Rich McCue

Open Source CMS & Courseware

The convergence of Open Source CMS and Open Course ware is exciting for education.

The Sakai Project is a $6.8M community sourceCommunity source describes a model for the purposeful coordinating of work in a community. It is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but community source efforts rely more explicitly on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members than some open source development models. The products of this project will include an Enterprise Services-based Portal, a complete Course Management System with sophisticated assessment tools, a Research Support Collaboration System, a Workflow Engine, and a Technology Portability Profile as a clear standard for writing future tools that can extend this core set of educational applications.

SOFIA – Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets. The goal of Sofia is to publish “open” content on the web that covers most general education subjects taught at community colleges. Faculty from community colleges and four-year universities who have developed exemplary community college-level content, and are willing to share it openly with others, are encouraged to participate in the project. By inviting faculty from a variety of institutions to participate, the Sofia project will offer a breadth of learning models, teaching approaches, and depth of instructional material. The content that will be published by Sofia will be licensed under a Creative Commons License. Faculty will retain copyright of their materials that will be published in the Sofia site. The terms of attribution, distribution, and modification will be determined by the content authors.

Creative commons – faculty retain copyright, but can control it’s final use

Why use CMS for open content?
○ So interface is standard.
○ Built in collaboration tools
○ Interactive assessment
○ Easy adoption of conten by community of users.

Why open source CMS?
○ Many community colleges cannot afford expensive CMS systems.
○ Wide adoption of tools/content
○ Makes hosting easy and cost effective.