I just read a good article about Sakai, an online collaboration and learning environment developed for universities.
From the website:
Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.
Sakai is a free and open source product that is built and maintained by the Sakai community. Sakai’s development model is called “Community Source” because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the “community” of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai.
I used Oncourse, based on Sakai, as a graduate student at Indiana University – Bloomington. We had to use Oncourse to upload our projects for our courses. Several professors also inputed our grades with the Gradebook feature and we could check our progress throughout the semester. As an Associate Instructor for an undergraduate Database Information Systems course, I updated my students’ grades and downloaded their assignments weekly with Oncourse. It was easy to use and maintain and my professor and I had no complaints about it.
Since it is free and open source, many universities here in Vietnam could deploy Sakai easily and inexpensively. With a help of some active Vietnamese Linux users, Sakai could be translated into Vietnamese. I highly recommend Sakai over Blackboard (propriety), WebCT (propriety), or Moodle (open source).
Read up about Sakai at the Free Software Magazine website.
Sakai Project Website: http://sakaiproject.org/
Cross-posted from: http://www.saigonblogs.com/?p=23