Over the past several years many of our brick and mortar classrooms have undergone significant renovations and new classrooms have been built which allow for seamless integration of computer-based and Web-based material into lecture presentations. Increasingly, academic departments are adopting blended and online course delivery methods  to serve the needs of traditional on-campus students, part-time students and students learning at a distance. The increasing use of blended and online course delivery and the evolving needs and expectations of teachers and students with respect to the tools available to them in the online environment suggests that the time has come to renovate the University of Windsor’s virtual classroom environment. CFL is considering the following three recommendations in a report currently being developed:

1. To improve in the capabilities afforded to instructors by our course management system (CMS),

2. To provide a course portal to improve course access, convenience and efficiency for students.

3. To implement a more effective support infrastructure for faculty and students.

Open-Source CMS Development

In our investigation of CMS options, we discovered a number of non-commercial, open-source alternatives. (Open-source software is software whose code is available for users to look at and modify freely. It is available under licenses that allow for its redistribution, enhancement, repurposing and the derivation of new works.)

Two of these projects are noteworthy from our perspective: M00dle (http://www.moodle.org/) is an easy-to-install and well thought-out system with a number of attractive features; and the Sakai Project (http://www.sakaiproject.org/) promises to integrate some best-of-breed open-source tools to build a CMS worthy of enterprise-level deployment.

We have been experimenting with M00dle, particularly in the context of the Communication Studies project. In trying to adapt M00dle to meet our needs, we did encounter a number of design issues that proved frustrating and hindered our progress. Since our essential needs were not very complicated, we considered the idea of simply building our own framework to support this and other Web-based projects that are not well suited to the existing ViCKi framework. We believe that we can realize a framework that simpler and more adaptable than those of M00dle, Sakai, et. al., yet one that is expressive and powerful enough to meet our current and future requirements.

We realize that maintaining such a framework might be costly in the long run. At the same time, the framework could be of great use to other institutions. Therefore we decided that, if we were to proceed, the framework should be made available to others under an open-source license, thus allowing other institutions to participate in the ongoing maintenance of the project.

Graham Fawcett has been given the short-term task of prototyping such a system (code-named "Victor", in homage to our current system, ViCKi). Work on the prototype is scheduled for completion at the end of March 2003. There has been interest in the system expressed from faculty, librarians and technicians at Carleton, Yale and New York University. It is hoped that this interest can be developed into a commitment to share in the ongoing development of the framework.

It is not expected that such a system would replace ViCKi, which has a large user base and which serves its core purpose very well. However, as our Synchronous Chat experiments indicate, ViCKi may not be a viable platform as demand increases for more sophisticated tools and online-learning approaches. A newer system may augment our investment in ViCKi and provide us with additional tools for meeting future challenges in the online-learning area.