Resources

Institutional Collaboratives and Open Source Software

Sakai Project
http://sakaiproject.org

One major inter-institutional collaborative project is the Sakai Project. It is a community source software development consortium begun by the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford. Rather than simply sharing code and contributing developments ad hoc within a larger community (as is the case for most open source software), the universities that participate in this project assume assigned roles within a structured development process. The product of the effort is a learning management system in which the design was driven by the needs of Higher Education as determined by needs assessments. The software code for this system, called the Collaboration and Learning Environment, is freely available to other institutions.

Open Knowledge Initiative
http://web.mit.edu/oki

This project is a collaboration among a great number of universities and software specification and standards organizations. Together, they are working to create an open and extensible architecture for learning technology specifically targeted to the needs of the higher education community. That is, they are coordinating shared standards for the design and development of e-learning software to support interoperability among applications.

OSPI
http://www.theospi.org

The goal of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is to develop non-proprietary, open source electronic portfolio software. As part of this effort, they host a website that disseminates project news and updates, offers support forums, provides information and source code downloads for software developers, showcases portfolio projects and includes a number of other resources. The OSPI website serves as a good illustration of robust and active inter-instutional collaboration in action.