In 1995, two major commercial learning management system providers, Blackboard and WebCT, merged, prompting many colleges and universities to investigate lower-cost open source alternatives. In the Places to Go column in the last issue, we looked at an alternative to commercial learning management systems called Moodle (Downes 2005/2006). In this issue, we continue our exploration with a look at Sakai.

Started in 2004, the Sakai project is a “community source software development effort to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education” (Sakai n.d., ¶ 1). Its flagship product is the Sakai content management system, which is now being used in numerous institutions. For example, dozens of American universities have adopted the software; meanwhile, the organization itself recently gained its one hundredth partner and was recognized by 75% of the respondents in a recent Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness survey (Abel 2005). These trends represent significant growth for open source software in a market that has otherwise been stable for the last few years.