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Over the past several years, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of online course material available. Many colleges have dramatically increased the number of classes provided online as a way to stretch resources, as well as allowing more independently paced study. Re-entry students who have full-time jobs, for example, can "attend" class during evenings and weekends, whereas they might not be able to come to a physical classroom during the day in the middle of a work week.

There are many challenges that come up in making online classes informative and relevant for the needs of their students. One way to try to make the online learning experience better for students is through tools like Moodle.

Moodle calls itself a "course management system." It provides a framework for creating Internet-based courses of instruction and the supporting web sites. Based on a philosophy called "social constructionist pedagogy", which takes advantage of interactions among the community as well as content provided by the instructor, Moodle allows instructors to create opportunity for rich interaction, including elements such as wikis, forums, and blogs, as well as quizzes, surveys, and other activities.

There is extensive documentation available on the Moodle website. If you are responsible for the design or execution of online instruction, it may be worth your while to take a look and examine in depth the types of resources that Moodle can make available for you.

Moodle is available both for Windows and Mac systems running OS X, as well as systems running various flavors of Linux–basically any system that can support PHP, and requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Download Moodle

Is peer-to-peer file sharing not for you? It's too complicated to set up, and how about all those security issues. Does FTP scare you? What do all those arcane command line arguments mean anyway? You've got a file that needs to get from Point A to Point B. How do you do it?

Enter PipeBytes, a slick file-exchange service that only requires two users–the sender and the receiver–with a web browser each. Rather than sitting on somebody's server out there on the Internet, your file is actually copied directly from your machine to the target system.

To use the service, the users at each end simply go to the PipeBytes website.
The sender clicks on the Send File button, browses to and selects the file to be sent, optionally adds a text message, and clicks on the Start Upload button. The service returns a Pickup Code and a Pickup URL. The recipient then either clicks the Pickup File button on the PipeBytes website, or enters the Pickup URL into their browser, sees your message and a description of the file (filename, size, and MIME type), and clicks on the Start Download button.

Only at this point is the file actually uploaded from the senders machine. It never sits on a server anywhere, since it's immediately transmitted from the source to the destination machine. That means it's more secure, because it never sits anywhere waiting to be broken into. Encrypt your file, and you're using what has to be one of the safer file transfer methods out there.

PipeBytes is an online service, so it will work with just about any system out there that supports a web browser.

Download PipeBytes

Who can live without email? We all use it multiple times a day. If you're looking for something beyond what you're currently using, you may want to give i.Scribe a spin.

i.Scribe is a lightweight email client that combines email functionality with an integrated contact database, as well as a calendar. It doesn't require an installer (one is included for user convenience), so it can be dropped wherever you want it to live, including USB drives, making it super easy to bring along with you.

It starts up fast, requiring only a second or two to get up to speed. It may be one of the safer email clients out there, since it supports HTML email but not embedded scripts, so you won't have to dread opening emails like in Outlook. It features a Bayesean spam filter, so it will learn what you consider spam and react accordingly, getting smarter and more efficient over time.

i.Scribe supports only a single account (they have a paid version that supports multiple accounts), so it may not be the most flexible tool you own, but you can't beat the price.

i.Scribe is available as a free download. It runs under Windows (most features run under 98/ME, more under 2k/XP), Linux, and a beta-level version for Mac OS X.

Download i.Scribe

No matter where you wander on the Internet, you leave footprints. Each time your browser requests a web page, it also tells that server a lot about you. Multiply that by the number of websites you visit in a day or week, and that's a lot about you spread all over the place. Is there any way to help keep that from happening?

One way to leave fewer footprints–or at least footprints that nobody knows belong to you–is to use proxy servers. These get between you and the other servers, and as far as the web server is concerned, it's the proxy, and not you, that made that page request. The down side there is that the proxy knows who you are. How about making it so that nobody knows who you are?

Tor–The Onion Router–is just such a tool. Actually, it's a confluence of three different pieces that come together to make you as invisible as possible on the Web. Tor is the actual application that woks on your behalf behind the scenes. Vidalia (notice the nice onion metaphor continues) is a GUI for the
Tor app, And finally Privoxy, a web proxy that works in conjunction with the other two. All together, these pieces running across a network of widely dispersed proxy servers makes it nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who you are or to tie your activity back to you. It's probably as close as you can come to anonymity on the Web.

Tor is a free download, and is available for Linux (and other Unices), Mac, and Windows.

Download Tor - The Onion Router

Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of like for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

Download Juice Receiver

RSS has made everybody's life easier. Rather than having to run around the Web to see what's going on out there in the world, you can let the world come to you. Whether it's news and politics, social networking, or the musings in the blogosphere, the world literally beats a path to your door through RSS syndication of content.

RSSOwl is a free newsreader that lets you read news the way you want to. Along with the expected subscribe and read functionality, there are extras that deserve a good look. Enhanced search capability allows you to find just the posts you are interested in.

You can also search for newsfeeds you haven't discovered yet, helping you to cover your interests even better. Once you find a site you like, RSSOwl will scour the site, looking for every feed that they feature.

There's an internal browser, so HTML content will be rendered correctly for your viewing pleasure.

You can minimize the app to the System Tray, keeping it out of the way until it detects new unread items. It lets you new when you have new stories to look at, keeping you right on top of things.

A new Version 2 is currently under development. It promises to add Usenet capability, allowing you to go old school and keep track of Newsgroups as well.

RSSOwl is a Java application, and is available for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows systems.

Download RSSOwl

VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) is one of the bigger deals out there for taking advantage of the Internet. Instead of using the phone company and its network of wires and switches, you use the Internet as the conduit for your phone calls to travel from here to there. Commercial services like Vonage allow you to make calls this way, although you still get to pay for the privilege. Free providers like Skype are out there, allowing you to call other members for free, while paying to call numbers that aren't part of the network.

The Gizmo Project is another free VoIP service. Like Skype, you can call other members for free, or for an additional fee you can call and receive calls from phones that aren't part of their network. There are differences, however, between Gizmo and Skype.

Based on the open SIP standard, Gizmo allows you to also talk with Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live users, as well as IM your AIM and MSN buddies. file sharing is available through the IM window. Free voicemail and conference calling further enhance your options.

If it's time to tell the telco to take a hike, you may want to hike over to Gizmo and take it for a spin.

Gizmo is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, so just about everybody can use it.

Download Gizmo

Are you an Amazon junkie? How did we ever get along before having the ability to instantly order books, music, and video, to say nothing of cookware, patio furniture, and any of a zillion other things you can order from Amazon? Here's a tool to make it even easier to order from Amazon at the best price possible.

AmazonWatcher will allow you to watch for specific products, looking for changes in availability or price. Enter your item, and choose your criterion: an unavailable item becomes available, or the product price drops below a set level. When you get a hit, the app will alert you, and you can choose to bring up a web page, or send an email as well. You can even order automatically if you want. It's clever enough to figure out what the price is when you get one of those confusing "price too low to display" messages.

Along with the main Amazon site, AmazonWatcher can also watch several of the international sites, broadening your horizons if you're a fan of Region 2 DVDs, for example. The publisher warns that the automatic purchase option may not work with international sites.

AmazonWatcher is available in both Windows (2000, XP, Vista) and Mac (OS X 10.3.9+) flavors.

Download AmazonWatcher

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant–or on eBay. Never before in the history of humankind has so much stuff been available in one location. Unfortunately, the eBay interface isn't the fastest or easiest way to find things and buy them.

GarageBuy is a desktop application for Macs that allows you to search, bid, and buy in auctions on eBay. Officially certified by eBay, GarageBuy updates automatically during the final phase of auctions, so you don't have to keep refreshing your display manually to see the latest prices. Save your searches (and results) locally so that you can revisit them easily. The Gallery List shows as many relevant images as will fit on your screen at once. Growl support means that you don't have to spend all your time watching things either–notifications for newly found items or price changes can be displayed on-screen, as well as spoken or emailed to you.

GarageBuy is a Universal Binary application, so it'll run on your PPC or MacIntel box with OS X 10.4.

Download GarageBuy

Sometimes you're online, and sometimes you're not. Suppose you're not, but you really need to confirm some important info you saw on your favorite website just the day before. You're out of luck–until now.

Proxy Offline Browser is a slick little tool that lets you take the whole Web with you. Running in the background as a proxy server, Proxy Offline Browser keeps a copy of all pages that pass through it. That means that you are building a store of pages while you surf. Now when you need to re-examine that page from yesterday, you've already got a local copy of it. That means you can visit it again even when you're nowhere near your network, or your modem is sound asleep. When you're back online, visiting that page again will update the cached copy you have on your system, so you always have the latest and greatest.

Proxy Offline Browser Private Edition is a Java app, so it'll run on anything that supports the Java runtime or development kit, including OS X, Windows, Linux, and other flavors of *NIX as well. Best of all, it's free for personal use.

Download Proxy Offline Browser Private Edition