Commercial Suppliers Showcase Open Market Interoperability at OpeniWorld:eLearn

 

For demonstrating educational impact

 

Total Content Access captured its "Best of Show" title for clearly demonstrating the educational potential that can be achieved when educators and students use handy software tools to find and assemble content from multiple commercial, institutional and open sources.  Ubiquitous access to educational content from a variety of educational applications is clearly realized in this remarkable demonstration.

 

Original Showcase Description:

 

Join us in New Orleans to experience federated search and access to content from commercial publishers and subscription services such as Pearson Publishing, BFW Publishing, and JStor alongside community sources such as MERLOT and Connexions.

 

A growing number of commercial and non-commercial content providers are enabling faculty and librarians in higher education to rapidly discover and aggregate their content into courses and shared repository systems. The interoperability across these content sources that is provided by OSID-based interfaces has created an open market in which faculty members, students and other customers can discover, buy, and use content from all of these suppliers.

 

Implementation of the O.K.I. Repository Open Service Interface Definition (OSID) by these marketplace players ensures that they can provide their customers with content that is automatically usable in applications such as HarvestRoad Hive Explorer®, Giunti Labs® Authoring Tools, The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), Sakai, Moodle, etc. This support of open standards and specifications is critical to their participation in the Digital Marketplace being created by the California State University system.

 

This demonstrator will showcase the addition of commercial educational resources to interoperability scenarios that are familiar to OpeniWorld and Digital Marketplace participants. These scenarios include:

 

* Federated Search and Discovery of Content: In constructing course materials, a faculty member should have the ability to determine if a suitable resource already exists. Various content authoring/aggregation applications will be used to showcase the ability to search across all available and authorized sources.

 

* Resource List Management: Faculty members, librarians, and other resource managers should able to present resource lists to students within an RLMS application or as part of an integrated offering within a Learning Management System. This scenario will use Harvest Road's Resource List Management System to provide the demonstrator.

 

About the Digital Marketplace

 

The goal of CSU's Digital Marketplace initiative is to enable the effective distribution of network-based digital goods and resources in support of academic programs. This Initiative addresses the growing need to efficiently acquire and distribute resources for elearning and to integrate these resources with instructional programs, library repositories, and other teaching and learning services.