Sakai Partners Program

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October 27, 2004

UT Austin recently decided to join the Sakai Project as part of their Educational Partner Program. The Sakai Project is an effort to develop and adopt community-based open source educational software. The Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) is a way for colleges and universities to participate in and support those efforts.

This announcement has led some to assume we will be abandoning our partnership with Blackboard as our supported course management system (CMS.) On the contrary, we will continue down the path of using and supporting Blackboard as the university’s official CMS.

Our participation in Sakai will allow us to create a better Blackboard product by building and sharing modules with other developers that can be used within Blackboard to increase the product’s functionality. It also holds the possibility of creating special modules that would be useful for specific faculty in certain colleges and departments.

As a campus we have a strong commitment to open course development, including OSAF Chandler, Apache, MySQL, and Tomcat to name a few. Sakai allows us to continue to participate in the open source development process and support our colleagues across higher education and create products and modules that better serve your needs.

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