An exciting new consortium has just been kicked off to serve a Higher Education IT community that wants to use Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 technologies to build out functionality which will support greater collaboration in the classroom, and have a positive impact on Teaching and Learning.  The Consortium are looking for members to join in with their ideas and contributions, so you should feel free to pay a visit.

You can read all about it here, and I have included an excerpt from the initiative description below.  All code that comes out of this solution will be released as shared source.

The objectives of this showcase project are two-fold.  First, it is designed to address missing, but critical, teaching and learning work roles and second, it is intended to jumpstart the collaborative process for using SharePoint as the development platform for the next generation Higher Education Collaboration system.
In order to achieve the first objective, the most frequently requested work roles enabled by SharePoint will be addressed.  These include:

• An Integrated Grade Book Web Part/Web Service
• Integrate the Testing Functionality from the SharePoint Learning Kit; fill in any gaps required for Higher Education community to utilize it as an Online Testing Platform
• Migration of existing web parts (e.g. MyClasses Web Part, Assignment Drop Box, Student Activity Tracker ) to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

In order to achieve the second objective, it is proposed that the development of these additions to SharePoint be accomplished through a collaborative effort between Microsoft, several community colleges, several four year universities and at least one outside vendor. Such collaboration should not only provide a robust set of web parts for SharePoint, but it also should help us to be closely tuned to the needs of the higher education community.