Sakai vs. Tovuti LMS

Sakai is well suited for any size institution or training organization looking to use an extremely flexible, well-supported and extensible LMS that doesn't sacrifice budget for useless options and extra features. The community that is Sakai (by way of students, instructors, teachers, administrators, information technology professionals, instructional designers and developers) all make Sakai what it is. Sakai can be paired with multiple LTI tools, streaming services, conferencing and plagiarism detection platforms and student information systems to ultimately help students meet with success. As we have a very limited IT staff Sakai is hosted off-site, but are still able to provide support to our faculty with very little extra effort. While Sakai is not as well-known as platforms like Blackboard or Canvas, because we're one of just a few clients, requests to our host for second or third tier assistance are resolved pretty quickly. We recently had an instance where all of our users were unable to login; this turned out to be an issue with host configuration rather than Sakai itself. Sakai is not perfect: "Auto-saved draft" text disappears sometimes, question pools are difficult to share among faculty, the forums interface could be modernized and progress analytics surfaced more easily to students.

Tovuti is really well suited for anything that involves instruction, whether that be to a class or to provide training to your company's staff. While the interactive content is wonderful and allows for many accommodations (visual and hearing impairments included), it is not always an easy task to create activities that work comfortably for individuals with mobility/dexterity disabilities.

Incentivized

• User friendly, easy to navigate
• Interactive friendly. You can link other resources to help students learn the course concepts better.
• Stable platform. There are a few updates from time to time but it has never gone down in my years of using the LMS.

Incentivized

• You can effortlessly set up logins and manage registered courses with Tovuti LMS.
• The interface is easy to use and can be easily linked with a variety of APIs.
• You can customize the learning module by adding or removing information.
• During virtual events, groups can be divided into multiple virtual teams and then return to the original group.

Incentivized

• While the check box to send an email when you send a message is helpful, there have been times that teachers forgot to check that box, so students didn't get important assignments/announcements.
• Discussion forums can be fun, but it's annoying to read other people's comments since you have to click into each person's comment, & it always marks the comments as new, even if you've read them.
• I think it would be helpful if Sakai warned you before submitting an assignment how many submissions or when the assignment is due, before hitting submit.

Incentivized

• I would love to see Tovuti LMS add privacy measures that would confine visibility by course to allow more external partner participation.
• While I appreciate the speed of response from the solution team, efficiency could be added by allowing quick video calls for identifying issues. It often takes a lot of effort to describe the issue, and it would be a quicker process to be able to show the problem.

Incentivized

Sakai is a good general learning management system - it is not leading edge but rather a stable system with standard learning management system features. It can be fairly easily customized and is fairly easy to learn from both student learning and faculty administrative vantage points. New paradigms for online learning though are emergent so the current field should also be investigated with competitors.

Incentivized

We have established the training department to extend our training capabilities into one central area. I have mentioned training production, internal and external sales staff. But the training department will surely delve into the HR area of new hire orientation, annual recertification processes, etc. We truly have just scratched the surface of this iceberg. Now that we have made the investment, we will surely continue with this product. I cannot see us moving to another product at all. We will definitely renew our subscription with Tovuti

Incentivized

When faculty are preparing courses from term to term, a portion of the content is static within a specific discipline. The time it takes to import past lessons into new versions of Sakai can be an inefficient use of my time. When I want to add new content and edit from the old content, it's reliant upon me to cut and paste the content from term to term rather than simply import and edit from a backup.

Incentivized

The in-platform authoring tool really isn't an authoring tool. It is a content management system/database that requires you to build each and every component of your course under another tab and remember and correctly string them together. You can't author anything directly into a Tovuti LMS course. Everything is its own separate 'thing.'

Incentivized

I have yet to have an outage on the availability. As far as I know, no trainee has run into it either. Excellent rating on that front

Incentivized

I have worked with so many software packages that are slow to load, take for ever for screen changes, etc. I do not have that issue here with Tovuti at all. I have yet to really do any reporting on it as we are fairly new with the package, but if it operates like the rest of the system, then I am going to assume that reporting will be no more difficult than the rest of the platform

Incentivized

Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends.

Incentivized

The pre-sales team was very helpful and responsive and then stopped responding to my mail as soon as I had signed the contract, not even a reply from the last couple of emails sent. The post-sale teams are engaged and quick to respond and really good. Unfortunately, I need to use them more than I should, and sometimes the reply is "we don't support that feature", but the support from the support team is excellent.

Incentivized

Hayden was awesome. He knows his product inside and out and was able to answer all my questions. I had a lot of questions. I was actually starting to build courses while I was going through the training so that when the next session on the schedule came up, I had even more questions about what I had done vs the way I maybe should have. In the end, I was doing my own hands-on while going through the training. Tovuti is that easy to use.

Incentivized

No, I don't

Incentivized

The implementation had extremely wonderful support from Tovuti in the form of a series of one-on-one meetings to hear the clients needs and intended usage and then to set up the platform to meet those needs while demonstrating how to use it.

Incentivized

Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as user-friendly and there were issues with administrating it. I don't think most of campus used it, actually. We changed to Sakai and haven't looked back.

Incentivized

I keep coming back to this, but the customization of Tovuti is fantastic. There is a bit of a learning curve, but if you dive in, there are wonderful tools to create engaging content. BizLibrary has a great existing library of courses, but that is not what we needed. The ability to create specific permission levels for users that overlap in unique ways due to the nature of workforce development makes Tovuti stand out for our needs. BizLibrary and Schoology just were not as flexible in this regard. And while Schoology has strong content creation features, it mainly serves educational organizations and is developed to suit their needs. Again, just not as flexible as we needed.

Incentivized

Scalability is great. We bought their first 'size' package and that covers 300 trainees. Transitioning to the next level is more a matter of accounting and payment. My take on it is that its just a matter of paying the higher level of subscription and its done

Incentivized

• Our Sakai costs are about 10% (ten percent) what it would cost for the big name LMS. For a school with a budget. this is a deciding factor.
• We can more easily afford more online programs to attract more students.
• Hard-won resources can go to needy places in the institution rather than to the online infrastructure.

Incentivized

• Tovuti LMS is easy to use for our learners and they are retaining more information than our previous eLearning platform.
• Learners are coming to training class with a thorough understanding of their role and are more prepared than previously
• We've seen an increase in attendance of webinars since we are able to post them in the media library for employees to attend after they are life.

Incentivized