Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment

In order to remain competitive, institutions must continue to deliver innovative approaches to teaching and learning.  Limited resources and shrinking budgets are quickly putting proprietary software options out of reach.  This dilemma has caused institutions to come together and create open source solutions for higher education, such as the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment.

What is Sakai?

Built by higher education for higher education, Sakai is an online collaboration and learning environment that provides a framework and pluggable tool modules for managing, delivering, and assessing student learning.  It is designed to bring students and instructors together for knowledge sharing, discussion, and shared learning.  Users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, and research collaboration.  Visit sakaiproject.org to learn more about the tools and features that make up Sakai.

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Learn about the 10th Annual Sakai Conference, in Boston, Massachusetts July 8th-10th, 2009.

Sakai's Development Model

The Sakai project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education.  Sakai's development model is called "community source" because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the "community" of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai.  Originally funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Sakai Project both competes with and complements commercial systems.

History of Sakai

Named after Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai, the Sakai Project began in January 2004 as a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford. These institutions joined forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools.  What resulted is a community-source model that relies on the interplay between academic institutions, commercial enterprises and individuals to ensure sustainability and stimulate and advance software development and distribution. Today the Sakai project is run by the Sakai Foundation: a vibrant and growing community of more than 100 members representing universities, colleges, and institutions worldwide.  Since its inception, the Sakai community has successfully achieved multiple releases and hundreds of enterprise production deployments.