In one of the classes I'm teaching this semester, 14 of 17 students were also in one of my classes last semester - a class in which I used Canvas. On the first day of class this semester, when I mentioned that we would be using Sakai, there was an outbreak of grumbling among the students. "Why?!" they wanted to know. I explained that we had only a limited number of spots in our institution to pilot Canvas.

Still, I had gone to great lengths to set up my course in Sakai, more thoroughly than I had bothered to do in the past, trying to make it as useful for the students as Canvas had been last semester. When I showed them the first online quiz that was assigned for this week, someone pointed out that it didn't appear on the Calendar, even though the due date was specified in the published quiz. A mystery... temporary, I'm sure, as there is probably some preference that I set wrong when I created the quiz. Still, to be sure, I asked students if quizzes typically showed up on the Calendar for their other classes. My question was met with blank stares and hesitation, until one student spoke up and confessed that they didn't know... because they never used the Calendar in Sakai. They too found it useless.

In another class that I'm teaching, when I introduced the online quiz for the first week, I went over tips on how to avoid technological problems while taking a quiz in Sakai. I asked the students if they had ever experienced problems with online quizzes in Sakai. Well over half of the class raised their hands and shared their Sakai problems: Sakai froze in the middle of my quiz; the browser crashed; the question displayed incorrectly with parts of the questions wrapped into the answers; Sakai wouldn't save the results after I answered all the questions; it wouldn't let me select the answer I wanted...

What a contrast with my experience last semester with Canvas -- of 75 students in three classes using Canvas, I had only one student report a problem with a quiz (he took the quiz on his smart phone, and on one of the questions he was unable to select the answer he wanted).