Powerful and flexible support for research and teaching, built by universities around the world
An international collaboration bringing together some of the world’s top Universities, the Sakai project is revolutionising the way in which Universities build and buy their software. Leading Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Berkeley, Australia National University and many, many others, have recognised the needs they have in common – to support world-class research, learning and teaching – as well as their differences, and for the last four years have been developing software that they can all use. One of the greatest innovations of Sakai is to recognise that at our research Universities, research and teaching march hand-in-hand, and so the same tools can be used for both teaching and research.
Sakai has taken shape as a software suite ready for any University to customise it, adding in precisely the tools that meet their members’ needs. At Cambridge, the Sakai software is best known as our customised version, CamTools (although we host other Sakai installations too). From the University of Cape Town, we’ve borrowed a plagiarism detection module; from the Universidad Fernando Pessoa in Portugal a tool to allow lecturers to check how often students are downloading their lecture handouts. “We’ve found it inspiring to see so many Universities freely exchanging the tools they’ve developed,” said CARET’s Harriet Truscott, one of the team responsible for customising Sakai for Cambridge’s needs. “This type of collaborative software can cut costs substantially, but the world of new teaching ideas it’s opened up to us is perhaps even more important.”
Cambridge is actively driving development of the latest parts of Sakai, in both the “K2” project to deliver a new back end engine for Sakai, and also the Sakai 3 user experience which includes social networking and more. With the re-election of our director, John Norman, to the Sakai Foundation Board, we look forward to continuing to push forward the boundaries of collaboration and learning systems for higher education within the Sakai community.
