Sakai

What do you like best?

Easy-to-use template for instructors to enter their materials. You can easily make short quizzes with multiple choices or fill in the blanks. For numerical answers, it also allows a range of values to be accepted (to account for round-off errors etc.). Assignments can also be randomized in terms of the order of the questions (to inhibit cheating in tests), and also the options for multiple choice/match the columns can be randomized. The way the software is set up, you don't need to know much about html scripting or syntax to have a full website-like functionality.

What do you dislike?

Very slow especially for large class sizes -- the gradebooks take extremely long to load and interact with. The biggest issue with Sakai is that you cannot easily upload a gradebook from Excel to Sakai. The manual task of inputting grades is not fun at all. Also, the UI is not very intuitive -- you usually have to dig around to find a certain thing. Sakai has a tendency to bug out randomly -- the biggest losers are students while answering quizzes or tests. Also, the inefficient UI usually means that you have to go through too many clicks to accomplish simple tasks. The "back" button on Sakai is another huge bug as the software freaks out and behaves unexpectedly every time you hit back.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It's a quick solution for an instructor who needs a class website. It does require a little patience, but not a lot of website-related experience.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Handling intro classes for students via Sakai. Easy to manage grade reporting and uploading materials as an instructor. Basic homework type quizzes are also easy to make on Sakai -- easily auto-gradable with minimal programming/syntax required.