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Sakai is a higher education community project to develop and support a new Collaboration and Learning Environment. The Sakai system is a potential alternative to Course management software such as Blackboard and WebCT. However it has somewhat broader goals. It is intended to facilitate collaboration in research, administration, and service, as well as in courses.
Sakai can be used for courses, research projects, student clubs, or any other group that has information that they want to share, and that wants to use communications tools such as mailing lists, chats, and discussions.
Sakai has special facilities for courses. For example, Sakai has access to the official course rosters. Faculty with appropriate authorization can set up a Sakai site so that it includes everyone on the roster of one or more courses. Course photo rosters will be visible from these sites.
Sakai is open-source software, being developed by large group of universities. More information about this project is available at the Sakai Project Site.
Rutgers is current running Sakai in parallel with commercial course management software. For the Fall of 2007 we are decommissioning WebCT, a commercial system that has been run in New Brunswick and Camden. Users have the option of moving to Sakai or eCollege, a system run by Continous Education. See WebCT to Sakai Conversion Tools for more information about conversion to Sakai.