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Case Study

Building on a strong foundation

University of Notre Dame implementation of eduCommons

Institutions considering an OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative often face many daunting procedural and technical questions: What does it mean to "openly publish"? How will the OCW publishing process interface with our campus learning management system? How do we manage the workflow process?

For the University of Notre Dame, which will launch Notre Dame OCW later this year, the Center for Open Sustainable Learning (COSL) staff at Utah State University have helped to answered many of these questions. Through a combination of their OCW consulting services and their open-source OCW management system called eduCommons, Notre Dame is well on their way toward publishing its own OCW Web site.

"eduCommons has the great advantage of having been designed for an OCW project from the ground up," said Professor Terri Bays, the project director of Notre Dame OCW. "Practically speaking, this means our not having to work around parameters set by someone else's project goals. Philosophically speaking, it means that the system design is aligned with the same principles of open sharing that motivate OCW. Built entirely from open-source code, eduCommons removes proprietary use-barriers from both producer and consumer alike."

"This means less occasion for saying, 'We're sorry, this knowledge is available only to those with the right resources,'" Bays continued.

EduCommons is a publication system designed specifically to support OCW projects, including several of the projects participating in the OpenCourseWare Consortium. The COSL tool provides the functionality necessary to develop and manage an open access collection, including a workflow process that steps users through uploading materials into a repository, the copyright clearance process, reassembly of materials into courses, a quality assurance process, and final publication of the materials. While the front end of eduCommons is designed to visually align with other OCWs, the back-end architecture stores elements of the OCW project as individual learning objects in order to facilitate easy re-use downstream by the global OCW audience of educators and learners.

"The eduCommons is extremely user-friendly," Bays said. "This means I can hire course production assistants based on their understanding of the relevant academic disciplines, rather than on their technical savvy. When technical issues arise, we have recourse to the online COSL forum, where our questions are immediately visible to the COSL team member best suited to answer them. Knowing that the system's designers are available boosts the confidence with which we approach our work, even when no particular assistance happens to be needed."

For more information on eduCommons, please contact the COSL staff.