About

Sakai has served Duke well for over a decade. However, the large number of universities that have already migrated off Sakai—a community-supported LMS—has left the sustainability of the platform precarious given the small number of remaining clients. 

Additionally, in order to connect Sakai to external applications (for example Gradescope and Zoom), the developers of those applications need to build an “integration” (piece of software code) that connects their application to Sakai to transfer information seamlessly between the two. As the number of Sakai universities has decreased, it means that often the Sakai integrations we might want for external applications used commonly at Duke do not exist. 

Finally, the amount of effort needed to keep up with the current leading LMSs, build new features and evolve with Duke’s educational needs can no longer be met by the Sakai Community, Longsight (our Sakai hosting vendor), or Duke.

In Summer 2022, Duke Learning Innovation (DLI) and Office of Information Technology (OIT) leadership determined that Duke University needs a more robust learning platform to achieve its goals over the coming decade. A project team of representatives from DLI and OIT was selected to investigate and propose a platform by December 2022. Observing that many universities had already moved to the Canvas platform, the team began its evaluation by focusing on whether or not Canvas would meet Duke’s needs. The evaluation process included independent research, consultations with peers at other universities who have switched from Sakai to Canvas, meetings with representatives at Instructure (the company that owns and operates Canvas), and inviting input from various campus stakeholders, including our Functional Stakeholder group of volunteer faculty, staff and students.

The project team focused on the following criteria during the evaluation process:

1. Accessibility
2. Analytics and insights
3. Customization
4. Mobile Options
5. Security and Privacy
6. User and Account Support 
7. Sustainability
8. Teaching and Learning 
9. Third Party Integrations
10. User Experience

Canvas is the largest LMS provider in higher education, and has already been successfully adopted by programs at the Fuqua School of Business and School of Medicine, as well as many of Duke’s peer institutions. Features and functions of Canvas that the evaluation team found especially valuable include – but are certainly not limited to: 

• Speedgrader 
• Mastery Paths and Mastery Grading
• New Analytics
• Global Calendar
• Mobile Apps (Instructor and Student)
• Easier integration with external applications (such as Google Drive, Panopto, and Gradescope)
• A large, engaged user community

Sponsors

• Tracy Futhey, Vice President & Chief Information Officer
• Yakut Gazi, Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Digital Education
• Evan Levine, Senior Director of IT Services & Support

Project Team

• Project Lead – Michael Greene, DLI 
• Project Manager – Logan Roger, OIT
• LMS Service Lead – Marty Soupcoff, DLI
• Communications – Blythe Tyrone, DLI; Camille Jackson, OIT
• Evaluation – Grey Reavis, DLI
• Technical implementation – Liz Wendlend, OIT
• Third-Party Integrations –  Chris Lorch and Ashley Walker, DLI
• Faculty support –  Brenda Knox, Pratt, and Seth Anderson and Heather Hans, DLI
• DKU – Haiyan Zhou, CTL

Functional Stakeholders

The Functional Stakeholder group is composed of volunteers from the Duke community to represent the members of their respective schools or units and provide input to the project team and sponsors.

• Alex Glass, Senior Lecturer, Nicholas
• Brenda Knox, Instructional Designer, Pratt
• Dave Johnston, Associate Dean of Learning Innovation, Nicholas
• Ed Gomes, Dean of IT, Trinity
• Hugh Crumley, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, Graduate School
• Jennie De Gagne, Professor, Health Systems & Analytics Division, Nursing
• Jacqui McMillian-Bohler, Assistant Clinical Professor, Nursing
• Jax Nalley, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Duke Student Government
• Jiaxin Wu, Assistant Director, Center for Teaching and Learning, DKU
• John Campbell, Senior Director, Student Information Systems, DKU
• Julia Conrad Fisher, Educational Technology Specialist, School of Medicine
• Karen Newberry, Head, Library Systems and Integration Support Department, Libraries
• Karin Breiwitz, Instructional Technology Analyst, Divinity
• Ken Rogerson, Professor of the Practice, Sanford
• Linda Daniel, Reference and Digital Services Librarian, Libraries
• Luisa Li, Educational Technology Specialist, DKU
• Mark Hart, Associate Dean, Sanford
• Meagan Dunphy-Daly, Lecturer, Nicholas
• Preston Nibley, Undergraduate Student
• Rachel Porter, Senior Education Strategist, Physician Assistant Program
• Sharon Kaiser, Manager, Information Systems, School of Medicine
• Tina Johnson, Manager, Educational Technology, Nursing
• Zoe Tishaev, Undergraduate Student

Yes - please review the content on the migration page for more information about the migration process.

You will be able to access your previously created content in Sakai until May 31, 2025. User access to Sakai will be disabled on June 1, 2025.

If you have unused, old content you do not need migrated to Canvas but that you are not ready to permanently delete, you can download a copy to your local computer and then backup in your chosen cloud platform (ex: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc).

Sakai does not have a tool to export content from all tools at the same time, so you will need to go to the desired tool and download content separately. In addition, some Sakai tools do not have a bulk download option so you may need to copy/paste data into a spreadsheet or text document as necessary. 

If you have questions for how to do this in one of your past Sakai sites, please email us canvas@duke.edu. Make sure to include the Sakai site name you are working in and a description of what content you are trying to extract.

Note: When making copies of data, users should ensure that they are following all copyright laws and obtaining permission from the copyright owner where necessary. 

The equivalent to project sites in Canvas are Collaboration Sites. Learn more and request a Collaboration Site here.

As of May 2024, no new project sites may be created in Sakai. Project sites in Sakai may continue to be used until Summer 2025, when access to Sakai will be disabled. If you have a project site in Sakai, we recommend you request a collaboration site in Canvas as soon as possible. 

Prior to this university-wide transition, the Duke University School of Medicine and Duke's Fuqua School of Business had already established their own instances of Canvas. If you are attempting to access a course for either of those schools, you can access their instances of Canvas below:

• Canvas for School of Medicine
• Canvas for Fuqua

DKU is transitioning from Sakai to Canvas with Duke University. Canvas is accessible similarly to Sakai. DKU's Center for Teaching and Learning are leading the training and adoption efforts for instructors at DKU. Visit DKU's Canvas site for more specific information and resources.

Kits won’t go away as it provides value outside the LMS and outside the course context for those working on projects and collaborations. We are evaluating the relationship between Kits and Canvas to better balance the functionality Kits provides with the complexity that comes with it. The integration between Kits and Canvas may be different than what currently exists between Kits and Sakai.