The most important document discussing archiving of old online courses is
Cliff Lynch's 2003 "The Afterlives of Courses on the Network",
http://www.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/ECARpaper2002.pdf
The Blackboard committee did a fairly careful examination of the issues in
early 2004 with Heather Briston's input, looking at whether we should have
centralized policies and if so what they should be. We developed a set of
current procedures (not quite policy) that we hope will tide us over until
community best practices emerge.
We currently maintain blackboard coursesites within the Bb system for at
least 3 years (more if disk space allows); we need to maintain coursesites
for at least a year due to OAR requirements and the needs of students who
have incompletes, and faculty need access to the materials they put into old
coursesites for somewhat longer than that since they are likely to want to
reuse some of the material when they teach the same course again. On the
other hand, these days coursesites usually have substantial components that
are not just static course material contributed by the instructor, and those
other components need to be treated separately. For example, it is not
appropriate to make public any student evaluative materials, and generally
not appropriate to archive student discussion postings without the student's
permission. If students have filed a directory restriction request, it is
not even appropriate to archive any indication that the student participated
in the course. It's important to read the record retention schedule
(http://libweb.uoregon.edu/speccoll/archives/schedule/) to understand what
we should and should not be archiving.
In general, the problem is that credit-course web sites are a much more
complicated entity than they at first appear, especially as faculty make use
of course management systems and interesting collaborative learning
technologies.
In the blackboard context, I think the best approach for archiving old
coursesites is to encourage faculty to use the blackboard "export course"
feature. This creates an IMS standard content package (internally, that's a
ZIP file with a bunch of XML metadata; see
http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/). "Export course" is careful to
export only those portions of the blackboard coursesite that are "safe" to
share with the public, e.g. instructor-provided content and definitely not
the list of students who had been enrolled or any student-written materials.
The zip file can then be stored in an institutional respository, though the
resulting package isn't very useful except as something that can then be
loaded back into a course management system.
An alternative is not to try to archive a course or web SITE, but instead to
archive an html file or files that is/are written by the instructor for a
course. That's a much easier problem if the pages don't use many advanced
features. But even for web pages note that we have problems -- a web page
that includes server side includes makes one set of demands on its web
server; a web page that is driven by a SQL database makes another set; etc.
Note that from a copyright perspective instructor-written course materials
are pretty easy at UO. Although the UO claims "work for hire" ownership
rights to most faculty work, it explicitly waives such rights for course
materials unless a substantial amount of UO resources went into their
production. There is also a bit of an issue with some DE courses; some
contracts for development of distance ed courses explicitly include a clause
that assigns ownership of the materials to the UO. But for typical course
materials you just need the original author's permission. If the original
author got substantial production help from a UO support unit the situation
might be slightly more complex, but that's not the typical case and usually
the support unit would be CET:IM or Media Services hence local and easy to
negotiate with.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-lib-ir@lists.uoregon.edu [mailto:owner-lib-ir@lists.uoregon.edu]
On Behalf Of Carol Hixson
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 11:17 AM
To: Heather Ward
Cc: Institutional Repository Group
Subject: lib-ir: Re:
Heather,
I'm sending this out to the Scholars' Bank Steering
Committee to get their reaction. In my opinion, it's
probably all right, although I would like to take a
look at what you're talking about first. I just
finished harvesting something perhaps similar
for an OIMB collection so it's not unheard of.
What do the other group members think?
Carol
At 01:33 PM 8/11/2005, you wrote:
>Dear Carol - Would it be possible to set up an area in the
>institutional repository where we could archive past library
>credit-course web sites? I've been asked to update the interface, but
>it's the content that matters.
>
>I brought this up in the All Instruction meeting this morning in case
>others ask.
>
>Thanks,
> Heather
>
>Heather Ward
>Humanities Librarian
>University of Oregon Libraries