Most of you know about or have used Blackboard. Blackboard has been actively involved in pursuing and enforcing aggressive patent and IP policies. Thankfully, there are several open-source alternatives that provide similar functionality: Moodle and Sakai.

The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-sourceSakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Most surprisingly, our very own Virginia Tech has been working on a customized implementation of Project Sakai. It’s called Scholar and is accessible to anyone with a VT pid. At least one person I talked to had used this CMS in their classes. Does anyone else know more about this project?

Scholar is an innovative and robust collaboration and learning management system. Designed by higher education for higher education, it offers tools in support of teaching and learning, research and collaboration, and assessment/accreditation projects.