Software for Online Courses?

bcrowell asks: "I teach Physics at a community college, and a lot of the faculty are trying their hands at teaching internet courses. I'm going through the process of getting approval to offer some of our physics courses with online instruction plus lab, as an alternative to lecture plus lab. (My main motivation is to boost enrollment in some of our higher-level courses, which tend to get canceled if not enough people enroll.) The standard software for this kind of thing seems to be WebCT, but I get the impression that it's proprietary straightjacket-ware. I'd rather go with something open-source, especially since proprietary software seems to come and go, but the best open-source code is forever -- who wants to waste their time building a whole course around the flavor-of-the-month software? I'm particularly curious whether something like Slashcode might work. Most online courses include a requirement that people post a certain number of 'substantial' comments, where 'substantial' is a subjective term to be determined by the instructor. I know some teachers who say when they teach a large online course, they just don't have time to read all the posts, so they end up going by length a lot of the time. Wouldn't moderation by one's peers work better?"