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Foothill's Leadership in Online Learning
Etudes Consortium Project: Leadership in Online Instruction
Offering more online classes than any community college in the Bay Area, Foothill has been a leader in offering online instruction since the emergence of the Internet. Since the debut of Instructor Michael Loceff’s online C++ class in 1994, Foothill has stayed on the forefront of online learning. Loceff was one of the first instructors to teach online in the State of California in 1994, and subsequently developed ETUDES Classic, a course management system that contributed to the growth of Foothill’s eight online degree programs. Through the ETUDES Project, Foothill now supports distance, hybrid, and web-assisted instruction for over 30 California Community Colleges and is leading the development of open source learning tools/systems.
The ETUDES Consortium Project was formed by Foothill College in 2002. It is a community that supports development of open source (OS) tools for its platform, ETUDES-NG and the Sakai OS software. Additionally, the ETUDES Project provides centralized hosting, administration of sites and accounts, training and professional development, and user support to its member institutions.
The project is housed and managed from Foothill College, continuing the legacy that was started by Loceff in 1994 with ETUDES Classic. The ETUDES Project's main focus is to represent and support community college needs, especially in California. Membership is open to other higher education institutions and organizations that are interested in the effort and centralized support services.
The ETUDES Consortium Project partnered with the Sakai Foundation in December of 2003 and is coordinating software development with Sakai project leads and the Sakai community. Foothill has adopted the Sakai framework and is building upon Sakai for its platform, ETUDES-NG. ETUDES-NG is an online teaching environment based on the Sakai open course platform. Foothill College, the first institution to partner with the Sakai Project, is collaborating closely with the Sakai technical teams, and is building tools upon the Sakai framework to meet the unique needs of its community college members and users. The Sakai Project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new online teaching environment for higher education. The Sakai project began in January 2004.
Vivie Sinou, Dean of Learning Technology & Innovations at Foothill College, manages the ETUDES Consortium Project and also serves on the Sakai Board of Directors. Sinou and her team at Foothill are collaborating closely with Stanford University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT and UC Berkeley, and other higher education institutions. The Foothill-De Anza Community College District received over 1,000,000 in grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to pursue this innovative project. Starting July 1, 2006, the State Chancellor’s Office for California Community Colleges (CCC’s) endorsed the effort, and is contributing the new software development of ETUDES-NG for CCC needs.
ETUDES-NG serves over 30 ETUDES California Community Colleges and 22,000 students. The software will eventually support 100K Community College students.
For information on our community, services, and partners, see: etudesproject.org.
2006 Online History Archive
2004 Online History Archive
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