[Sakai SEPP] Willie Pritchard - The ETUDES Alliance

ETUDES is the course management system used at Foothill-DeAnza College, developed by a Computer Science professor in 1995. Foothill created the Etudes Alliance in 2002 to ensure long-term sustainability of ETUDES for community colleges, mostly in California. They began a redesign and redevelopment of the software in 2002.

They undertook a needs analysis among faculty, and identified a list of some 50 features that would be necessary in a CMS for community colleges - about 30 of those are present in the initial release of Sakai.

In 2003 Hewlett Foundation approached Foothill with an invitation to develop something equivalent to MIT's Open Courseware Initiative - they went back to Hewlett to say that in order to do this they need to have a common CMS platform for the content, at that point proposing developing ETUDES as an open source effort for community colleges.

They ended up with a scaled back program to create 20 sets of open courseware during 2004 - created an organization called SOFIA - (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets). In addition they submitted a second proposal to extend Sakai to meet the needs of community colleges, which Hewlett funded. They are contributing two developers into the Sakai effort. Their priorities are designing/building a simple content authoring tool, migrating current ETUDES users to Sakai, and faculty training adn support.

Willie points out that there are pressures on the Sakai effort that need to be addressed. The formation of alliances with other areas is critical - e.g. bringing Educause more into the effort. It's more than just technology - there has to be a strong communication layer to this effort, both among the partners and outside - we need to work together to unify efforts to avoid unnecessary duplication.