November 2004


C3L makes it easier to collaborate and develop e-learning content online

Collaborations are relatively easy when the participants can sit and talk face-to-face. It’s a little more challenging when the people you need to collaborate with are separated by time and space.

As the development of online learning content becomes more diverse and sophisticated, the tools available for online collaborators are also evolving to generate greater productivity and opportunities for collaboration.

Collaborative Content Creation Laboratory (C3L) is a perfect example of these new tools.

C3L is a new shared online workspace where university and college faculty can collaborate to create e-learning content at a distance, greatly increasing the potential for building the best research teams and producing much richer courses, modules, lessons, and learning objects.

In addition to distance, C3L overcomes issues of limited time, technical expertise and support. Collaborative teams can create learning content and export it to a variety of environments using online tools developed for C3L, including instructional design support, project management tools, web editing resources, calendars, and discussion forums in a secure online environment.

From the outset, C3L was billed as the first collaboration system in the world specifically designed for faculty and post-secondary education. The $1.2 million project was launched in partnership with seven private and public sector organizations, including the University of Guelph and Centennial College, with matching funds from CANARIE.

Among the many diverse collaborations under way using C3L are courses in nursing, engineering learning modules and leadership administration content.

Online editors for creating web pages automatically by instructors means there is no need for programmers, while the ability for faculty to automatically import video, audio, simulations and tests as well as export content to any system means that content can be previewed, reviewed, assessed and exported to any standards based Learning Management Systems or web environment.

“These tools have so far proven to be enormously advantageous in engaging collaborators across Ontario and Canada for analysis, design and development of e-learning content,” says Robert Luke, a researcher and curriculum coordinator at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre.

“For example, there’s a current project to develop culturally relevant learning materials for First Nations patients with chronic illness that involves team members from Montreal, K-NET in Sioux Lookout, and several sites in Toronto. In this context, C3L provides an important common instructional design framework and a common secure repository for people to share ideas and develop content according to specific parameters.”

C3L is being made accessible through the Faculty Online Support Service (FOSS) and offers a secure workspace that faculty can access remotely to manage their content development activities, while allowing them to collaborate regardless of location.

FOSS itself is a product of university-industry collaboration through OPAS - the Office for Partnerships for Advanced Skills. An online service, FOSS helps faculty across Canada learn more about aspects of teaching with technology, sharing information with colleagues at other institutions, and providing sources of support in areas not available at their respective institutions. Started in the spring of 2002 with 100 users, FOSS now boasts over 7,500 registered users.

The Office of Open Learning (OOL) at the University of Guelph, which works with the University's academic departments to develop e-learning courses, created C3L’s embedded help and support system for instructional design, as well as for content authoring tools.

Since the C3L curricula required visually rich content (e.g. demonstrating procedures with a patient), Centennial College helped to define faculty and accessibility requirements and prepared users for the pilot study as well as evaluation of the study, building on work already done with its Collaborative Nursing Degree program, an initiative where curricula is shared across three institutions.

Other partners in the C3L project included Kitchener-Waterloo’s Desire2Learn and Canadian Microelectronics Corporation in Kingston. Learn more at http://foss.opasonline.org and http://c3l2.ucourses.com

CANARIE showcases projects - aims for strong uptake

CANARIE wrapped up its national series of Showing Results - Sharing Knowledge" Workshops, at a two-day session in Toronto earlier this month, highlighting dozens of projects that CANARIE has funded over the last five years, projects it now hopes can fly on their own with new partners and investors.

With an investment of more than $68 million in projects and applications development in e-health, e-learning, e-business and new media, CANARIE scheduled the workshops - in Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto - to showcase the return on investment that can be measured "in terms of knowledge gained, products developed, partnerships created and the potential for moving beyond CAANRIE funding to a sustainable future".

Over 30 projects were profiled at the session, ranging from the Community Health Information Network project in Waterloo, to the University of Alberta's Rural Advanced Community of Learners. In another project, Broadband Opportunities for Deaf Youth, at Ryerson University, involved deaf students from across Canada, bringing sign language to the Internet and creating multimedia content.

The idea behind the CANARIE workshops was to give project teams an opportunity to present their achievements and future plans to potential customers, strategic partners and investors. Learn more about the projects at www.canarie.ca.


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