Open tool for open educational content

Toru Iiyoshi, Cheryl Richardson, and Owen McGrath, Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open Educational Knowledge Sharing, Innovate, October/November 2006. Excerpt:

The Knowledge Exchange Exhibit and Presentation (KEEP) Toolkit, a set of software tools designed to help educators provide focused, detailed investigations and demonstrations of effective teaching practice, was developed in 2001 by the Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a specialized in-house software resource. However, within five years this software steadily evolved into the hub of a distributed community of over 10,000 users, and in 2006 it was released as open source—thereby making it possible for individuals and institutions anywhere to participate in this community. Encouraged by the rapid usage growth but concerned about sustainability, we saw that the best bet for long-term viability in the software would come from inviting our user community to participate in the KEEP Toolkit's future development.

In what follows we first provide an introduction to the key features of the KEEP Toolkit, illustrate its early application as a means of promoting shared inquiry into pedagogical practice, and address its role as a tool for documenting the pedagogical value of learning objects. We then discuss the factors that led us to pursue an open source approach to further software development, and we describe the stages that characterized our implementation of this approach....

PS:  KEEP includes integration with DSpace repositories.