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 information#software libre|software libre]] 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 was running concurrently with [[Blackboard]] for the fall 2009 and spring 2010 semesters but became the only online course tool (besides departmental websites) in the fall of 2010.