EDUCAUSE: “At the End of the Day We Will Have Given it All Away: The Convergence of Open-Source CMS and Open Courseware”

Free content for community colleges (well and everybody else)! Free!

Developing content based on model of MIT Open CourseWare success, but for community college level courses.

Foothill-De Anza approached by Hewlett Foundation to lead effort for more general education level courses, community college level curriculum. Based on success with FHDA success in ETUDES (Easy To Use Distance Education Software), home grown course management system,

Project name: Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets (SOFIA) open content initiative http://sofia.fhda.edu/

Sofia – the wisdom and intellectual virtue achieved when striving after the best ends and using the best means”
– Aristotle

Alan’s cheap, half-baked summary: The goals of the project are lofty, admirable, well planned, et . Everything looks like it should. What is not clear is how the content will be shared, is it the course as a bundle, is it unbundled, can one use pieces?? It also begs the questions others have asked about MIT’s Open CourseWare project- isn’t there more to the course than then content? Regardless, I’ll be curious to see how these free courses are rolled out and received.

Call for participation to California Colleges (via California Virtual Campus), 17 responded for the pilot to put existing courses into Sofia

Applied Creative Commons License.

Call for reviewers – 40 peer reviewers, 6 on editorial board.

Objective Rating by Reviewers:
1) Educational Content
2) INstructional Design
3) Interactivity and Community
4) Use of Multimedia

Final Rating by Reviewers:
1) Definitely worth publishing
2) Worth publishing with minor enhancements
3) Needs significant enhancement
4) Does not meet quality criteria

Rewards to finalists: $1000

Estimated cost per course ($10,000)

Document process (via web discussion board, no email)

Consistent Presentation (navigation, layout)

2 kinds of discussion forums:
* Q&A on course (not moderating) “Post a Question / Contribute a Response)
* Showcase your projects

Feature: “The Story behind the Course”- spotlighting the course authors, talk about transformation of their teaching, items in the course they are most proud of, tips for students.

Technology:
* Use existing FHDA Course Management System (ETUDES)
* Had started work on re-write on ETUDES, but saw the future was better with Sakai. Joined Sakai effort

Challenges:
* How to deal with required textbooks
* Copyright/IP issues, dealing with regular practice of hiding behind password protected site
* Accessibility compliance

Why Use a CMS?
* standard presentation format
* built-in collaboration
* built-in assessment
* standard development environment
* easy adoption by our community of users
* ease of modification
* portable content

Why Open Source
* control of destiny
* only path to sustainability
* wide adoption of tools/content
* develop tools for open publishing (CC license, public view, IP workflow, Authoring)

Courses available Jan 4, 2005:
* Intro to Java
* English Literature

(the slide zoomed past before I could get more)

Next Phase
* Publish Core General Ed Curriculum
— high enrollment courses
— high stakes courses
— selective electives
* Improve Technology for Open Publication
* Encourage Collaborative Publication