Sakai Project

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The Sakai Project is developing open-source or community-source educational software. The project name is in reference to Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai. Originally funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Sakai Project's aim is to create a unique course management system that both competes with and complements commercial systems such as ANGEL Learning, WebCT and Blackboard. The early versions of the project were based on existing tools created by the founding institutions, with the largest piece coming from the University of Michigan's "CHEF" course management system.

The original institutions started meeting in February 2004. Each institution had built a custom course management system:

Indiana University: Oncourse
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Stellar
Stanford University: CourseWorks
University of Michigan: CourseTools, based on the CHEF framework
UPortal and the Open Knowledge Initiative were also represented.

Once the first version of Sakai went public, the original five institutions invited other institutions to join through the "Sakai Partners Program". The partner institutions contribute to the program financially and by submitting code to the project. The number of education institutions involved is now over 70.

Beginning in 2005, the Sakai Project began the process of setting up a foundation to oversee the continued work on the Sakai Project, and in 2006 named Dr. Charles Severance as the director of the Foundation.

[edit] Software features

The Sakai software includes many of the features common to course management systems, including document distribution, a gradebook, discussion, live chat, assignment uploads, and online testing.

In addition to the course management features, Sakai is intended as a collaborative tool for research and group projects. To support this function, Sakai includes the ability to change the settings of all the tools based on roles, changing what the system permits different users to do with each tool. It also includes a wiki, mailing list distribution and archiving, and an RSS reader.