UCI’s Open Education project has been gradually evolving over time since we joined the OEC in 2007 and has faced a series of issues related to its growth. (1) How could we support our project’s need for a website platform? We didn’t need a full LMS and we wanted something that handled the specifics of open education. EduCommons, the original software used by many universities to host their OpenCourseWare projects, no longer has any active development . (2) As our OpenChem project grew to incorporate thousands of individual chemistry topics covering the span of the undergraduate major (and even some graduate courses), how could we optimize this resource for learning? And, finally, (3) as the university’s needs have been changing over time to include more team-developed courses, how can we take advantage of the investment in our website to address these needs? Slowly, we began developing a series of software applications to handle these issues. Our as-yet-unnamed software for our OCW/OPEN website handles the complexities of a multi-university environment, making it possible to support a lightweight hosting environment for colleges and universities that don’t have the support staff, but want to quickly put up their resources for open distribution. Our peer learning application tries to create the infrastructure for real learning communities in which a content library becomes accessible via search to a peer leader who uses video, text, and practice opportunities combined with a whiteboard to quickly and easily lead a group study session over the open web. And, finally, we are working on a new “commons” platform as a means not just for sharing within the university community, but also as a collaboration too that allows users to manage content revision and to edit various documents and course syllabi. With the capability of assigning CC licenses, this becomes a potentially useful tool for cross-institutional co-creation of courses and other exciting uses.
