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Dates
April 2004 — October 2006
Principal Investigator
Ann Wolpert (MIT Director of Libraries)
Goal
The goal of this iCampus project, called CWSpace, has been to digitally archive OpenCourseWare's educational content, and make it available to learning management systems by using Web Services interfaces on top of DSpace, the digital archiving system maintained by the MIT Libraries.
Overview
MIT had two goals for its OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative: to publish all of MIT's course materials (in the form of static course web sites) to the Web for world-wide free public access, and to make these course materials available to scholars and instructors for inspiration and reuse for the foreseeable future. OCW has made significant progress on the first of these promises. The second is being achieved through the use of DSpace, MIT's professionally managed and sustainable digital archiving system. In this way, the courseware content (i.e. course websites of teaching and learning materials) is made accessible in a straightforward, structured way, rather than the ad hoc methods previously used.
Project Findings
The teams at both DSpace and OpenCourseWare have implemented the necessary infrastructure to archive OCW web sites in DSpace, and have put this infrastructure into their production systems, as MIT's institutional solution for archiving MIT OCW materials.
Real World Results
This project represents a major example of actually achieving interoperability of educational content on a large scale, using standards, as field tested at MIT on two production systems.
- Interoperable Content: OCW content is now packaged for interoperation with a variety of teaching and learning systems, according to standards.
- Web Services: OCW content can now be transported across the network amongst those systems, by means of a service oriented architecture developed using SOAP standards.
Applying Standards
The CWSpace project has developed and documented two significant specifications (interpretations, or "application profiles") of industry standards, and applied them to the topics noted above:
- a profile for how courseware content ought best be represented within a Content Packaging standard; and
- the optimal mapping of a particular Web Services protocol onto the DSpace object model (API).
These each represent particular design decisions useful to both the problem at hand (OCW content into DSpace), as well as (it is expected) to other future problems concerning educational content and digital archives.
New Flexibility, Leveraged Investments
Adoption of these generalized applied standards provides new flexibility to providers and consumers of educational content in working with digital archives. Existing investments in either content management or in applications or protocols development can be leveraged against a new, flexible plugin architecture on the digital archive.
- Plugins for Packaging: In practice, multiple competing standards are in use for packaging digital content (e.g. from the domains of higher education; libraries; commercial; government). CWSpace has implemented a new plugin architecture that permits content providers and consumers to operate with various options.
- Conversion among Packaging Standards: This new CWSpace functionality, to import and export various types, effectively achieves a means of conversion among them, potentially useful to various content provider/consumer needs.
- Not Just Java Anymore: The digital archive's (Java) API is now exposed across the network to content providers and consumers, for them to utilize in distributed computing, from any kind of application development environment.
Valuable Content: Safe, Findable
Finally, the benefits delivered by digital archiving to DSpace include:
- Wider Dissemination, Interoperation: OCW content can now be discovered by a variety of additional searching and dissemination mechanisms, owing to its inclusion in a digital archive like DSpace.
- Long Life Expectation: OCW content is now under professional curation for archival timeframes, providing long term preservation and persistent URLs.
Project Output
Papers
- D-Lib Magazine (forthcoming)
- International Journal on Digital Libraries, special issue on Compound Digital
Objects. April 2006
"MIT's CWSpace project: packaging metadata for archiving
educational content in DSpace"
Presentations
- Syllabus Conference, Boston, Massachusetts. July 2006.
- Sakai Conference, Vancouver, Canada. May/June 2006. Presentation.
"DSpace and E-Learning"
- DSpace User Group meeting, Bergen, Norway. April 2006. Presentation
"Technical Introduction To and Initial Use Of the Lightweight Network Interface"
- Digital Library Federation (DLF) Spring Forum, Austin, Texas. April 2006.
Presentation.
"Archiving Courseware Websites to DSpace, using a Content
Packaging Profile and Web Services"
- DSpace User Group meeting, Cambridge, UK. July 2005. Presentation.
"Archiving
OpenCourseWare to DSpace"
Posters
- (Informal Publication) Poster prepared for Microsoft Research-MIT Alliance.
"Interoperability of Teaching & Learning Materials Across Systems"
- SPARC/SPARC-Europe conference, November 2004. Poster.
"Learning Object
Repositories: Metadata Standards for Packaging"
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