rSmart Sakai CLE
The rSmart Sakai CLE is a feature-rich, fully scalable, collaboration and learning environment, unique in its ability to support teaching and learning, project collaboration, group interaction and eportfolio construction.
The rSmart Sakai CLE comes preconfigured to support different types of online group sites, including: course sites, project sites, and portfolio sites. Each site type contains a unique selection of roles and tools, designed to facilitate group interaction in the designated context. In addition, users have their own personal workspace in which to collect and organize their resources, maintain a personal calendar, web page or blog, and view aggregate information across all their group sites.
Take the guess-work and risk out of configuring and using Sakai. Sign up for a free account in the rSmart Sandbox today, or purchase an rSmart Sakai CLE support subscription to start using Sakai with the backing of a commercial support organization.
rSmart and Sakai
rSmart is a commercial open source application software company. We, along with leading colleges and universities around the world, are forging new software development and business models for open source systems in education.
As a founding Sakai commercial affiliate, rSmart is dependent upon the success of the Sakai community, and ensuring the vitality of this community is our top priority. We support the Sakai community with participation on many levels. Chris Coppola, our president, was one of the first elected Sakai board members and remains its only existing non-academic member. Our team of talented developers, such as John Ellis, have received official recognition within the community for their contribution to the code.
Our professional designers, consultants and support staff are an integral part of community workgroups, participating in the Sakai QA process, functional requirements gathering process and ongoing documentation efforts. We believe that forging a new model for open source collaboration with academic communities around the world allows us to offer higher quality, cutting edge software, at greater value and lower cost to our customers and ultimately empowers educational institutions to take charge of their technological destinies.
To learn more about how rSmart works as a part of the Sakai community for the mutual benefit of our clients and the community read the rSmart Sakai Contribution Model (Adobe PDF format, 294KB)
How is the rSmart Sakai CLE different from Sakai?
The rSmart Sakai CLE is based on the community release of Sakai which can be downloaded freely from the Sakai project website. We go to great lengths to stay in synch with community direction and development and to shape this direction where we can. Our customers enjoy the best of both worlds by having a fully supported, polished, packaged software that is free from vendor control and ongoing licensing fees.
The rSmart Sakai CLE is different from the Sakai community version in five key ways:
1) It's Commercially Supported
Our customers enjoy peace of mind knowing that they have commercial quality support backing their use of an open source system. Our team of professional support consultants are here to answer your functional, technical or tactical questions and to keep you up-to-date with security patches, maintenance releases, and free upgrades to the system.
2) It’s Easy to Configure
We've taken the guess-work out of configuring Sakai by creating a new customizer tool that allows institutions to specify their own functional and technical settings in the system. We recognize that one size seldom fits all and that educational institutions have idiosyncratic needs. Should you decide that our default configurations don’t quite meet your needs, we take pride in working with you to adapt the system accordingly, and we make it easy for you to alter this design as your use of the system evolves.
3) It has a Polished User Experience
We recognize that usability is often key to adoption, and we’ve worked hard to enhance the user experience of Sakai OOTB by creating a new, professionally designed user interface (UI) for the environment. The design is not only visually appealing, but is supported by sound principles of user interaction and a thoughtful rationale for the ways in which different actors in the educational enterprise typically interact. You’ll notice this in the way we’ve chosen to organize types of sites, types of users, groupings of tools and default permissions for their use. You’ll even see role related support cues and multiple avenues to information on the screen, designed to guide users in navigating the system.
4) It has an Expanded, Fully Tested Feature Set
We've taken the time to integrate, test and package a set of tools drawn from a variety of different sources, including: the Sakai community, the Open Source Portfolio Community, Foothill College and Cambridge University. For institutions interested in portfolios, the CLE offers a bridge between coursework and portfolio construction by integrating Sakai tools with OSP tools, allowing students to incorporate evidence-based, use evaluated artifacts in a portfolio of their work.
In addition, rSmart is continually evaluating the world of open source and proprietary software and has worked with clients to develop integration points with systems such as Marratech’s video, audio and web collaboration space and Elluminate Live. Our professional services team is always available to work with you on custom enhancements to existing tools or integration with new systems and tools.
5) It Comes With Up-To-Date, Comprehensive Documentation and Training
Once you have decided to implement the rSmart Sakai CLE, you will have the ability to use our resources to help guide you through the process. After implementation, you have the option to pay for our subscription support where you will have access to many guides, tutorials, and the rSmart Support Network (RSN), including the following:
- The rSmart CLE User Guide
- The rSmart CLE Administrator Guide
- The rSmart CLE Customization Guide
- The rSmart CLE Portfolio Tool
- Numerous e-tutorials
- Over 100 knowledge base articles in RSN for administrators and users.
