Creating a Curriculum/Bundling Content

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Creating a Curriculum/Bundling Content
As OCWs continue to publish course materials, and as new OCWs begin the quantity of OERs organized around courses continues to grow. Following the MIT OCW model, many universities are organizing their courses within a traditional university hierarchy. In many cases courses may “link” to prerequisites and co-requisites, but it is still challenging for the average user to compile a comprehensive curriculum within a single OCW, let alone across multiple OCWs.

Examples:
 * A machine-assisted personal learning environment (MAPLE) in which searching takes place across platforms to pull into one's file cabinet a user-directed set of materials to learn (courses, content-pieces) or to teach (lesson-plans). A self-directed organizing system to make sense out of the internet haystack.
 * Connexions "Collections" provide a way to bundle courses, mini-courses, reports, and full blown text books. Modules represent single topics and topic authors provide prerequisite links and supplemental links that can be used by collection creators to assemble relevant pathways through the material. One of the challenges in trying to do a similar sort of aggregating over general web resources is in ending up with a coherent seeming look and feel out of the resources.

Challenges:
 * A view of OCW as a combination of both opencourseware and open contentware, i.e. "mini-courses" or "curriculum packets" rather than full-blown courses.
 * The main challenge OpenLearn finds in supporting remixing material is getting it simple enough for "normal" educators.
 * The other challenge OpenLearn finds is that many educators are stuck with the "peer review" mindset which won't allow them to share their work until other academics have validated it, so we're looking at including draft status flags on contributed materials.

Enablers:
 * TBD, eXe

Story Including Search (for Course Construction)

 * Educator creates a "course" on (e.g.) "object-oriented software design":
 * Searches the web for _similar_ courses
 * the search engine could use ontologies, social tagging, profiles of learners, etc.
 * imports a combination of objectives selected from two of these,
 * edits them and posts the result to the new course.
 * The same process may be followed for any element of the new course (reading materials, activity sequences, online community links, and assignments, ... etc.).
 * (the licensing can be automated and only find appropriately licensed components)