Colleges are keen to support Sakai, the open-source course-management system that has emerged as an alternative to Blackboard. But the software has been plagued by “fairly serious usability problems,” says e-Literate, and attempts to fix them have been “sporadic and fragile.”
Now there’s reason to be optimistic, e-Literate says: The nonprofit Sakai Foundation, which oversees the software’s development, is jump-starting a project intended to make Sakai more user-friendly. The project was devised this year but was put on hold while the foundation searched for a new executive director.
Michael Korcuska has now filled that slot, and the initiative, which is to last for six months, is back on track. Five institutions — Charles Sturt University, in Australia; Indiana University at Bloomington; The John Hopkins University; the University of Cambridge, in England; and Yale University — are expected to participate. —Brock Read
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