Open Sourceware Consortium

April 10, 2007 1:34 PM

Open Sourceware Consortium "While MIT has pioneered the open courseware movement where many class materials are made freely available online, there's now an Open Courseware Consortium extending courses to dozens of universities and many thousands of courses." - Don Lancaster
posted by dragonsi55 (9 comments total)

Did you mean open coursewear?
posted by delmoi at 2:35 PM on April 10, 2007

No, silly: open coarse wair.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:45 PM on April 10, 2007

At Rice University: Connexions

At Utah State: EduCommons (supporting Utah State OCW)
posted by 3.2.3 at 2:50 PM on April 10, 2007

Fnark
posted by dragonsi55 at 3:15 PM on April 10, 2007

And if you're looking to create online coursework (think webCT/blackboard) via open source, there's always Moodle
posted by jmd82 at 3:37 PM on April 10, 2007

Also ATutor or Dokeos or Claroline or Sakai. There are a number of mature open source learning management systems (LMS) out there beyond the two that most people think of (moodle and sakai).

There's some hope that LMS will be substantially supplanted by Personal Learning Environments (PLE) like Elgg.

EduCommons and Connexions are both built on Zope, and there's a demo instance of EduCommons here. Novell is even using it.

I've often wondered though about these open courseware initiatives in terms of what they actually offer beyond some structure to get at content that's already out there. The structure is useful in defining the subjects, but it is just content, isn't it? What does an open courseware system offer that a regular content management system does not?
posted by idb at 5:41 PM on April 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Is this the same Don Lancaster who used to have a column in Nuts and Volts? I used to read his articles in high school. If it's the same guy, I'm glad he's still mixing it up.
posted by Tacodog at 8:10 PM on April 10, 2007

Tacodog - this is the same guy. He's been mentioned in comments, but I posted the site in the blue.
posted by dragonsi55 at 6:26 AM on April 14, 2007

EduCommons and Connexions are both built on Zope

Actually, built on Plone (which is built on CMF which is built on Zope).
posted by 3.2.3 at 8:38 PM on April 17, 2007