols for security. In addition, since our instance of Sakai is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), all of the incredible security that is part of AWS applies to the LAMP instance of Sakai.
Sakai places a high priority on accessibility. An accessibility working group meets regularly and identifies accessibility improvements that are quickly fixed by developers.
You’re not going to believe this: Sakai was named after a Japanese chef.
Initially there were four institutions that collaborated to create Sakai: MIT, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Indiana University. Each was replacing a home-grown LMS with a new open-source tool (what eventually became Sakai). The product that the University of Michigan was replacing was known by the acronym “CHEF.” One of the lead developers suggested, tongue in cheek, that the product should be named after the winner of the Iron Chef competition. The winner the year was Hiroyuki Sakai.
It is really true: Sakai was named after a Japanese chef. And, by the way, because Sakai is a name, not an acronym, it is not written in all capitals.
