Abstract
Identifying key elements for successful Institutional and Faculty Collaborations in Curriculum Development using Open Technologies and Open Content
Mary Y. Lee, Gregory R. Crane & Susan Albright, Tufts University, US
Conference Theme: Collaboration
Summary: Interactive discussion: strategies/challenges for collaboration for institutions and faculty using open content/tools/networks
Abstract: A major challenge for OCWC has been helping individual faculty as well as institutions find ways to forge effective collaborations to enhance curriculum development and implementation with open resources. The authors will share their experiences from the past 2 decades of working with open technologies and open content that range from the classics to the health sciences with international partners. Through mini-presentations, they will present brief histories of their projects, describe current initiatives, and share from their experience the common elements for successful collaborations at institutional and individual faculty levels, including how networks formed and what role open technologies played in encouraging sharing and reuse of open content. Using a multifaceted open repository and tools hosted at one institution to promote curriculum development and implementation. Perseus has been a major open resource for the Greco-Roman culture since the 1980’s, providing a rich, evolving digital repository for classical Greek and Roman collections, art and archaeology images, and user tools for students and faculty. As the leading provider of open source textual and linguistic data for Greek and Latin, Perseus’s website serves a substantial audience—884,000 visits and 9.6 million page views in November 2011 alone. Perseus’s integrated reading environment combines source texts, translations, dynamically generated links to dictionaries, and language technologies (e.g., morphological and syntactic analyses) that significantly enrich and expand the range of materials with which users at all levels can work. In addition, Perseus provides the initial framework for a new generation of e-Portfolios that not only display digital versions of traditional projects but also capture the working vocabularies language students acquire over time as well as every form of contribution that students – and faculty – can make to increasingly complex “machine actionable knowledge.” Using open software as a platform for creating institutional networks, curriculum co-development, and local content development and implementation. To leverage valuable faculty time and expertise, it is essential for institutions to share content creation, curriculum development and delivery. Direct faculty-to-faculty methods across institutions include 1) content co-development—pairing faculty who teach similar areas to share content development, and 2) curriculum co-development—sharing course development and co-teaching. We will share multiple successful faculty-to-faculty and institutional networking examples that have used the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) platform, now a fully open-source, enterprise-level software that is being used by institutions in the United States, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Started in 1994, TUSK was recognized in 2010 by the Association of American Medical Colleges, particularly for its institutional curriculum management capabilities. TUSK provides rich user applications for learners, faculty, and administrators, including mobile access that is essential for supporting users in remote areas, and national curriculum reform efforts in India. Its searchable content repository enables all health sciences disciplines to share one system for content development and delivery across a diverse university or network. While Perseus and TUSK are specific open systems, the lessons learned are generalizable for how faculty and institutions can promote co-creation, sharing, and reuse of open content for specific courses or broader curriculum development initiatives.
