Scholar
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 has not been running the latest version of Blackboard, which has features such as RSS feeds, the lack of suite-wide support in Sakai for RSS feeds should not be missed. Anyone interested in writing these or other features would likely be welcomed by Sakai community. The administrators at Virginia Tech responsible for the Sakai deployment here have expressed some willingness to deploy additional modules.
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 at Virginia Tech on January 29th, 2009.
WebDAV
You can access Scholar through WebDAV. See the Filebox article for instructions on connecting to a WebDAV server.
Technical Details
Sakai is Java-based. It is licensed under the Educational Community License, which is GPLv3 compatible.
