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 #REDIRECT [[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. =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 [[w:Educational Community License|Educational Community License]], which [[w:GPLv3|GPLv3]] compatible. =See Also=* [[wgp:Sakai Project]]* [[Blackboard]] =Links=* Scholar Login* [https://scholar.vt.edu/portal/site/!gateway/page/!gateway-200 Scholar About Page]* [[FC@VT]] [http://vt.freeculture.org/2009/02/07/scholar-online/ Blog Entry]* [http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/campus_notices/campusnotice.php?item=2381 Campus Notice Regarding Blackboard to Scholar Migration]* [http://sakaiproject.org/sakai-community-map Sakai Community Map] [[Category:Free cultural works on campus]][[Category:Campus computing resources]][[Category:Software]]