Serendipity35

Sakai is a course management system originally developed using grant money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the University of Michigan and Indiana University. MIT and Stanford later joined along with the Open Knowledge Initiaitive (OKI) and the uPortal consoritum (a free portal used at some universities) to form The Sakai Project in January 2004.

Though Sakai is often called a CMS (course management system), the Sakai Project mission is listed as " to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education" and also to "deliver the Sakai application framework and associated CMS tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course management, and, as an augmentation of the original CMS model, they also support research collaboration. The software is being designed to be competitive with the best CMSs available."

As of now, they are in their third version (1.0, 1.5 and version 2.1.2 in April 2006). They list more than 65 universities around the world.

The tools and features in Sakai include: Announcements, Assignments, Chat Room, Discussion, Drop Box, Email Archive, Help, My Workspace, News, Quiz and Test, Resources, Schedule, Syllabus, and WebDAV.

Rutgers University's Sakai Pilot Project (version 2.1.1) includes more than 75 faculty members and they expect more than 6000 students from the university and collaborating institutions to participate. They are also looking at both research and administrative uses of Sakai. Like other schools, Rutgers will continue to use WebCT and Blackboard during the pilot and assessment phases of the project and for the foreseeable future.