Late 2019 Software Community Health Metrics - Sakai

Late 2019 Software Community Health Metrics - Sakai​

Status: Graduated

Background and Objectives:

Sakai is a freely available, feature-rich, learning management solution built by higher education for higher education, and used by a diverse and global adopter community. Sakai provides a wealth of powerful, flexible tools that enable great teaching, compelling learning, and dynamic collaboration. Thanks to Sakai’s responsive design, instructors and students can achieve their academic goals no matter where they are or what device they use.

Sakai’s breadth of features means you can choose the tools that meet your needs. Out of the box, Sakai includes all of the standard online learning, teaching, and collaboration tools found in modern learning platforms. In addition, Sakai has a wide range of community contributed tools and external integrations available as add-on components. Sakai’s open source flexibility allows you to configure or customize the system as much or as little as needed.

New Technology/ies since last report

Statistics

Context:

Each year, Sakai typically has between 1000 and 2000 commits from over 40 developers updating its 1.4-million-line code base.

Sakai has approximately 300 institutional adopters worldwide - the exact number of institutions using Sakai is unknown, since Sakai is free to download without registration and has no mechanism to “call home” to let us know it is being used.

2019 Sakai Highlights:

SakaiCamp strategic planning retreat held in Orlando, FL on January 27-30, 2019

The Sakai Manifesto was revised and updated at SakaiCamp 2019.

• Sakai 19.3 - release date 11 October, 2019, more information at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/19.3/
• Sakai 19.2 - release date 26 July, 2019, more information at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/19.2/
• Sakai 19.1 - release date 24 May, 2019, more information at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/19.1/
• Sakai 19.0 - release date 21 March, 2019, more information at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/19.0/
• Sakai 12.7 - release date 11 November, 2019, more information at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/12.7
• Sakai 12.6 - release date 5 March, 2019, more information at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/12.6      
• Sakai 11.x reached support status EOL (end of life) in March 2019

Sakai Virtual Conference was held online Nov. 6, 2018. There were approximately 200 attendees at this event, raising more than $11,000 USD in funding to be used for future Sakai Development. Recordings of the 30 presentations are available on the Sakai YouTube Channel.

Throughout 2019, the Sakai Marketing Working Group continued to add new content to the Sakai.LMS.org blog, partner with Pepperdine to film and edit several instructor testimonial videos about using Sakai, and communicate to the community the availability of new and updated market data and reports previously licensed from an independent research firm. Also, a report on Open Source Community Health Factors was commissioned.

The Accessibility Working Group began working with an independent accessibility consultant to do a systematic review of Sakai and to write an updated VPAT for the current version. The VPAT for Sakai 19 is targeted to be published by the end of Dec. 2019, and accessibility testing on Sakai 20 will begin immediately after publication.

The UX Working Group completed the initial UI Inventory as part of the SWITCH project and made a series of recommendations for changes to promote consistency across the platform. Work is ongoing to develop a living style guide which will contain current and future recommendations for all of the styling elements to be used for development.

Future Plans

The Sakai Community is currently in the process of updating the three-year strategic road map for years 2021 through 2023. As with the prior version, the purpose of the road map is to steer the ongoing, energetic, rapid innovation that is the hallmark of the Sakai LMS. This updated plan builds upon Sakai’s track record of market leadership in higher education, as evidenced by independent survey research and market data. It prioritizes the development of teaching technologies that increase design flexibility for faculty and enable greater learning outcomes for students.    

The Roadmap: Annual Areas of Focus

• 2021: Lessons 2.0, Cloud storage, Date Wizard, UVA Site Builder, Evaluations replacement, Document annotation within new grading UI, Analytics

• 2022: Notifications 2.0, Forums 2.0, New mobile-first UI
• 2023: Achievements service, Tests & Quizzes 2.0

The above focus areas are still being revised and refined. The road map will be finalized and presented for community approval and adoption in January 2020. 

List Commercial Support:
Beijing Open-Mindedness Technology Co., Ltd.
Entornos de Formacion
Learning Experiences
Longsight
MPL
OpenCollab
Unicon