Interesting free learning portal...
From MacMinute today:
The team at Savvica have announced that Nuvvo, its on-demand learning management system, is now available free. Instructors and students can now use Nuvvo to teach and learn free of charge. "Nuvvo lets would-be instructors create their own learning portal where they can build and deliver courses to students around the world. The system works in English and German, with more languages coming soon."
Free always catches my eye.
I gave it a try (see http://passmore.learnhub.net). There is no help system on line (see, however, an Adobe PDF file at http://www.nuvvo.com/pdf/quickstart.pdf), so I really do not know what I am doing. However, most of the administration is intuitive. I sent myself an invitation to join as a student. The registration system works well. Courses can be structured with or without registration fees. The course interface is simple and easy to use, although the cascading style sheet skins that are promised to course administrators (that would be me) to control look and feel do not work. A few other things crash, too, but I push all things to their limit. Interestingly, they will store and serve "heavy" media such as QuickTime files. There is no indication of storage limitations.
Let me know if you would like to join the test course. I will send you an invitation. I am thinking about integrating this portal into one of the graduate courses I manage at Penn State during Spring Semester 2006. The value that will be added over Penn State's current course management system, ANGEL,is the ability to invite to and enroll in the course any number of participants who are not Penn State employees/students/friends. This feature especially is important to me because I want to (a) scale the course to the world and (b) scheme 
to get people at any location, from any organization, to enrich the course experience for the enrolled, tuition-paying participants. Open source/content works, even for learning portals.
