Presented during OE Global 2015 Pre-conference Workshop

1. Overview of Content
Management Systems
(CMS) for OER
Jure Cuhalev
jure@oeconsortium.org

2. • Jure Čuhalev,
Director of Technology at Open Education
Consortium
• 10+ years in working in Open Source Communities
• Previously Community Manager / Technology
evangelist

3. LMS Web CMS
Student enrolment
Discussion boards
Assessment
Content
Content
Integration with 3rd party
content providers
General purpose

4. Popular Web CMS Systems
• WordPress (most popular)
• Drupal
• Joomla
• They are all actively maintained with large global and
local communities
• Extendable with 3rd party commercial support, books
and forums
• Accessibly features and translation support

5. Licensing / costs
• Open Source software - Free (and open) but
without warranty or support
• Commercial hosting available from as low as $5/
month
• Require about 1 hour/month for basic maintenance
(security and maintenance updates)

6. How to choose?
• Survey existing solutions inside your organisation
• Avoid vendor lock-in (custom built solutions)
• Availability of external contractors
• Just pick one - good content trumps technology

7. Getting started with WP
• Free hosting on wordpress.com
• Use one of the default themes:
• Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Fourteen
• Just start writing and copying your existing content
• Once you hit limits of the WP.com, export content
and import it into your hosted wordpress.org
installation

9. Accessibility
• Wordpress has dedicated
accessibility team
• Admin dashboard and
official themes (Twenty *) all
follow best current practices

10. • Start with content in a simple CMS
• Once you have one course entered, consult with
CMS consultant about presentation and
organisation
• Optimise for legibility and accessibility, design
second

11. Ed Tech?
• Prototype using off the shelf technologies
• Lots of advancements in general purpose software
• Vendors might not be experienced
• Not invented here syndrom

15. Platforms
• OpenStax CNX - http://cnx.org/
• P2PU - https://p2pu.org/en/
• MERLOT Course builder
• (many more)

16. Discoverability

17. • Google will index and find your resources
• As long as you provide good content, no need
for Search Engine Optimisation
• (Advanced) Structured Data Markup
• https://developers.google.com/structured-data/
• Benefit from being hosted on .edu and other
educational domains

18. • Each vertical search engine will have their own
policies on how to include the data
• Most of them support entry via wizard
• Excel / CSV for larger data sets (100+ courses)
• Manually match your course categories with the
one from provider
• Dublin Core / Learning Objects Metadata / LRMI