CourseWork v5 is the next generation of Academic Computing's course management system. It will be released to the Stanford community during the 2007-2008 academic year. CourseWork v5 is based on Sakai, a community source development effort led by a consortium of universities including University of Michigan, University of Indiana, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford University.
CourseWork v5 Pilot: Academic Computing is making CourseWork v5 available to more Stanford courses beginning Winter 2007.
If you are teaching Winter, Spring, or Summer 2007 and would like to pilot CourseWork v5, please send an email request to coursework-pilot@lists.stanford.edu.
Based on the goal of addressing the common and unique needs of multiple higher education institutions, the community source model is an extension to the already successful, economically feasible, open source movement forged by projects such as Apache, Linux, and Mozilla. Participation in this new development model enables Stanford to:
- Share in software ownership; participate in designing, building, testing and releasing new tools; and sidestep the limitations imposed by proprietary software.
- Participate in a community of peers at the cutting edge of teaching and learning that possess the intellectual capital necessary to develop enterprise teaching and learning environments.
- Benefit from using a richer set of tools created by other higher education institutions and achieve developmental economies of scale and cost savings implicit in inter-institutional cooperation on software solutions for common academic processes and problems.
What's New in CourseWork v5
While CourseWork v5 provides many of the same capabilities as the current system (CourseWork v3.3), it also adds a host of new features that members of our academic community have been requesting. Some of these features include:
- A variety of new options for Course Materials:
- Ability to upload/download multiple files at one time,
- Option to have students post files in addition to instructors,
- Option to send notification to students when new materials are added, and
- Option to create nested folders (subfolders) to organize materials.
- Ability to add attachments to announcements that can be emailed to the class.
- Ability to calculate grades in the Gradebook.
- Ability to display external Web content within a course site.
About the CourseWork v5 Pilot
Since Winter 2006, over 30 courses have participated in the pilot of CourseWork v5. These include courses from the following departments and schools:
- Cultural and Social Anthropology
- Earth Systems
- Education
- English
- English for Foreign Students
- Graduate School of Business
- Law
- Music
- Overseas Studies
- Program in Writing and Rhetoric
Academic Computing is making the CourseWork v5 pilot available to more Stanford courses beginning Winter 2007. If you are teaching Winter, Spring, or Summer 2007 and would like to pilot CourseWork v5, please send an email request to coursework-pilot@lists.stanford.edu.
