Rodger GrahamManager, Course Design

Athabasca University

Distance delivery to 30,000 + students per year

Undergraduate courses Continuous enrollment Self study

Graduate courses Semester based

Course materials include Textbooks Lab kits CD ROM Audio/video material Material published in house

2004 – we started to move toward more online delivery

Selected a single LMS to replace WebCT, Bazaar, Lotus Notes, and other systems

Convert print-based courses to online delivery Content for printed courses mainly stored and

output from print publishing system (Interleaf)

Needed a CMS that would allow us to publish to the LMS as well as to the web, to print, and to mobile devices

The CMS would also manage collaborative development, storage, and lifecycle

Course packages Textbooks Study Guides Student Manual Other physical Resources Electronic Resources Assessment (formative and summative)

Student/institution interaction Student/teacher interaction

Mail Telephone Email Course mail

Student/student interaction discussion forum Wiki Course mail

Other social software

Little previous experience with CMS’s Committee struck June 2006 out of

Educational Media Development Committee grew to include key stakeholders

from across the university including: EMD Other course material developers Records management Training Web development and delivery Registrar Library

Looked at a wide variety of management systems.

Two main types emerged in varying degrees: Web Content Management Systems (WCMS)

Designed to manage and expose content solely through a web site(s)

Content Management Systems (CMS) Sometimes referred to as Document MS Manages content creation, storage, publishing Includes workflow, extensible roles and permissions May include Records Management features

After extensive investigation the committee developed a list of contenders: RedDot Rhythmyx Documentum ThinkingCap Docushare Cascade Server Plone Alfresco Joomla

To help compare products we developed a list of criteria through interviews with various stakeholders

Each product was measured against this list

Vendors for proprietary products and application developers for open source products provided demonstrations

Each committee member conducted a SWOT analysis of each product

Analysis led to two contenders Cascade Server by Hannon Hill (proprietary) Alfresco (open source)

User trials Installed both systems rather than use a

hosted service Set up accounts and permissions for

committee members Developed simple workflows Simulated course content publication process

including creation, editing, approval and publishing to LMS

Cascade server: Proved difficult to install Technical help was inadequate Users found the interface difficult Unable to publish to the LMS

Alfresco Installation was successful Technical support from open source

community adequate Users found the interface intuitive Publishing to LMS, at a basic level, was

achieved

Alfresco Open source a good fit institutionally Development ongoing in the Moodle

community to integrate Alfresco Local resources available (OA Solutions) Opportunity to contribute to the open source

community Development of in-house expertise Scalable to handle other institutional

requirements like records management

Alfresco was installed on a temporary server in September, 2007

Implementation committee struck 4 sub committees

Course content management Web development Records management metadata

Inevitable delays: Server expansion New releases of Alfresco Internal resource shortages

Developing use cases around content Contract with OA Solutions, an Alfresco

partner, to develop a course tracking system and copyright database in Alfresco as well as basic infrastructure for housing content

Developed several web sites driven dynamically from Alfresco

Develop workflows in CMS to manage content creation, design, and publishing to LMS, web, and print

Track course development in Alfresco using a combination of metadata and hierarchical structure

Migrate current copyright database to Alfresco Employ lifecycle tools to manage copyrighted

materials Migrate content from print publishing system

to Alfresco Investigate Common Cartridge for export Integrate Learning Design

Presentation wiki at http://tinyurl.com/45vnzv Presentation References Questions/Comments/Discussion