Sakai is a collaboration and learning environment, sometimes referred to as an "LMS" (learning management system). The built-in collaboration tools available in Sakai support the needs of academia and a number of different teaching and learning models. These range from traditional courses with online components such as resource management and forum-based discussion to more advanced online approaches such as flipped classrooms and fully-online teaching.
Sakai also includes dedicated project work sites, which allow organizations and project teams to coordinate project administration, share resources, schedule activities, develop collaborative work products and track progress towards completion. These project collaboration spaces are widely used by student groups, faculty committees, thesis committees, strategic planning teams, re-accreditation teams and others tasked with important projects beyond the classroom.
Incorporates Bootstrap and Font Awesome libraries, making it easier than ever to develop new tools and customize them with well-known libraries.
The new file browser, which is based on elFinder (http://studio-42.github.io/elFinder/), is used when browsing for files (documents, images, movies etc.) from within the WYSIWYG HTML editor. Compared to the Sakai 10 file browser, it has a much smoother interface and enhanced functionality such as icon view, document preview, file management (copy, paste etc) and view file properties.
By default, when a site is deleted it is now only actually ‘softly deleted’ and will be recoverable for a period of 30 days (this value is configurable). To recover a site, use the Worksite Setup tool, select “Softly deleted sites” and choose the sites that you wish to restore. System administrators will need to configure the Quartz Job (‘Purge Deleted Sites’) that cleans out the deleted sites.
In Sakai 11, the following standards are now supported (in addition to existing support in 10.x for LTI 1.1, IMS Common Cartridge, and IMS QTI).
IMS Content Item - first LMS in the world certified on this standard.
Sakai’s content review (or plagiarism detection) service has been completely revamped for the upcoming release. In Sakai 11.1, content review is no longer an add-on and does not require any additional configuration. This means that you only need to set a few properties in the sakai.properties file to enable your preferred content review service. This work was done in collaboration with Longsight, Oxford, the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, and VeriCite.
NB: The intention was to get this incorporated in 11 or a maintenance release, but to-date the work is not in Sakai. There are code contributions awaiting approval. Projected completion is for Sakai 12 (2017 Q2 projected release) followed by likely backport into Sakai 11.