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Features
The Evolving Growth of LON-CAPA
10/3/2006
By Gerd Kortemeyer, Michigan State University
As educational institutions establish an online presence, initial successes are often due to individual faculty members (“early adopters” of this new technology), working long hours to develop material more or less single-handedly. Frequently, they are leaving behind scattered projects, which are of intrinsic value, but of little use for the institution and far less for the larger academic community. The same is frequently true for content developed in externally funding curriculum development projects, where stewardship for the materials oftentimes ends with the end of the funding period, and little or no sustainable dissemination strategy is in place. “Late adopters” of technology in education might altogether refuse to venture into creating new online educational resources, since the task of creating comprehensive material appears overwhelming in isolation.
To address these problems, an infrastructure to provide a course and learning content management system was created, which has resource sharing at the base of its architecture: the LearningOnline Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach (LON-CAPA).
The roots of this system go back to 1992, when a group of faculty at Michigan State University started developing a sophisticated online homework and assessment system, with a strong focus on the sciences and mathematics. Soon other universities adopted the system, and it was not long before an informal culture of inter-institutional sharing of such resources developed. The exchange of resources, however, was reflected nowhere in the architecture of the system, and was achieved by copying files (at the time, on floppy disks), FTPing them from server to server, or e-mailing them from colleague-to-colleague.
To formalize and thus further the content sharing within the emerging community of practice, the team in 1999 started to add cross-institutional digital library and learning content management capabilities, which were not limited to problem resources, but include the management of any multimedia materials (images, HTML pages, applets, etc). The top layer of the system consists of a complete course management system, so that the assembled resources can immediately be used in a course context, where instructors have the ability to seamlessly assemble their course from resources across institutional boundaries.
In 2000, the LON-CAPA group at MSU received funding by the National Science Foundation to expand the user community, research educational effectiveness of the resources, and to develop a mechanism for resource sharing across institutional boundaries and with the collaboration of commercial partners. In 2003, the project won the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Award in the Education and Academia category, and in 2004 it won a Sloan-C “Most Effective Practice” Award.
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