[Educational] collaborative OCW project

Mike Halm mjh at psu.edu
Thu Jul 9 16:14:23 UTC 2009


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: 204.988.7102
> Fax: 204.772.4622
> Email: jo.marion at uwinnipeg.ca
> _______________________________________________
> Educational mailing list
> Educational at lists.plone.org
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/educational

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