This project grew from 12 years of successful course development projects through UVa’s Teaching + Technology Initiative (TTI) grants to faculty. Despite the fact that the vast majority of those projects had depended on common solutions to enable a web/database to enrich a particular course, the individual projects remained prototypical, stand-alone because UVa had been unable with limited resources to grow its infrastructure and to create scalable tools to support these approaches.

At the same time the Vice Presidents who made these awards wanted to see newer and more innovative approaches supported. So they charged a small group of professionals with the task of creating an open source tool, dubbed the VET, to make this tried and true approach to enriching the learning environment more scalable. The small group of professionals began as a group of four, two from faculty support roles, two with more technical backgrounds. They hired a programmer who began immediately to code the solutions they planned. Because UVa was a leader in developing FEDORA and was a collaborative partner actively experimenting with Sakai, these were capabilities that we wanted to leverage.

We asked nine faculty members (selected because they would both understand what we were up to and stand for the more rank and file faculty) to actively give us feedback on our development process and tools. All of them readily accepted. The first feedback that we got from that group of faculty caused us to reprioritize our tasks and to be clearer about our goals for the tools in development. At the same time, the testing for the first drafts of the tools has caused us to realize the inadequacies of our processes about moving from development to production. We are now trying to rapidly articulate a more clear and concrete plan for testing and for how the testing results will be captured and addressed. Even as we were reprioritizing and revisiting our initial design specifications, we discovered that this tool lead logically to a much larger vision that we refer to as the “Academic Information Space”. We have begun to pursue larger funding so that we can speed this project’s development. In conclusion, challenges persist; collaborative partners are welcome.

Notes:
1. Fedora’s organizational website can be found at www.fedora.info/
2. Sakai’s organizational website can be found at http://sakaiproject.org/
3. This case updates and builds on a presentation made by John Alexander at the U21 eLearning Conference in November 2006.