Using Zope to Support Open Course Collaboration – A Case Study
Robert Stephenson 1,2,4 and Dorai Thodla 1,3
(1) OpenCourse.org, (2) the Harvey Project, (3) iMorph, Inc. and (4) Wayne State University
The US National Science Foundation is building a federated digital library, NSDL, of open content for teaching and learning about science, mathematics, engineering and technology. As part of this initiative, OpenCourse.org is an NSF funded project to build an infrastructure for “open course” collaboration: developing and sharing open, reusable content for learning. Opencourse.org will be a portal for developers, a portal generator and a hosting site (ASP). Think of it as Sourceforge™ for learning object developers.
OpenCourse.org will provide a rich set of tools for collaborative development of learning objects, as well as a knowledgebase of best practices. It will support publishing learning objects to the NSDL libraries through the OAI Protocol. Code developed for OpenCourse.org will be released as open source, and will build upon existing open source software.
Zope/Plone/CMF combined with XML provide the basic platform for this project. This presentation talks about how we are using Zope and related technologies for rapid development of a collaborative platform. Topics covered will include:
- The nature of learning objects and reusable learning content.
- Standards and metadata for learning objects.
- Licensing models appropriate for open course learning objects.
- The architecture of the OpenCourse.org portal and portal factory.
- How we are adapting the portal and content management technologies in Zope for this project.