Lenovo offers LanSchool, a classroom management platform supporting collaboration, monitoring student activity, chat, teacher broadcasting / screen-sharing, and other features.
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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
Lenovo LanSchool
Sakai
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LanSchool
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
Lenovo LanSchool
Sakai
Features
Lenovo LanSchool
Sakai
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
I have recommended it across campus and would not hesitate to do so again. It has been great in our lab environments and would like to continue using it for years to come. In the future as we move away from physical labs I will be investigating to purchase for BYOD devices, however I know that I will face pushback from students on this. However we must weigh privacy & security vs. using BYOD devices and integrity on exams.
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.
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.
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.
In terms of competition, there is no real competition that we have used at the school or find on the market. We use tools such as REMIND, MOODLE, and KAHOOT, but none of them would be a replacement for LanSchool. On the contrary, all of those tools would support what we do with LanSchool because it gets students in the comfort level of using different technology tools to communicate and be successful. Apple has a Remote Desktop tool, similar to LanSchool in most ways. The key difference between Apple's Remote Desktop and LanSchool is that Lenovo's LanSchool has a student app and a stronger teacher platform to use on non-Mac devices. Our school focuses on LanSchool because using it on a PC and on a MAC, it is the same interface with the same fluidity. Teaching students on MACs to use Remote Desktop and on PC's or Chromebooks to use LanSchool would be a misuse of resources and confusing for educators and students. The best system for engagement and student use would be via LanSchool on all operating systems.
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.
