UNC report on their pilot of Sakai as a replacement for Blackboard. Quote from a faculty member in the report: "Have heard many complaints about Blackboard being kludgy. Sakai is graceful."

The minimal support needed is a good sign of Sakai's overall usability: "First, of the more than 1,000 people using a completely new collaborative learning environment for almost a full year period, we had a total of 264 tickets—the vast majority of which (74%) were for requests to use the system (new sites and new user accounts)...In summary, from a support perspective, 54 substantive help requests on behalf of more than 1,000 pilot participants over a nearly one-year period was a very positive finding."

Vision for what Sakai could look like in the future. The authors envision an LMS based on widgets with lots of flexibility, social networking, and content creation tools. The proposed changes to the organization (doing away with sites) would make Sakai much more flexible outside of a traditional academic course environment. The ability to have groups persist outside of courses would allow cohorts to be part of a group together, which creates some interesting possibilities.

"In summary, our ambition is not merely an incremental improvement of Sakai nor is it to copy Google. Our goal is not simply to create a better and cheaper version of Blackboard. It is time to arrive at a clearer understanding of the capabilities that represent needs unique to education and for the Sakai community to focus its development effort on providing these capabilities while taking advantage of established open‐source efforts to provide more generic capabilities. We should, in short, strive to create a different type of academic collaboration system."