Sakai (software)

Sakai is a free, community source, educational software platform designed to support teaching, research and collaboration. Systems of this type are also known as Course Management Systems (CMS), Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). Sakai is developed by a community of academic institutions, commercial organizations and individuals. It is distributed under the Educational Community License (a type of open source license).

Version 1.0 was released in March 2005.

Sakai is used by hundreds of institutions, mainly in the US, but also in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Sakai was designed to be scalable, reliable, interoperable and extensible. Its largest installations handle over 100,000 users.

Sakai is developed as open source software as a community effort, stewarded by the Apereo Foundation, a member-based, non-profit corporation. The Foundation fosters use and development of Sakai in the same open, community-based fashion in which it was created. It encourages community building between individuals, academic institutions, non-profits and commercial organizations and provides its members with an institutional framework for their projects. It works to promote the wider adoption of community-source and open standards approaches to software solutions within the education and research communities. It organizes the yearly Open Apereo Conference. Additional, regional conferences have taken place in China, Japan, Australia, Europe and South Africa, and there is an annual Sakai Virtual Conference. Members include universities, colleges, other institutions and commercial affiliates that provide support. While members take care of most of the development and support in practice, joining the Foundation is not required to use the software or participate in the community.

The development of Sakai was originally funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation as the Sakai Project. The early versions were based on existing tools created by the founding institutions, with the largest piece coming from the University of Michigan's CHEF course management system. Sakai is a play on the word chef and refers to Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai.