Sakai Foundation

Release Date: 29 January 2010

The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce the latest maintenance release for Sakai 2.6.x and 2.5.x.

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The Sakai 2.6.2 maintenance release provides a set of bug fixes that improve upon the Sakai 2.6.1 release. Over 80 issues have been addressed by 2.6.2.

Early this year, Jasig, the parent organization for uPortal, CAS, Bedework and other open source software serving higher education, and the Sakai Foundation, which supports the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, formed Board-level groups to examine ways the two organizations could collaborate more closely. These Strategic Alliance Committees, led by Jasig Chair Aaron Godert, and Sakai Foundation Chair Josh Baron, met in New York in September to consolidate the outcomes of their discussions and bring proposals to their respective Boards.

I am very pleased to announce that Alan Marks will join the Sakai Foundation staff as project director for the Sakai 3 project. Alan’s hire is an important milestone for the project and for our community.

Alliance to Support Exceptional Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning

Richmond, Virginia, U.S. – June 9, 2010 – SoftChalk, LLC, a leading developer of content authoring software for eLearning, and the Sakai Project, an educational community renowned for innovation in open teaching, learning and research software, today announced an integration and collaboration partnership. SoftChalk has become a member of the Sakai Foundation and introduced integration between the SoftChalk authoring solution and the Sakai Learning Management System.

Economies of scale was a critical reason to start the Sakai project. Several universities working together on software development could produce a final product much less expensively than each of us working on our own. (And, of course, build the software we wanted to use.) Because we could eliminate redundancy, aggregate costs would be lower, and the cost to each university would also be lower. This equation paid off for Stanford. We developed about 20% of the original Sakai code base, which meant that we received 80% of the product in return.

American Public University System (APUS) announced today that it has chosen Sakai as the foundation for its new Learning Management System (LMS). [press release]

A .zip file with Keynote, PowerPoint, and NeoOffice versions of slide templates for the 2010 Sakai Conference in Denver are available for download <2010SakaiConferenceSlideTemplates.zip>.

Join your peers and neighbors on Friday, April 2 to learn more about how California institutions are using Sakai, the open-source collaboration and learning environment. Hosted on the UC Davis campus, this open, no-cost forum will give you a chance to meet a wide variety of people in the Sakai community, including longtime members and newcomers. Ask questions, share best practices, compare technologies and pedagogies, and leverage the benefits of this vibrant open source community.

Lance Speelmon, Sakai Foundation's Scholarly Technologist, has posted videos recordings of his and Lois Brooks, Sakai Foundation's interim Executive Director's presentations given at the 3rd Annual Ja-Sakai conference in Kumamoto Japan 2010.

The Sakai Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization, seeks a visionary leader to serve as Executive Director.   From its inception in January 2004 to the present day, the Sakai Foundation has led the community-based development of an open source Collaboration and Learning Environment designed to meet the needs of higher education.  With nearly 100 academic and corporate members, and over 200 institutional deployments on six continents, the Sakai community is robust, global and growing.