collaborative OCW project

[GlobalCollege]

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Hello,

We are a small organization within a relatively small university, and we are working on building a collaborative research and learning platform, based on eduCommons OCW on Plone. eduCommons, as you may know, is a popular Open CourseWare platform in use in many universities around the world.

What we are trying to do is reach out beyond the top-down approach, and beyond the narrow academic sphere to offer a platform for collaboration on learning content. We've been successful in building off of eduCommons, but are facing many roadblocks when it comes to building the collaborative portion - particularly in establishing secure, user-initiated projects, with simple invitation/permissioning, TTW and email-based mailing lists (using "Listen"), and a publication workflow that allows content to be aggregated in a site-wide library.

I have three specific questions:
1) are there members of this list who may be interested in contributing to this project,
2) can you suggest good places to find people interested in contributing, and
3) what kinds of products or solutions have you seen in use for this kind of work.

As a background: We've looked at other systems like Connexions (cnx.org) and Coactivate (previously OpenPlans), but found their systems to be so highly customized that it is substantially more difficult to build off of than a basic Plone site (or even eduCommons). We've tested out a couple of Plone workgroup products like MXMWorkgroups and TeamSpace, and found them to be lacking in functionality, or conflicting with other aspects of our build.

Your suggestions are greatly appreciated, and offers of support even more so!

Cheers,

Joel

Joel Marion
The University of Winnipeg Global College
9th floor, 491 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E4
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [hidden email]

_______________________________________________
Educational mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/educational

[JCarswell]

Joel,

We are currently writing an internal grant proposal to have similar functionality developed for our Plone-based learning site (http://learning.nwc.hccs.edu). Right now faculty post their course materials and related resources to the site, but are looking to develop some tools to foster more collaboration and shared content building for our subject areas. Part of the project will also be to create a more formal buildout for our site that can be used by others.

I'm actually in the middle of putting together business requirements today and tomorrow. If you could send me more specific information about what you are doing, maybe we can collaborate on the specifications. If we get the grant, it should be a great opportunity to bring some new education-centric products into the Plone community. Look forward to hearing from you.

Jordan Carswell
Technology & Instructional Computing
Houston Community College
Katy Campus, 198C
[phone]
[e-mail]

GlobalCollege wrote:

What we are trying to do is reach out beyond the top-down approach, and beyond the narrow academic sphere to offer a platform for collaboration on learning content.

1) are there members of this list who may be interested in contributing to this project,

[Mike Halm]

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Hi Joel,

Sorry to take a while to respond to your inquiry. We have been very involved in the Zope/Plone community for 5+ years here at Penn State.  We have a very active developer community of nearly 100 participants University-wide and we have staff members on the core developer team. We have also followed both the EduCommons and Connexions projects since their inception and know the developer teams quite well.  

Our project is called WebLion, you might be familiar with our website (weblion.psu.edu).  The focus of the project is to develop web solutions in open source for education related applications, particularly Higher Education.  We form internal (and external) partnership to develop solutions that have usefulness across the education sector.  

We would be delighted to work with you on this effort.  We are currently working on three projects with internal partners in this space.  The first is an open courseware search engine and repository which we have informally dubbed Monorail. The second that we have been working on is a set of collaborative tools for the development of courseware.  This would be used by our on-line learning organization to collaborate on the development of courseware. The final projects is an Assessment Management System to be used for storing evidence of learning for curricular accreditation purposes.  As part of our repository project it is our intention to incorporate some course development tools. We would likely use eduCommons or Connexion for this effort.

If you would like to chat by phone be happy to share our directions.

Mike

On Jun 30, 2009, at 9:34 AM, Joel Marion wrote:

Hello,

We are a small organization within a relatively small university, and we are working on building a collaborative research and learning platform, based on eduCommons OCW on Plone. eduCommons, as you may know, is a popular Open CourseWare platform in use in many universities around the world.

What we are trying to do is reach out beyond the top-down approach, and beyond the narrow academic sphere to offer a platform for collaboration on learning content. We've been successful in building off of eduCommons, but are facing many roadblocks when it comes to building the collaborative portion - particularly in establishing secure, user-initiated projects, with simple invitation/permissioning, TTW and email-based mailing lists (using "Listen"), and a publication workflow that allows content to be aggregated in a site-wide library.

I have three specific questions:
1) are there members of this list who may be interested in contributing to this project,
2) can you suggest good places to find people interested in contributing, and
3) what kinds of products or solutions have you seen in use for this kind of work.

As a background: We've looked at other systems like Connexions (cnx.org) and Coactivate (previously OpenPlans), but found their systems to be so highly customized that it is substantially more difficult to build off of than a basic Plone site (or even eduCommons). We've tested out a couple of Plone workgroup products like MXMWorkgroups and TeamSpace, and found them to be lacking in functionality, or conflicting with other aspects of our build.

Your suggestions are greatly appreciated, and offers of support even more so!

Cheers,

Joel

Joel Marion
The University of Winnipeg Global College
9th floor, 491 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E4
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [hidden email]

_______________________________________________
Educational mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/educational

_______________________________________________
Educational mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/educational

[kraig]

If any of friends are interested means i will definitely  ask them to post.

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