Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine
nl: I've done some work in this area, although more aimed at the school sector than higher ed.One thing we found was that providing alternate forms of navigation and filtering is important.For example, from memory the OCW metadata contains subjects. If the query result pages displayed those as facets then it would allow users to refine results by subjects. "School" and "Year" would be other good facets.Solr does faceting really well, BTW