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 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. Sakai is Java-based. It is licensed under the Educational Community License, which is GPLv3 compatible.
History
Version 1.0 of Sakai was released in March 2005. Scholar became available for production use at Virginia Tech on January 29th, 2009. During spring and fall of 2009, professors had the option of using Scholar, but many chose not to, some citing fears of bugs.
During spring 2011, Scholar suffered from periods of extended downtime several days during the semester, including one during exam week.
On May 14th, 2011, Scholar was upgraded from version 2.6.2 to version 2.7.1[1], which includes many additional features and bug fixes.
On December 19th, 2011, Scholar was updated to use CAS for login and improvements were made to the gradebook.[2]
File storage
You can access Scholar through WebDAV. However, the group file limits are too small for many organizations such as engineering senior design teams with large files.
