Overview of Content Management Systems

(CMS) for OERJure Cuhalev

jure@oeconsortium.org

• Jure Čuhalev, Director of Technology at Open Education Consortium

• 10+ years in working in Open Source Communities

• Previously Community Manager / Technology evangelist

LMS Web CMS

Student enrolment

Discussion boards

Assessment

Content

Content

Integration with 3rd party content providers

General purpose

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

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)

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

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

Accessibility

• Wordpress has dedicated accessibility team

• Admin dashboard and official themes (Twenty *) all follow best current practices

• 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

Ed Tech?

• Prototype using off the shelf technologies

• Lots of advancements in general purpose software

• Vendors might not be experienced

• Not invented here syndrom

Platforms

• OpenStax CNX - http://cnx.org/

• P2PU - https://p2pu.org/en/

• MERLOT Course builder

• (many more)

Discoverability

• 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

• 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