What is Sakai?
CSU Interact is the name given to CSU's scholarly online environment for research and collaboration as well as learning and teaching. The technical framework used for this environment is known as Sakai .
CSU implemented Sakai as the framework for our online learning environment. Sakai is a type of open source system called community source, which provides a collaboration and learning environment to meet the needs of higher education. Sakai's framework can support a wide range of collaboration tools which can be mixed and matched to suit the needs of the particular scholarly environment in which it is deployed.
CSU is currently the largest Australian University to adopt Sakai. Sakai is in use in over 160 universities, colleges and schools. Other users include University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Michigan and Stanford University.
As a community source approach, Sakai offers many benefits to the University, including:
- Interaction with a growing community of wide-ranging perspectives from learning and teaching, technical and research areas
- Ability for customisation, further development and enhancements meeting the unique requirements of CSU
- Consistency in user interaction within the environment including the interface, navigation, communication and appearance
- Intuitive to use hence minimizes training and support
- Facilitate access for those with disabilities
- The ability to use more integrated online teaching and recording of data
- The ability to bring together content, resources and services into a seamless interface
- Reusability of learning objects (import/ export objects)
- Provision of a collaborative environment within the University for researchers