CourseWork Course Management System

CourseWork, a course management system (CMS), was developed at Stanford University. Started in 1998, CourseWork was expanded in 2001. It has been used by thousands of courses at Stanford. An open source version was released in 2003.
When Stanford joined the Sakai Project's joint development effort to create a widely adopted, open source, CMS in 2004, effort was redirected to that project. Functionality of the original CourseWork assignment tool strongly influenced the design of the SAMigo Test and Quiz tool, a part of the Sakai tool suite.
CourseWork, Base Version (1998): An Interactive Problem Set Manager.
In early winter 1988 the Stanford Learning Lab initiated development on CourseWork, a web-based problem set tool for use in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University. In fall 1998, this version was made available to students and was in use until superseded by Version 1. In 2000, the program was expanded to support other question types and quizzes at Stanford's Academic Computing group by Scott Stocker.
Functionality of the system included:
CourseWork-Base Version was designed by George Toye, Scott Stocker, and Charles Kerns, based on discussions with Human Biology faculty, including Prof. Russ Fernauld, and teaching assistants. Its first implementation required browser versions: Netscape 3.01 or higher or Internet Explorer 4.0.
CourseWork, Version I (2001).
CourseWork I, a full-featured course management system, was developed as part of the Open Knowledge Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A prototype, including all planned tools, was delivered in fall 2001. After testing and refinement, the complete production version with a full complement of Web site administration features, was available Winter Quarter 2002. By June 2002, after the system had been available for two academic quarters, more than 400 course web sites were created and over 6000 students and instructors had registered.
CourseWork had two basic views: student and instructor for each page that the student viewed. The instructor also viewed a set of links to editing wizards that stepped them through the development process.
Each user logged on to CourseWork and then viewed a list of the courses in which they were registered. From this page they could navigate to one of their course sites. A course site, from the user point of view, consisted of a set of tools:
All Tools had an admin view for the instructor to edit the page: enter information, upload files, create quizzes, etc.
My Courses.
A list of all course in which the student is registered is displayed on My Courses Page. The student goes through this page to get to her/his course homepages.
Course Homepage.
The course homepage is the first page seen when navigating to a course site. It displays:
Announcements.
Announcements are displayed in reverse chronological order. Two views -- "Past 7 Days" and "All"—are provided. Each announcement displayed: date/time, who posted it, a title, an indication of Class or Group posting, and the message text. Only 3 lines of each announcement are displayed on the homepage. If a message exceeded 3 lines, a “more” link is provided for viewing the complete text.
An editing view allows instructors to create and remove announcements. They can be sent to the full class or to specific sections. Announcements can be sent as emails to students (not the default).
Syllabus.
Instructors have the option of posting downloadable documents, adding links to online syllabi or pasting text or HTML directly into a form.
Course Materials.
Course Materials lists the documents uploaded and organized by the instructor for the course. The instructor can group documents and assign them a pedagogical type (e.g. reading) and designate whether they are required or optional. Documents can b sorted by name, date added, etc. Users download the documents to their computer.
Each piece of content is assigned a unique identifier and persistent URL within CourseWork allowing it to be displayed within pages controlled by other tools, e.g. within an assignment in the Assessment/Quiz tool.
Schedule.
The Schedule page lists the activities in a course. It is divided into weeks, initially showing the current week in a course. Instructors posting an activity, choose from a set of activity categories, write a short description, and then can link course materials to it.
Assignments.
The Assignments Tool updates functionality from the earlier, base version of CourseWork. This tool lists homework, problem sets, and other assignments for the course in chronological order. Students can navigate to assignments, answer questions and submit their work. The assignment list shows which had been submitted, and which are past due.
A CourseWork assignment consists of parts made up of questions: multiple-choice questions, short answer questions, audio response and essays (which allow you to upload files.) Students can resubmit assignment parts and only the most recent was graded at the due date.
Discussion.
The discussion page contains a link to the Panfora discussion tool or other asynchronous applications.
Panfora supports threaded discussions on a class-wide basis, or within individual sub-groups (sections or work groups). Instructors control the discussion topics: they can add a guiding question or attached content and set a start and end time. Students can either respond to an existing thread or start a new thread within the topic. Email notifications were available when a posting was made. Students can attach documents to their postings (if this option is chosen by the instructor.)
The instructor can view and post to all group discussions. Students only see discussions for the section to which they are assigned, in addition to class-wide discussions.
Grades.
The grades page shows the grades for all assignments listed in the assignments tool.
System Administration Features.
The system controls user authentication and authorization (what role a user plays in a given course or activity), and manages user login sessions. A login session enables CourseWork to “maintain state” for a user, or remember who they are and some vital information about them from click to click in their web browser.
The core system also encompasses the following administrative and user features:
CourseWork, Version 2 (2002).
CourseWork v.2 was released in Fall Quarter 2002. In addition to linking to the Registrar's database to automate course lists, it provided enhanced assignment and gradebook features as well as multiple other features requested by faculty. A new interface was introduced that incorporated usability feedback from faculty and students. An additional 5500 faculty and students registered to use the system in Fall Quarter 2002.
In 2002 Stanford developed an open source version of CourseWork. In November 2002, Stanford hosted 6 other institutions at a two-day workshop to introduce CourseWork and to receive feedback in preparation for the open source release. Attending the workshop were representatives from four large institutions, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, and from two small colleges, Denison University and Hamilton College. The session focused on technology and functionality, and offered extensive opportunity for feedback about features and deployment issues. The changes and suggestions requested by the other colleges were incorporated into CourseWork, and it was released to these schools in 2003.
June 2003 numerous user-requested enhancements were implemented, including signup lotteries, e.g., for lab sections, super user tools, timeout warnings; performance tuning and better exception handling, security enhancements. Database OSID incorporated to support database failover.