Foothill's Leadership in Online Learning
ETUDES NG: Software for the New Generation of Faculty and Students
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.
Through the leadership of Dean of Distance and Mediated Learning Vivian Sinou, Foothill is poised to launch another breakthrough in the development of online learning software with the Spring 2006 release of ETUDES NG, an advanced open-source online learning product.
Sinou is leading the development of the Sakai-based community open-source software product ETUDES-NG, focusing on tools that support teaching and learning. She serves on the Sakai board and is collaborating closely with Stanford University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT and UC Berkeley. The Foothill-De Anza Community College District received a $600,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to pursue this innovative project. For the full press release on the Sakai project, click here.
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 project began in January 2004. Scheduled for full release in Spring 2006, the ETUDES-NG software will initially serve 30 current Etudes Alliance community colleges. The software will eventually have the capacity to support many more community colleges.
Feedback gathered from a spring 2005 pilot involving faculty members at 17 ETUDES alliance colleges was very positive, with faculty gaining hands-on experience with the product and identifying some key areas they would like to see improved. “ETUDES-NG is stylish looking, fast loading, and fun to use,” says Karl Peter, director of the Foothill College Veterinary Technology Program. “The new powerful editor is first-rate and a welcome addition to the online course author.”
Some of the new features within ETUDES-NG that faculty praised were the online course editor, calendar tool and chat room functions. No editor was available in the legacy ETUDES system, so faculty relied on client editors or html coding. The rich editor in ETUDES-NG is a welcome change for novice and advanced users alike.
The calendar is another tool that received high marks by users. Events are automatically added to the calendar from assignments and announcements. Math, physics and chemistry instructors were happy to learn that there is also a formula feature. The global calendar is customizable and displays all the events posted in the calendars of all the courses users are enrolled in. The global calendar feature is especially useful for users with poor time management and study skills. The chat function, not available in the current ETUDES software, received equally high remarks.
2004 Online History Archive
