Wednesday, 27 May 2009

Sakai: What this teaching tool does

Developing with Moodle as I do in my day job I get to see how useful these learning management systems are becoming. I also see the limitations that are inherent in their specific design. Just like any product or company, software always has strengths and weakness. 

For some reason I decided to have a look at the opposition. I'd always known they were there but hadn't bothered. Well today I checked out Sakai and was very pleasantly surprised. I read a short wikipedia page, briefly checked out the website but in truth I wanted to see Sakai in action. I know how moodle works and it does the job well. So I wanted to see how it compares to Moodle. 

Funny thing is I didn't find a video showing it working but what I did find got me very interested in the tool and I thought it was worth sharing. Mainly it's the idea that Sakai is built with programming interfaces in mind from the bottom up and built to scale from its heart. Unfortunately this is something Moodle lacks and can become quite a problem at times. Whether this is the case in practice I'm yet to find out but I'm certainly interested and  inspired by what I saw. 

I also like the concept of community development they use and that collaboration and teamwork is built into the core of the application



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