Scholar is the Virginia Tech deployment of Sakai. "Sakai is a set of software tools designed to help instructors, researchers, and students create websites for collaboration." Sakai is Free Software jointly developed by Virginia Tech, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Cambridge, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, Rutgers, Yale, Georgia Tech, University of Cape Town, and others. Scholar is running concurrently with Blackboard for the fall 2009 semester but will become the only online course tool beginning spring 2010.
Since Learning Technologies seemed always slow to upgrade Blackboard versions, certain features unavailable in the deployed BB version, such as RSS feeds, may be welcomed by the more tech-savvy students. During spring and fall 2009, professors had the option of using Scholar, but many chose not to, some citing fears of bugs.
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History
Version 1.0 of Sakai was released in March 2005. Scholar became available for production use on January 29th, 2009.
Technical Details
Sakai is Java-based. It is licensed under the Educational Community License, which is GPLv3 compatible.