Posted by andy Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:49:00 GMT

Sakai is a Learning Management System that provides features for students to interact with their professors and their universities on the Web. Why is Sakai important?
  • It’s the best example that we have seen of a community coming together to build an industry-specific application.
  • The community has generated real …

Sakai is a Learning Management System that provides features for students to interact with their professors and their universities on the Web.

Why is Sakai important?

It’s the best example that we have seen of a community coming together to build an industry-specific application.

The community has generated real enthusiasm at both the institutional and individual level. More than 80 dues-paying universities have joined the Sakai foundation, and 400 individuals showed up at the last Sakai conference. More than $5M has been committed to Sakai development so far.

* It’s a category killer. It’s in line to replace a multitude of homegrown systems, and it competes with six commercial products designed for higher education.

I had the chance to speak today with Amitava “Babi” Mitra, a Sakai board member representing MIT. He filled me in on the history and the secret sauce.

The project started when representatives of four universities – MIT, U Michigan, Indiana U, and Stanford – realized that they were each investing in a homegrown learning management system. They pooled their efforts, and by the beginning of 2004 had been awarded a $2.4M grant from the Mellon Foundation. They also began offering an “Educational Partner Program” to other universities, supported by the Hewlett Foundation, and started the process of creating a Sakai Foundation with a more inclusive governance structure.

They began developing an application on open source foundations. Development and beta testing proceeded for a year and a half, and now in the fall of 2005, a handful of universities are putting the latest version into production.

I want to understand the enthusiasm that universities, more than 80 at this point, have showed for this project. They commit $30,000 when they join the partner program – $10,000 per year for three years. What do they get? Why do they join?

They certainly don’t join for the code. The code is available to anyone under a free open source license. Furthermore, the code is still under development and used only in pilot installations. Given that the project has been so successful in the 1.5 years prior to a production release, I almost hypothesize that it is important NOT to have a finished application when you start putting a collaborative like Sakai together.

Nor do they get significant governance privileges when they join. The board is controlled by the four original founding universities, who don’t pay dues and get the majority of the development money.

They get direct support from Sakai’s small permanent staff – training, implementation workshops, questions answered, working groups arranged. Mostly what they get is the membership in the community and a voice in the development process. Community features include conference admission (a $300 value per person), participation in the members-only discussion lists, and the chance to join the working groups (a chance to work for free!). Partners are taking the lead in setting up working goups and discussion groups.

So, universities and individuals are pouring time and money into a product that they can get for free, in exchange for some advice, participation in discussions, and a chance to do extra work. Those are real benefits because they belong to a community. It shows that collaboration is a powerful motivating force.

Mitra gave me his opinion of why universities and individuals are enthusiastic about this project.

  • It’s a hot category. Universities are just now discovering that there is a demand for learning management systems from their students and professors, and they need to make plans for deployment.
  • Universities have a bias to control their own code and to share that makes them less enthusiastic about the proprietary products available in this category.
  • He thinks higher education institutions are culturally unique because they make time for collaboration, conferences, and exploratory projects, and the time and talent wouldn’t be as available in a for-profit institution.

    I’m not sure that I agree with the university-specific analysis. People in many industries seem to want to collaborate with their peers.

    There are some dynamics that I would expect to see repeated with other industry collaboratives:

  • The system directly replaces homegrown software
  • It’s a recent but not totally new category of application that the majority of participants have realized they will need to adopt.
  • It’s built on open source components
  • Four founding members seems about right. It’s enough to get real savings, but not too many to form a management group.
  • It starts with a community and not with finished code.

    There has to be an initial event. In this case, a $2.4M grant made the project real and gave it the resources to start from scratch, although Mitra says “it just would have taken longer” without the grant.

    On alternative sourcing mechanism that interests me is donation. The Sakai Course Evaluation Working Group is taking an application that Columbia uses to let students evaluate professors (and that Virginia Tech has modified and deployed), and formed a working group around it with the goal of offering it as a Sakai tool.