Rolling out the BB Content System: a planning story

This was presented by the Maricopa Community College District, and outlined how they were trying to implement the Content System. They make our problems pale into insignificance: 277000 students, lots of staff (I got a bit confused here), 9 separate colleges, students who may be taking courses at more than one of the colleges at the same time....

So pretty big, and pretty disparate. What was interesting was how many of their conclusions fitted with waht we have seen. For example: staff don't really want to share content. They might want to reuse it to some degree, but they don't really want to share. You can't just launch the content system on an unsuspecting public: you need to identify what you want to use it for. The library already had a solution for e-reserves. In their case, they identified enabling staff to reuse content which they delivered multiple times, some sharing if they wanted, and the ability to easily access their content from off-site. They also felt is was important to have something whch would add value for students, so they are using portfolios.

They'd identified some quite interesting models for their file structure. They identified content as either "My Content", belonging to an individual and "Institution Content" belonging to a group in some way. Within the My Content area they encouraged staff to use a folder structure of workspace; courses; shared and common. Common content is content that is available to anyone. Not sure it would work for us, but the interesting thing is this idea of creating a common vocabulary for using the CS.

So quite interesting, and quite a lot I could identify with even though very different institution (s)