News / Events

In recent months the South African Sakai Community has witnessed a number of exciting events.

The most notable event for 2011 -thus far- has been the adoption of Sakai by the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg.

According to a press release by Wits, Wits has been looking for an open source, interoperable, enterprise ready platform that facilitates teaching, research and academic collaboration. The university has recently adopted Sakai as the official platform to provide students, faculty, staff and guests with new teaching, learning and collaboration opportunities. Sakai was selected as the platform as it offered an integrated, functionally rich and robust environment that was also responsive to the collaborative teaching, learning and research needs of its user community. eLSI (eLearning Support and Innovation), the unit charged with implementing Sakai, are now in the process of inviting the campus community to assist them configure and adapt the new environment to meet Wits specific e-learning needs. Wits anticipate that Sakai will be used by staff and students on campus to create a supportive environment that will promote rapid knowledge exchange -irrespective of time and distance and dependent only on access to people and institutional networks.

In light of Wits decision and the fact that the last Sakai Programmer’s Café in South Africa took place in April 2007, it was decided to arrange a Bootcamp for Developers. The reaction was overwhelming and eventually two Bootcamps – one in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town -were held in August 2011. These covered Sakai Developer training, Systems Administration and Sakai Core Function training. In combination the Bootcamps attracted 43 attendants on average daily from 9 institutions. The trainers were all South African.

Other adopters of Sakai in South Africa are effectively using and enhancing their Sakai environments – UNISA has assisted more then 1,2 million students in 2011 through their Sakai Implementation, myUnisa; whilst North West University is planning a new release of Sakai Solo (offline Sakai), introducing the capabilities HTML5. UCT, through their active involvement in the global community, remains central to the South African Sakai community. Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) is on everyone’s agenda as many of the aforementioned institutions are mapping out their path towards OAE.

A number of smaller local institutions are leveraging off the community and using Sakai to their advantage: Cornerstone Institute (Private Education), Democratic Alliance (Political Party), Gert Sibande College (Further Education and Training College) and Quirk Education (Private Marketing Company).