The need for offline learning has been an e-learning requirement for the North West University and UNISA for a long time. The need aroused from the cost of connectivity and the bandwidth in South Africa. South African connectivity costs have come down over the past few years, but it is still high compared to other countries. Dialup users tend to spend as little time as possible online by downloading information for offline reading.

New tools like Google Gears combined with Google Web Toolkit makes it possible to develop rich web based applications with the ability to cache online files and to synchronize database content to a local database.

The Sakai Solo tool makes announcements, resources and Melete available to learners offline. The Sakai web interface is replaced with a rich Google Web Toolkit interface. This Windows-like interface is more familiar to users and eliminates browser refreshes. The user is notified when site content is possibly outdated. Only changed and new content is downloaded during the synchronization process. Large resource files can be skipped for later download via a CD-ROM. A local SQLite database stores user profile and caching information.