LMS Comparison Activity
Blackboard versus Sakai
Diane Main
June 30, 2010
Blackboard Academic Suite (Release 8.0)
Communication
Blackboard offers discussion forums (with spell checker), which can be used by students and instructors together. Instructors can choose to allow students to create their own discussion groups, and they can also set up moderated discussions. Posts can be peer reviewed by other students. There are some further discussion management tools that can be useful for summarizing statistics about discussions, in addition to an ability to share discussions across courses, departments, or schools within an organization. Students can use drop boxes and personal folders for submitting or sharing work, with the space allotted for these determined by administrators. Built-in e-mail functionality supports groups of addresses for recipients. There is also a built-in address book. Students can use online portfolios to keep notes or journals. The real-time chat feature allows an unlimited number of simultaneous discussions, with new rooms created by students or instructors. Instructors can moderate chat rooms and suspend users as needed. The chat rooms can be used for student and instructor question-and-answer sessions. Chat sessions are archived. There is a recordable whiteboard tool that can also display images, slides, web browsing, and desktop sharing.
Content Organization
Students can create bookmarks to their frequently-viewed items. The online course calendar can have events posted by both instructors and students. Instructors post announcements to a page for that purpose, while students have personal home pages listing all the courses in which they’re enrolled, new e-mail messages received, and all events from their courses, the system, and their personal calendars. Students can also access their grades and compare these against the class as a whole. Students may search course content and discussion threads, so the organization of the content is not critical if they know what they’re looking for. Content can be compiled and downloaded to be printed or stored electronically, and instructors can publish to CD-ROM. The earlier version whose features I looked at enabled students to download course and discussion group content to PDAs, so I imagine smart phones are the next logical step in the newest version. There are tutorials to help students learn how to use Blackboard.
Interface
Tools for students include group work elements, such as discussion forums, chats, whiteboards, and other activities or assignments. Students can be assigned groups by instructors or can self-select groups; these can be private or monitored. There are also community networking possibilities for clubs, interest groups, and study groups. These exist at the system level and therefore enable anyone from any course(s) to participate. There are also system-wide chat rooms and discussion forums. These tools enable a campus feel. Students can use their personal home pages as portfolios, and these home pages can be exported.
Tools for administrators include the ability to allow guest access to all courses and a number of features I did not understand (external LDAP server, Kerberos, Shibboleth, CAS, etc.). Administrators assign each user roles, and these are used to control access to various parts of the Blackboard system. Blackboard works with a number of SIS (student information systems), and course registration can be done manually by instructors or students.
Capabilities
Blackboard allows test taking, with many types of questions available. This comes with an automated management system for testing, which allows instructors a number of options in designing, distributing, and grading their assessments. Grades are stored in an online gradebook which allows inclusion of offline assignments and exporting of the gradebook’s contents. Instructors can specify dates for the beginning and end of class, as well as for release and completion of materials, assignments, and more. Access to materials can also be made contingent on completing previous activities in the course. There are options for tracking and reporting on student use and access to the Blackboard system. Blackboard allows a great deal of customization in the look and feel of the system.
Practical Application
What I think people will like most about Blackboard is that it is very comprehensive. However, it does involve significant cost, and their own website does not do a good job of laying out features of the newest version. It contains a lot of hype about the product, but nowhere does it give a listing or matrix of what the system includes or how it compares to other LMS options. K-12 and higher education environments benefit by using Blackboard for two reasons: 1. it has many features and can be customized to the specific needs of an organization; and 2. it has a very large user base, despite its cost, and it appears to be in constant development. I reviewed version 8 (because I could locate information about it), but the latest version (9) is being pitched as the most amazing product ever.
Sakai 2.3
Communication
Sakai has discussion board with spell-check and also e-mail integration (whole posts, daily digests, etc.). Instructors can choose to moderate discussions and screen all posts. There are a number of forum-specific features, such as date-controlled access, categories and sorting, and sticky and announcement topics. These make discussion boards very customizable to the individuals needs of students and instructors alike. Sakai also supports twelve foreign languages. Student drop boxes can be used for submitting assignments. There are a number of ways that students can create and control content, including projects sites they can set up and administer. Built-in e-mail functionality supports groups of addresses for recipients, and instructors can e-mail an entire class at once, a single address, or an alias. There are chat capabilities, with logged archives of chats, but these are limited in scope compared to Blackboard. Synchronous communication outside of chat requires Elluminate, Breeze, or another software integration.
Content Organization
Sakai allows a number of bookmarking tools, compared to Blackboard. The online course calendar can have events posted by both instructors and students. Instructors post announcements to a page for that purpose, while students have personal home pages listing all the courses in which they’re enrolled, new e-mail messages received, and all events from their courses, the system, and their personal calendars. Students can also access their grades and compare these against the class as a whole. An advantage over Blackboard is the ability for students to subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified of changes to course materials. Students can search course content, discussion boards, chats, and virtual classroom session recordings. It would appear that while there are some tools enabling instructors to work offline, there are no such tools for students. The system has online tutorials as well as context-sensitive help for users of any tools.
Interface
Like Blackboard, Sakai offers a number of groupwork tools, but these appear less extensive in Sakai than in Blackboard. There are also community networking opportunities, but perhaps fewer tools for these in Sakai than in Blackboard as well. Sakai’s OSP (Open Source Portfolio) is commended all over the Web. In fact, this option for students is a major selling point of Sakai, and some universities started out using this alongside Blackboard and later opted to replace Blackboard with Sakai’s LMS.
Administration tools appear very similar to those described above for Blackboard, but with a few less options or features. Administrators assign each user roles, and these are used to control access to various parts of the Sakai system. Registration integration with Sakai is not as comprehensive as Blackboard’s, and it appears that Sakai does not work directly with commonly used SIS.
Capabilities
Sakai allows test taking, with many types of questions available (though not as many as Blackboard). This comes with an automated management system for testing, which allows instructors a number of options in designing, distributing, and grading their assessments. Again, there are slightly fewer options than with Blackboard. Grades are stored in an online gradebook which allows inclusion of offline assignments and exporting of the gradebook’s contents. Instructors can specify dates for the beginning and end of class, as well as for release and completion of materials, assignments, and more. Access to materials can also be made contingent on membership in instructor-assigned groups. Blackboard allows a great deal more customization in the look and feel of the system than Sakai does, but there are some tools for this in Sakai.
Practical Application
Sakai’s biggest selling points are that it is “free” due to being open course, and its user community is strong and supportive. There are several large university and graduate programs using Sakai’s portfolio tools, LMS, or both, and these users freely share their experiences, in the spirit of open source. K-12 schools with confident staff to put such tools in place can completely revamp their offerings to include more distance learning and portfolio creation. Often, the barriers to beginning these initiatives are many: costs of hardware and software, changes in the way we deliver instruction and what we expect from students, etc. But a system like Sakai, if implemented carefully and successfully, can overcome these obstacles. I think, for the present, Sakai will see more success and wide use in higher education where such larger institutions have greater experience implementing across-the-board systems like this. Organizations need to decide if Sakai will meet their needs, and whether they can live without the extra benefits Blackboard offers. In many cases, these additional features may not be widely used, and there may be some unforeseen advantage to having limited tools and features for new users to master.
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