LMS Comparison - Hundley

Sakai
Well, Sakai seems to be the winner here by a landslide. It offers so many more capabilities for both student and administrator. I was especially impresses with the feature that allows the learners to set up their own project sites and allow permissions for other students to enter those. Furthermore, it gives the learners a lot more control over what information they receive. It strengthens the notion that learners are in more control of their learning.

As far as customization of the course, there are many possibilities here. Not only does Sakai offer many templates, but also the freedom to change the location of such things as the navigation bar. An administrator can choose to have the same "look" for an array of his or her courses, or change the "look" from course to course.

As most CMS, it seems to thrive on Mozilla's Firefox rather than Internet Explorer or Safari. Other than that stipulation, there are no significant hardware or software requirements that a learner cannot get simply by having a reasonably priced computer. Finally, the Sakai LMS is available at no charge.

Eduvo School 2.0
There have been few reviews of this product, which I believe is the main reason for its lack of characteristics listed in the comparison. To begin, students have some control, but it does not seem much more than what a person has control of in his or her email. For example, a student control what will be included in the email digest, group contacts can be established, and students can use use a searchable address book. However, an interesting feature is one that allows the students to keep a log of various notes taken in class, then combine them to form a study guide.

Id addition, students can make his or her own home page for a class, which would allow easy access to many assignments for various classes.

Unfortunately, sitting next to the Sakai review and discussion doe not make Eduvo look too good. The nail in the coffin is that Eduvo is about $8,000 annually, compared to the NO cost of Sakai.

For my purposes, a simple LMS would work just fine. Sakai offers many features and is free. I don't need all the features for a blended classroom of eighth graders, but I would go with Sakai because it's free.