Open Ed Practices Brainstorming

What specific functionality is needed for OpenedPracticesto be an effective tool for the T&L community sharing and collaboration?

1. Subgroups have "home page" similar to TWSIA page, a portal page
2. Forums to allow for discussion (I second that!)
   1. Should send email notifications of updates - preferably with digest option
   2. Allows for international and schedule challenged to still actively participate
3. Granular authoring and access controls to allow sub-group leaders (and possibly members) to easily update content
4. Ability for some portions to remain behind closed doors.
5. Improved tagging of content to facilitate search
   1. By Categories, Best-Practice, Tools, Resources
   2. Tag Cloud / Suggestive Tagging
6. Group specific discussions on a listserv from this site--or will those be served to mailman and nabble?
7. Place to develop course site for faculty development workshops (possible long term project)

Next steps

1. Nate Angell will add the tools listed above. This will be complete by August 4.
2. We will schedule a time with Nate to walk through this and understand what is/is not possible. (Best time?)
3. This should effectively allow us to evaluate the ability of the site to meet our needs for sharing and collaboration.

Ideas for improving the OpenedPractices site

1. Have OEP become the central and official location of T&L (and subgroups) collaboration
   1. may be a temporary measure until Sakai 3 is further along
2. Make it useful beyond collecting award entries
3. DL Group is talking about how to expand to add a new repository and collaboration space
   1. You can see a sample of discussion forums in Drupal 6 (OEP is currently on version 5) demo site here: http://demo.xolotl.org/
   2. and you can create an account and test that out as you wish here http://demo.xolotl.org/user
4. TWSIA Committee is looking for a collaboration space
   1. having a central space is also ideal as group looks to align with Design Lenses
   2. other groups also overlap
5. T&L shared documentation: use cases, best practices, training material
6. T&L Sample courses (other than TWSIA)
   1. Make entering Sample Courses easier than completing entire Award Form
7. Please be sure to preserve the OSP library components.  This repository was originally created by and for the OSP community.
8. Need to incorporate more rich media -- images, screencasts, videos

OpenedPractices SubGroup

Some History

Original ideas on use of OEP site: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=21954616

Some Questions

• Where does non-technical community discussion happen?
• Should OEP be the T&L tool corresponding to JIRA where these collaborations happen?
• (There is no technical reason against this, the software can be changed to do this.)
•  Since there is no central Sakai instance for collaboration, could OEP serve that role.

Other Thoughts

• Using an instance of Sakai 3 might be ideal down the road, but not sure it is ready yet for that.
  • Using a Sakai instance may deter non-Sakai Community members from interest in the group.

• "OpenEdPractices is a community of practice for teaching and learning with open/community-source tools and servers as the official collaboration space for the Sakai Teaching and Learning Community."
• Have CoP "Portal" or entry areas for TWSIA, Distance Learning, Design Lenses, etc, that function as home pages and give access to the collaboration/forums, etc. May or may not be Sakai branded or secured while main area remains open to all.
• Separate out course profiles from TWSIA entry forms so it is easier to enter/share information about a course without the long lengthy TWSIA form. When TWSIA courses are entered they will still be added to the repository.