The LMS marketplace has reached a point where commercial cloud hosted LMS systems from large, established companies have become the norm. Systems like Canvas, Desire2Learn, or Blackboard address the need for a scalable production grade LMS without using local IT staff for development, installation, upgrading, patching or performance monitoring. But the move to the cloud has taken away the sense of ownership, iteration, and innovation that has been part of open source LMS systems like Sakai and Moodle. SakaiPlus makes it so that the Sakai LMS can be installed into your campus-wide cloud-hosted LMS using LTI Advantage to give an option to faculty and IT staff to work with an LMS that can grow and improve over time. Using LTI Advantage enables the idea of a “boutique LMS” that serves a small fraction of the faculty on the campus without actually installing and supporting a second LMS. This session will describe the notion of a “boutique LMS” and then demonstrate Sakai working inside of Canvas, Blackboard, D2L and Moodle.

Abstract: Learning Impact 20203

SakaiPlus is the first example of using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Advantage to plug an entire LMS into another LMS, allowing faculty a choice of LMSs on a campus without requiring a second enterprise LMS installation. We have been beta-testing SakaiPlus integrated into Canvas at the University of Michigan School of Information since fall 2022. This presentation will describe how this is done technically, show how it has been used in real courses, and share initial reactions and results of the testing. We will talk about how an institution with Canvas, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn could use SakaiPlus via LTI Advantage.

Abstract for 2023 NERCOMP and 2023 Educause ELI