Sakai vs. Teachable

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.

Teachable is excellent to work with as a software platform. However, after change of ownership, they made a massive price hike to legacy users, and stripped away many of the benefits that early adopters had enjoyed. All with next to no communication and transition. This burned a lot of trust and is the only reason for a7 rather than a 9.

Incentivized

• User friendly, easy to navigate
• Interactive friendly. You can link other resources to help students learn the course concepts better.
• Stable platform. There are a few updates from time to time but it has never gone down in my years of using the LMS.

Incentivized

• Hosts digital content such as video & PDFs
• Allows us to bundle multiple courses together
• Has a decent Zapier connection to sync with our other platforms
• Really easy to use

• 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.

Incentivized

• Communication with customers about changes to terms
• Customer support is slow
• Integration with Active Campaign

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Because we haven't had any major issues with it. The platform is really simple to use and the content can be uploaded and modified very easily. It has a drag and drop feature that makes everything fast and easy. Their support has always answered our questions or concerns and the cost is affodable. We will keep using it in the future.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Because it's easier to use both as administrators and both as user. We have never heard of any users having issues login in or going through the lectures or completing the course

Incentivized

We haven't had any issues, it's always available. Even when they schedule a maintanance on their end, students still can access the courses

Incentivized

Never had any issues with pages or videos not loading

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Their support is good overal. There are a couple of things that I would change, like answering faster. Sometimes they take a day to answer a concern and that's kind of annoying considering sometimes there are urgent issues we have to deal with. But the support has been good, they have answered properly.

Incentivized

No, I don't

Incentivized

I'd say: learn the system first, try it out and then publish the content with customers. There are a couple of features that will cause issues with customers (especially lazy ones) but I'd say it's easy to implement and modify if needed. People don't need to train much to use Teachable, but they should take their time to know it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's honestly just worked really well for us in terms of serving the actual course content. Plus, our customers can maintain one profile and use that to access all of the courses and bonuses that they've acquired from us. And the cost of Teachable has been very reasonable in terms of our budget.

We haven't had any issues with it. Their maintanance hours are always at times when we don't have students there, and even then, they still can access the platform

Incentivized

• Our Sakai costs are about 10% (ten percent) what it would cost for the big name LMS. For a school with a budget. this is a deciding factor.
• We can more easily afford more online programs to attract more students.
• Hard-won resources can go to needy places in the institution rather than to the online infrastructure.

Incentivized

• We were out the money and time of loading all courses onto Teachable, paying their fees, and then having to scramble to transfer thousands of students to another platform and pay all the setups again.