Apereo Foundation Announces Availability of Sakai 10

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - July 8, 2014 - PRLog -- TheApereo Foundation, a non-profit organization which sponsors a range of open source projects and software communities serving higher education, today announced the availability of Sakai 10. Sakai is an open source learning management system that provides a flexible and feature-rich environment for teaching, learning, research, and other collaboration.  Sakai 10 features two new tool contributions to Sakai core, better support for audio and video using HTML 5, infrastructure improvements, about 50 security fixes, performance improvements, and a number of new features. Extensive documentation is maintained and continuously updated. The community went to great lengths to guarantee the quality of the software through rigorous testing and the application of close to 2,000 fixes.

“Sakai 10 is the most innovative Sakai release to date, with dozens of contributing institutions and organizations to thank for that,” said Chuck Severance, Chair of the Sakai Project Management Committee and faculty member at University of Michigan. “Sakai 10 is a major milestone release that boasts a wide variety of new features and capabilities.”

Highlights from this new Sakai release include:

  Sign up for events with Yale’s Signup tool – new to Sakai 10 core

  Delegate administrative rights to those who need them with the Delegated Access tool— new to Sakai 10 core

  Incorporate advanced services into Sakai 10, the first LMS to support the latest Learning Tools Interoperability standard (LTI 2.0)

  New in Assignments:  peer grading and group assignments

  With the addition of two new question types and improvements to the audio recording question type, Tests & Quizzes supports over a dozen question types including better support for math, medicine, and languages

  Sequence content in any format more easily with improvements to the Lessons tool

  Drag-and-drop files into your courses through your web browser

  Allow students to create content owned by both groups as well as individuals

  Use cutting edge features in the new Syllabus tool – edit in place, calendar integration, bulk changes

  Manage extra credit in the Sakai 10 Gradebook

  Higher level of integration for the Student Success Plan, open source software to help students overcome obstacles and meet their academic goals.

  Performance and reliability gains using well-known and open industry standards

  See the complete list in the Sakai wiki pages

  Download Sakai Here

Over 40 institutions and organizations contributed to the development of Sakai 10, including Columbia University, Duke University, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, University of Oxford, and Yale University. Apereo Commercial Affiliate contributors include AsahiNet International, Longsight, and Unicon. For a complete contributor list click here.

“Apereo is proud to announce the general availability of Sakai 10,” said Ian Dolphin, Executive Director of the Apereo Foundation. “Sakai 10 will encourage increased collaboration and enhance the online learning experience at institutions and organizations across the globe.

As an open source software suite developed by its adopter community, Sakai continually evolves in step with the needs of the students, faculty members, and organizations it serves. Planning for Sakai 11 is currently underway. Colleges, universities, governments, and other organizations deploy Sakai’s rich toolset to expand the possibilities for technology-enabled learning across many facets of the educational experience. Sakai is mature technology, the product of many thousands of person-hours of development over the last ten years. To learn more about Sakai visit http://sakaiproject.org/.

About Apereo

The Apereo Foundation was formed by the merger of Jasig and the Sakai Foundation in late December 2012. Sakai and Jasig had pioneered the production and adoption of open source software for higher education for over ten years. Apereo will take that work further, providing a more rational and improved organizational umbrella for a range of projects and software communities serving higher education. The core mission of the Foundation is to "assist and facilitate educational organizations which collaborate to foster, develop, and sustain open technologies and innovation to support learning, teaching, and research.” Learn more at www.apereo.org.