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CourseWork, Stanford University's home-grown course management system (CMS), continues to make great strides. Since its pilot in Fall 2001, and campus-wide release in Winter 2002, CourseWork is quickly becoming the preferred CMS across campus.
More servers added to help speed up the login process
Additional servers have been added to the production environment in response to the slow login issues experienced during the beginning of Winter quarter. Doubling the total numbers of CourseWork servers will help spread the distribution of login attempts, thereby reducing the likelihood of slow login process from reoccurring.
“We want to improve the user experience by logging people in as quickly as possible,” comments Makoto Tsuchitani, CourseWork project manager. “Increasing server capacity is one option but we’re also exploring other ways to improve login performance.”
Time-saving features for faculty and instructional staff
With the release of CourseWork version 3.3.1 in Spring quarter, instructors, head teaching assistants, and course administrators will have the ability to modify certain course settings after a CourseWork course site has been set up. Under Course and Section Setup, instructional staff will have permission to modify the following course settings:
Instructional staff will benefit from these time-saving features since they will no longer have to submit a HelpSU ticket and wait for these changes to be made by the central CourseWork support team.
Useful guidelines on copyright compliance
The CourseWork team has been working with the Office of the General Counsel to provide more useful copyright guidelines to instructional staff when adding content to their CourseWork sites.
The content upload process now includes links to industry-accepted safe harbor guidelines and promotes best practices such as reminding instructional staff to link to Stanford Libraries’ electronic repositories or to content materials publicly available on the World Wide Web. Additionally, instructional staff can now submit copyright questions directly to a University expert who can address specific needs (copyrightquestions@lists.stanford.edu).
For the past two years, Stanford University has joined forces and collaborated with the University of Michigan, Indiana University, University of California, Berkeley, and MIT, to develop the next generation of course management tools. This landmark venture, called the Sakai Project, aims to create open-source course management tools and related software for the higher education community.
“This endeavor allows five institutions that have committed to software development to vet ideas and implementations with each other, creating the opportunity for a best of breed to emerge,” commented Lois Brooks, Director of Academic Computing, Stanford University. “By committing to work with each other and devote our resources to the common good, we are assuring that the collective value is returned to our own institutions, to our partners’ institutions, and to the community.”
The Sakai Project will provide Stanford with the next version of CourseWork (CourseWork v5). Select Stanford courses have piloted CourseWork v5 since Fall 2005. For more information about CourseWork v5, please visit http://coursework-pilot.stanford.edu.
