Optimizing OpenCourseWare (OCW)
Just had a great meeting with Mike Caulfield. He helped me better understand the OCW World and highlighted ways that NIXTY could help address some of the challenges that OCW faces. Before jumping into some of the steps that we can take, let me first sketch out the NIXTY system, so you can see these steps in context.
NIXTY is a global learning platform that provides free and premium ePortfolios, courses, CEs and learning management systems. Institutions can launch a private LMS/CMS just like they would from another commercial or open source LMS/CMS provider. Additionally, there is a public/open side where anyone can launch a course.
Now, back to the main point, NIXTY can take the following steps to better align with the OCW world.
1. Integrate the OCW banner into course development - when a person launches a course on NIXTY, we can make it very easy for them to make it a OCW.
2. Provide metrics on OCW reuse - if a person creates an OCW on NIXTY, then we can make it very easy for people to reuse that content in other courses. Additionally, we track course content at the micro-level, so if people port content out of a OCW course and reuse it in another course, then we can provide them with an overall dashboard to track macro and micro OCW course content.
3. Help faculty convert course content published in their institution’s LMS to OCW content and publish it on the public side of NIXTY so that it is easily accessible. For example, I’m a professor at X University. I build my course out in my institution’s private NIXTY LMS. When it is done I see a button that says “publish as OCW and make available on Web”. If I press that button, then my course content falls under the OCW banner and gets published on the open/public side of NIXTY. As an aside, we are not yet common cartridge compliant, but will be in the near future (we have the common catridge engine built, but it is not yet integrated with NIXTY).
4. Make NIXTY courses publicly accessible to the OCW Consortium search tool, so that content can readily be found/integrated/exported.
These are a few steps that we can take. If you have additional recommendations, then please let me know. You can email me: glen at nixty.com.
