Product Review of Sakai

Sakai is a global community created with a mission to enhance teaching, learning, and research. All this is achieved by the community combining knowledge and resources in support of a goal aligned with the users’ academic needs. Members of this community dedicate their time and resources to these goals by designing and improving the software. They also collaborate on projects and take advantage of the relationships that result from this work. However, sometimes, it can be difficult to find the right entry point into the community, but they believe each new participant brings knowledge and perspective that benefits the community at large.
Website: https://www.sakailms.org/
What Users Love About the App
“Easy to submit assignments, view grades, and take assessments. Professors, not always tech-oriented, still find a way to communicate resources effectively with Sakai.”
“Sakai is really easy to use. All of the tabs are well labeled and it’s really easy to find everything you need to. I also love that you can see the roster for every class. This makes it really easy to collaborate with classmates!”
“You can choose to receive emails when assignments are added, announcements are made, changes are made, etc. This is very beneficial for someone who doesn’t want to constantly be logging into Sakai.”
“I love that you can use Sakai on the computer or mobile phone. I would quite frequently use my phone and everything worked great!”
“The software design is simple and minimalist which helps with navigating Sakai. It is also nice to have an auto-save feature for saving drafts.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“The only thing is that under “Gradebook” you cannot see your overall grade and there’s no way to automatically calculate it. You have to pass up everything yourself to see what grade you have in the class.”
“There are times when the software loads pages with errors when it times out, but it is not always clear that you need to log back in to restore the connection to the page.”
“The options are not clear at all. Nothing is self explanatory, I have had senior learners struggling with it the most as the courses do not show up automatically in the home page after signing up.”
“This platform has some quirks – Poor app layout – Basic in functionality – Boring design.”
“There seemed to be less functionality out of the box than other CMS packages. Much of the interface is dated, so the UI takes more clicks to do something than you’d expect out of a modern software package.”