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The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-source Sakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools.Why Use Sakai?Designed by educators, for educators. The people building Sakai work at campuses just like yours. We believe they know best what features academic users value.Flexible, Free and Open. Sakai is a powerful yet flexible solution that supports not only teaching and learning but also research and administrative collaboration. The Sakai CLE is distributed free of charge and our license is designed to encourage innovation and customization in order to meet local campus needs.Our Community. Sakai is an active community of educational institutions working together to solve common problems and share best practices. The professional development and cross-institutional knowledge sharing are benefits hard to find elsewhere.The Sakai CLEThe Sakai CLE is a free and open source Courseware Management System. It features a set of software tools designed to help instructors, researchers and students collaborate online in support of their work--whether it be course instruction, research or general project collaboration.For coursework, Sakai provides features to supplement and enhance teaching and learning. For collaboration, Sakai has tools to help organize communication and collaborative work on campus and around the world. Using a web browser, users choose from Sakai's tools to create a site that meets their needs. To use Sakai, no knowledge of HTML is necessary.But the product vision reaches beyond teaching and learning applications. Many Sakai deployments include as many or more project and research collaboration sites. In addition, the Open Source Portfolio e-Portfolio system is a core part of the Sakai software. Finally, the Sakaibrary project links library resources to Sakai. You can try Sakai for yourself by downloading and installing the demonstration or by visiting one the sites of our Commercial Affiliates, several of which have test drives of Sakai where you can simply create your own account. No installation necessary.Sakai is Open SourceSakai is distributed as free and open source software under the Educational Community License. Access to this code is extremely valuable to those who want to customize their on-campus instance or wish to develop innovative new tools. But open source code is important to the entire Sakai community. The ability to make that one change to the code for your campus can be crucially important and that change can be added to the Sakai code base, removing the need for customization as you upgrade. And the source code serves as the ultimate insurance policy, ensuring that you aren’t locked into a single vendor. Learn more by reading Sakai Profiles or Case StudiesWho is Using Sakai?The Sakai CLE is the enterprise system of choice at over 160 educational institutions, in production settings ranging from 200 to 200,000 users.Learn more about who is using Sakai by exploring our Sakai Profiles or in-depth Case Studies. Background The Sakai Project began in 2004 when Stanford, Michigan, Indiana, MIT and Berkeley began building a common Courseware Management System rather than continuing their homegrown systems or licensing software from a commercial vendor. The Mellon Foundation provided initial funding for the project.These universities recognized that research collaboration would be as important as teaching applications and developed a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) that scales across many kinds of academic uses.Today, the Sakai CLE is the enterprise system of choice at over 100 institutions, in production settings ranging from 200 to 200,000 users. The Sakai CLE is open source software that is freely available to everyone.System RequirementsSakai is Java-based and will therefore run on a wide variety of platforms.