Plone in Education: A Case Study of the Use of Plone and Educational Content

In recent years MIT has been releasing course materials online through their OpenCourseware project, making content available all around the world for free. Many people have benefited and continue to benefit today from having these materials available. Other universities are also now beginning to see the value of participating in similar movements, and are publishing OpenCourseware sites of their own. This movement is growing across the world including universities from several countries such as Japan, China, Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico, and the United States. Producing web sites with freely available educational content can be a complicated endeavor for many academic institutions. Work is currently being done to reduce the technological and economic barriers to participating in OpenCourseware. A project called eduCommons, which is built by the Center for Open Sustainable Learning (COSL) at Utah State University, is making it easier for institutions share their course materials. This session will detail the evolution of eduCommons, from its first release on Plone 1.5.2, to the most current version that has just been released on Plone 3. Even if you are not involved in OpenCourseware, but are contemplating making course materials or educational content available on the web, you will want to learn about our approach to writing reusable Plone based educational products, and learn about best practices of how to publish educational content from those who have been involved in the OpenCourseware movement.