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Welcome to the home page for discussion of design and implementation issues related to Sakai's support for creating OpenCourseWare materials and sites from Sakai-based course materials. For information about the OpenCourseWare initiative, see http://www.ocwconsortium.org/about/index.shtml .

In Sakai, we'd like to provide tool support for exporting course materials in a form that makes it easier to create OCW material, that is, material that can be freely distributed and reused, from the course materials that are used in Sakai. That will include support for clearing up copyright issues, providing metadata about the resources, creating organizing pages for course materials, etc. We have been working on such a tool, and figuring out just who its users would be, for the last couple of years. An early, java-based tool developed by Zhen Qian has provided a starting point for the current work on a PHP-based tool. This tool is about to undergo some rapid development. We'll keep you posted as we work on it.

The ideas surrounding OCW material generation have also undergone some significant changes, from looking at open material generation from a faculty-centric perspective, to a staff-centric perspective to a student-centric one, to the current recognition that we need to incorporate all these views in a multi-centric approach that recognizes the contributions, and the possibilities and limitations, of each of these groups. Along the way we have become interested in what we are calling 'participatory pedagogies' or ways of teaching and learning that involve students as co-creators of the final learning materials, helping faculty with vetting the materials, using the tool we are building, providing focus in some cases, and contributing their individual and collective learning products to the mix of materials that then become available as OCW materials. This kind of deep engagement of students with the learning, and OCW generation, process is motivated by a recognition of benefits that students (and faculty) receive by having a course's material available publicly, and also the specific incentives that can be mobilized for students to work directly with faculty and support staff on this. For a quick overview of this thinking at the time of the Amsterdam Sakai Conference, see http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/download/attachments/43336/Amsterdam+OCW+Presentation-+v0.9.ppt .

More to come after next week's (September 24-25, 2007) OCW Consortium Conference - http://www.ocwconsortium.org/conferences/