New, free systems available from Middlebury (Segue) and Stanford (CourseWork).
Both are participants in the MIT OKI standards initiative.

A dedicated group of coders from Middlebury College has for some time now been developing a MySQL/PHP Course (alt:Content) Management System available to all under an open source license. Alex Chapin demonstrated Segue at a November NITLE meeting at Middlebury.

The day's meeting consisted of presentations from Blackboard and WebCT, followed by Alex Chapin advocating participation in the Segue project. Of the various colleges represented, I would estimate that 70% were subscribing to Blackboard, and 20% to WebCT, with Middlebury and Colby (my institution) as the lone holdouts using home-grown systems.

Blackboard and WebCT schools were both unsatisfied with their respective products, and were wowed by Segue, but sadly too wedded to their investments in proprietary systems to switch.

To those of who have already implemented a PHP based solution (Drupal, et. al.), I submit that part (or all) of the Segue code might be ripe for providing some of the course-specific CMS puzzle that Drupal alone doesn't deliver. Since it is open source, it's there for the testing. I'd be willing to bet that both sides of the equation (Drupal and Middlebury) would encourage a Drupal-Segue plugin.

Many other relevant Kairosnews posts on open source CMS can be found in the
Blogs & CMSs topic list.