Frontline Education offers a learning management system focusing on the development goals of teachers, in Frontline Professional Growth.
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Sakai
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Sakai is an open source learning
management system provided by the Apero Foundation. The LMS provides what it
calls Core and Expanded Features. The Core Features encompass an integrated
tool set that is tested by the Sakai community members and is then included
with each new release. The tool set can be configured by: instructors,
students, research investigators and project leaders. The other set of tools, known as “Contrib
Tools” are specific to Sakai tools and innovations that are developed…
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Pricing
Frontline Professional Growth
Sakai
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Frontline Professional Growth
Sakai
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Must contact vendor for pricing information.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Frontline Professional Growth
Sakai
Features
Frontline Professional Growth
Sakai
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
Frontline Professional Growth allows a teacher/educational specialist to organize and keep track of all the parts of their yearly evaluation (observations, SGOs, documentation log, Professional Development Plan), and Professional Development Workshops. Our district has been able to adjust the use of Frontline Professional Growth to fit our Professional Development goals as well as our evaluation systems. Frontline Professional Growth also has a Forms section so we have all of our request forms in a paperless environment. Overall, the system does a good job of helping the teacher and supervisor/administration manage the evaluation and professional development requirements for our State.
Sakai is well suited for any size institution or training organization looking to use an extremely flexible, well-supported and extensible LMS that doesn't sacrifice budget for useless options and extra features. The community that is Sakai (by way of students, instructors, teachers, administrators, information technology professionals, instructional designers and developers) all make Sakai what it is. Sakai can be paired with multiple LTI tools, streaming services, conferencing and plagiarism detection platforms and student information systems to ultimately help students meet with success. As we have a very limited IT staff Sakai is hosted off-site, but are still able to provide support to our faculty with very little extra effort. While Sakai is not as well-known as platforms like Blackboard or Canvas, because we're one of just a few clients, requests to our host for second or third tier assistance are resolved pretty quickly. We recently had an instance where all of our users were unable to login; this turned out to be an issue with host configuration rather than Sakai itself. Sakai is not perfect: "Auto-saved draft" text disappears sometimes, question pools are difficult to share among faculty, the forums interface could be modernized and progress analytics surfaced more easily to students.
The configuration and startup of Frontline Professional Growth is time-consuming. I wish this was easier to get going.
Creating forms is difficult and the form editor is hard to navigate and use. You cannot create a form yourself. That has to be created and entered into your system by Frontline, which takes more time, especially if it is an easy form you want to create.
There needs to be a better way to save forms you are completing and being able to go right back to them at a later date. I have had teachers lose what they were doing when saving a draft and then have to start all over.
Notifications on forms at individual levels only go out once a day, sometime around 2am. This should be instantaneous, notifying individuals as the form comes in.
While the check box to send an email when you send a message is helpful, there have been times that teachers forgot to check that box, so students didn't get important assignments/announcements.
Discussion forums can be fun, but it's annoying to read other people's comments since you have to click into each person's comment, & it always marks the comments as new, even if you've read them.
I think it would be helpful if Sakai warned you before submitting an assignment how many submissions or when the assignment is due, before hitting submit.
Sakai is a good general learning management system - it is not leading edge but rather a stable system with standard learning management system features. It can be fairly easily customized and is fairly easy to learn from both student learning and faculty administrative vantage points. New paradigms for online learning though are emergent so the current field should also be investigated with competitors.
When faculty are preparing courses from term to term, a portion of the content is static within a specific discipline. The time it takes to import past lessons into new versions of Sakai can be an inefficient use of my time. When I want to add new content and edit from the old content, it's reliant upon me to cut and paste the content from term to term rather than simply import and edit from a backup.
Overall, Frontline Professional Growth manages observations, SGOs, documentation logs, and Professional Development Plans. In addition to these evaluation pieces, it allows our district to manage our Professional Development Workshops (in-house), Professional Development requests (for out-of-district), and many online request forms. The only real negative is that some of the menus are a bit cumbersome, and it takes several steps to get around the system.
Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends.
Frontline Professional Growth isn't an LMS. This is something more used on the back end to manage and track staff information regarding professional learning, workshops, and hours. This does a good job in a number of areas, but does have a learning curve and does take a good amount of time to get up and running. There are features that I wish were easier to use.
Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as user-friendly and there were issues with administrating it. I don't think most of campus used it, actually. We changed to Sakai and haven't looked back.
