Course materials will have to be converted for presentation on your opencourseware site. The lack of a standard way of presenting these materials will impact the effort required to convert these materials.

Your opencourseware site requires editorial standards for tone and voice, as well as presentation standards for course structure, course materials templates and file types. The benefits of standards include:

• Ease of use: End users know what to expect when they navigate from course to course.
• Lower cost: Quality assurance will be limited to content (as opposed to debugging presentation format issues).
• Manageability: Having a single structure to model a course, and a standard way to model course materials like lecture notes, syllabus, etc., makes it easier to manage your opencourseware Web site.
• Lower barrier for usage: By minimizing the number of tools required to effectively use the site (e.g.: browser, PDF viewer and QuickTime or RealPlayer), you make it easier for end users to access your opencourseware.

Recommendations

• Standardize a handful of pedagogical models (content taxonomy). MIT OCW currently uses a single taxonomy for all its courses.
• Implement a limited set of templates to present course materials
• Ensure systems are flexible enough to handle exception cases. In MIT OCW, courses are comprised of pre-determined sections like lecture notes, syllabus, etc. The concept of custom sections is used to model specialized sections like Visualizations.
• Standardize a limited set of file types for delivery (e.g.: HTML, PDF, QuickTime, RealPlayer or Windows Media File)