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The Evolving Growth of LON-CAPA
10/3/2006
Today, LON-CAPA spans 37 universities, 4 community colleges, 44 high schools, 3 middle schools, 6 content development projects, and 6 publishing companies. LON-CAPA is serving over 11,000 students per semester at MSU alone, and well over 30,000 students per semester system-wide.
Its shared resource pool currently holds around 247,000 resources, among those are approximately 80,000 original homework and exam problems, 88,000 images, 700 movie and sound files, 1,500 animations and simulations, 58,000 content pages, and 7,400 re-usable content assemblies. Disciplines include astronomy, biology, business, chemistry, civil engineering, computer science, family and child ecology, geology, human food and nutrition, human medicine, mathematics, medical technology, physics, and psychology.
With all the tools in place to share content across multiple institutions and deploy them, and the majority of the content published such that it can be reused anywhere across the network, the real question is: d'es it happen?
As it turns out, of the 247,000 resources available in the pool, a little more than one third (36 percent) are in active use, where active use means being used recently in at least one course at the participating institutions. Of those, 44 percent are used in at least one course at an institution other than the institution where they originated. In other words, 15 percent of the available resources in the pool are shared across institutional boundaries.
These percentages vary strongly by resource type: the percent of active use is the highest for problems, where 72 percent of the available resources are used in courses, and of those, 41 percent across institutional boundaries – 30 percent of the available ones. Active use is the lowest for HTML content pages. Images are mostly reused in connection with problems or HTML pages – on the average 0.64 images per problem/page.
Most resources that are in active use are on the average used at 2.07 institutions, but as it turns out, this also varies by resource type, with, for example, animations and simulations being used on the average at 3.41 institutions.
This year, the LON-CAPA Academic Consortium was founded with Michigan State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as founding partners. Through this consortium, stewardship of the resource pool and the system infrastructure will be shared across institutions, and the financial sustainability of the project is guaranteed through long-term financial commitments of the partner institutions.
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