Sakai is a free, community-driven, open source educational software platform designed to support teaching, research and collaboration.

[4] [6] Sakai is developed as open source software as a community effort, stewarded by the Apereo Foundation, a member-based, non-profit corporation.

It works to promote the wider adoption of community-source and open standards approaches to software solutions within the education and research communities.

While members take care of most of the development and support in practice, joining the Foundation is not required to use the software or participate in the community.

The early versions were based on existing tools created by the founding institutions, with the largest piece coming from the University of Michigan's CHEF course management system.

Each institution had built a custom course management system: Sakai 1.0 was released in 2005, and it was adopted by all participating universities.

One of the partners, the University of Cambridge, started work on a more student-centric system in an attempt to provide a better fit with their own educational model.

In the following 2 years, many existing users also retired Sakai, moving to other software, while other core contributors remained.

The main focus of development has been on incrementally improving the existing toolset and modernizing the look and feel, making it more suitable for mobile use.

In addition to the course management features, Sakai is intended as a collaborative tool for research and group projects.

Major releases tend to be in spring or early summer, in order to allow institutions to upgrade before the new academic semester, and many of them do.