Technical Skills

In my previous teaching experiences, the learning management system (LMS) had already been chosen by the institution, and my goal was to figure out how to make the LMS do what I wanted. In this analysis, I had the opportunity to approach things from the other side - evaluating which LMS was best suited for my needs. I chose to compare Canvas and Sakai and had quite a bit of fun playing with the capabilities of both systems!

Canvas is a privately-owned LMS that is being increasingly adopted by larger universities. (NAU is currently preparing to switch its LMS to Canvas.) Sakai, on the other hand, is an open-source platform and has the greatest potential to merge the features of an LMS with the possibility of personal learning environments (PLEs). Being an open-source platform, a dedicated community could certainly improve its functionality to highlight options like RSS feeds, links to social media, wiki pages, chat, and other forms of communication. These features are enticing for interactivity and learner engagement. Sakai contains greater flexibility than Canvas for including unique pages and information streams, and adjustment to the code could make those features modular and movable for the student to arrange as works best for them. As it is, however, the bugs in operability and the steep learning curve made it a poor choice for creating a professional development course for faculty, and we selected Canvas instead.

Although the user experience is currently better with Canvas, I am excited about the possibilities that Sakai offers in the long-term. This analysis pushed me to think beyond the LMS with which I was already familiar, making me consider how the tools and experience of an LMS can support different methods of teaching and learning. Investigating Sakai makes me wonder how I could change the design of my curriculum to support an online community of learners. Thinking about implementation also helped me synthesize the information gained through reading and discussing online learning theories.