Committee chooses Sakai over WebCT

The way students interact with their courses online at Tech is changing, with WebCT soon being dropped in favor of a new open-source course tools system called Sakai. It will begin a pilot run in the summer and begin full implementation in the fall.

"It will be a change so people will have to get acclimated to a new system, but I think it offers great potential and I'm really excited," said Donna Llewellyn, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL). "People always want to collaborate online, and this provides a really nice platform. It has discussion forums, chats, wikis, email, as well as course management tools, so I'm hoping the campus likes it."

Tech's license for the Campus Edition of WebCT, which was part of a University System-wide contract through the Board of Regents, is set to expire in December 2007, necessitating a search to find a replacement. The decision came down to Sakai and WebCT's upgraded Vista edition.

"We got an extension to stay on the WebCT Campus Edition while we evaluated what we were doing," Llewellyn said. "We had a committee that evaluated over the summer whether or not to go with Vista, and since we're already paying for WebCT we didn't want to go with another licensed, proprietary solution because they're all pretty much the same. There's really only one other large open source solution, called Moodle, but we decided it wasn't ready."

"All accounts are that Vista is not user friendly and not stable, so the decision was to go with the open source solution Sakai," she said. When the license expires in December, WebCT will cease to be available for live teaching, though it will be archived for a period of time, according to Llewellyn.

Sakai was developed in a collaboration that included Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and Stanford University. It was launched in 2004 with its first funding coming from a 2.4 million dollar grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Many other schools, including the University of California, Berkeley, Virginia Tech and Yale University, are already running Sakai, and more are in the process of rolling out their implementations.

As an open source project, its source code can be freely reviewed and modified in response to specific needs and user requests.

"We no longer have to go to a vendor and be held over a barrel. We can hire programmers and make it work for us. It's definitely an advantage that we can make it fit what we need," Llewellyn said.

"The problem is that WebCT is not very user friendly for some things. It had very sophisticated tools for online quizzing and homework, but for collaboration it was sort of clunky so people would often turn to things like Buzzport," Llewellyn said.

Although Sakai costs nothing to use, most of the schools that currently use it or are planning to use it, including Tech, belong to the Sakai Partners Program which costs 10,000 dollars per year and gives support to the nonprofit Sakai Foundation that coordinates the project.

CETL's contest to give a name to Tech's WebCT replacement recently attracted 830 entries, out of which the winning entry will be announced on February 15 and an iPod awarded to its submitter. Llewellyn suggested the system will be referred to by the winning entry and labeled as "powered by Sakai", as is the case at most of the peer institutions currently using Sakai.

"We'll use the contest winner or some variation of it. We didn't promise to use it in case there's copyright infringement, or we find out that it means something we don't want it to mean," Llewellyn said .

Sakai is named after the Japanese "Iron Chef" Hiroyuki Sakai, so chosen because the project's original inspiration was the University of Michigan's CompreHensive collaborativE Framework (CHEF).

Sakai and WebCT's parent company, Blackboard, is currently involved in a dispute with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which issued a patent to Blackboard in January 2006 for an "Internet-based education support system and methods." This month, Blackboard pledged not to enforce the patent against open-source systems.