Sakai!

July 15, 2004 8:22 AM

The Sakai Project, an open-source course-management software program for educational institutions is being publicly released today. Backed by the University of Michigan, Indiana University at Bloomington, MIT, and Stanford, Sakai hopes to free Universities from commercial products, which have reportedly become increasingly expensive. Here's a nice little write-up from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
posted by Ufez Jones (8 comments total)

From the Chronicle article:
the Sakai Project, named for a chef on a popular cable-television cooking show ...

Awesome. The Delacroix of French cooking, coming soon to an online gradebook near you.
posted by gleuschk at 9:22 AM on July 15, 2004

Also: here's a PowerPoint slideshow that explains the name, referring to Hiroyuki Sakai and drawing comparisons with certain kanji characters.
posted by gleuschk at 9:29 AM on July 15, 2004

Michiba could kick his ass.
posted by Foosnark at 9:29 AM on July 15, 2004

Foosnark:

Heh-heh!
posted by jpburns at 9:32 AM on July 15, 2004

this could be the posterchild for what open source software is good for, a pissed off market gets together and creates its own freely-available competitor. I wonder if anyone is going to use this though, blackboard is so entrenched in a lot of schools.
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 9:43 AM on July 15, 2004

bah! I worked on an in-house course system at UCLA from 1997-2000, and it was GPL'd around 2001. The project started as a way to build a small companion site for a course with a syllabus, forum, and calendar, and eventually blossomed when the chancellor of the university decreed that all courses at UCLA would one day have a website. We got a cover story in the Chronicle of Ed back in 1999 or so, since it was a good David vs. Goliath story of one small computer group vs. the WebCT and Blackboard corporations.

I'm curious if Sakai is built off any of Classweb's GPL'd code.
posted by mathowie at 10:03 AM on July 15, 2004

GPL'd?
posted by jacobsee at 11:06 AM on July 15, 2004

oh
posted by jacobsee at 11:07 AM on July 15, 2004