The Apereo Foundation is committed to aiding educational organizations that collaborate to promote, cultivate, and maintain open technologies and innovation for enhancing learning, teaching, and research. It gives an organizational structure for open source software projects and communities in higher education. Established in 2012, Apereo is a 501(c)3 charitable non-profit organization which emerged from the fusion of Jasig, Inc and the Sakai Foundation, both of which shared equivalent goals and communities.
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What I liked about Sakai was that it is open source and therefore easily customizable. Most of the spaces that were meant for group project collaboration were adequate to support file exchange, and the team members could communicate with each other.
In terms of basic functionality, Sakai provides me with a fairly wide array of functions as a higher education LMS. The gradebook functionality also provided a convenient source of course readings as well as assignments for the students.
This is an OpenSource solution, created by education for education. Through active community membership and collaboration with our commercial affiliate, as a small-scale institution we still have high level of influence on the product/product road map and features available. Though OpenSource, the product is developed in a properly governed manner by the Apereo board (umbrella organization).
Grading on the weighted scale was tedious and to export the data for analysis was quite hard. We also had a number of challenges in terms of integrating Sakai with other systems that we consider critical, including our student information system.
Some elements of the design could be confusing switching from one part of a course to another, so the overall structure is not very clear. This usually causes inconvenience for both the instructors and the students, making the learning process less effective.
Sometimes 'older' features are not using the same User Interface yet as the newer features. This is something high on the priority list of the community/developers though.