Community Member Content from rSmart

The University of Michigan was one of the founding institutions of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) and the largest initial contributor of code. "There was nothing accidental in the creation of Sakai," explains Dr. John King, vice provost for academic information and professor in the School of Information. "It grew out of a research project to build online infrastructure for support of globally distributed communities of scientists. We realized that the future required online support for distributed communities of learners in all aspects of the learning process—teaching, research and administration. We needed an environment we could control, so we built it. Other institutions shared our ambition, and joined us. That was the beginning of the Sakai movement."

In 2003, Stanford University found itself at a crossroad. The learning management system (LMS) was becoming a more significant component of teaching and learning, and the university's homegrown system was too expensive to maintain. Assessing the options, all of the commercial LMS platforms lacked significant functionality that Stanford required and the flexibility its faculty and students demanded. Recognizing significant potential and opportunity, Stanford joined the University of Michigan, the University of Indiana and MIT to jointly develop the next generation of coursework tools, Sakai.