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The CommonS project and the CommonS platform

General information

This is the Community platform hosting the CommonSpaces of the Erasmus+  CommonS project.

At the start, two web sites are dedicated to the CommonS project:

  • this Community platform
  • the project intranet, based on the Plone software.

Moreover, Github hosts the

  • Git project development site at github.com/gtoffoli/commons; all original software in course of development, together with references to prerequistes, can be found there; only some private configuration code is missing, and the content of information pages such as those accessible from the Info and Help menus of this site.

Presentation of the CommonS platform on Github

Here below is the first part of the presentation of the CommonS platform that we posted in the homepage of our Github repository (follow the link above to find a more detailed description):

A Collaborative Learning platform: cataloging and remixing of Open Educational Resources (OER), e-mentoring and e-tutoring, Learning Analytics (LA), and more

CommonS (= common spaces) was an Erasmus+ project (September 2014 - August 2017) funded by the EU, aimed at experimenting new forms of co-learning, e-tutoring and e-mentoring. Among the main results of the CommonS project there are:

  • the Commons Platform (this software);
  • CommonSpaces, a federation of Communities and Projects hosted and supported by the CommonS Platform.

Often, the term "CommonSpaces" is used to denote both things.

Origin

We started by developing a Django project customizing and wrapping the Mayan-EDMS application, in order to be able to create a sample OER library (OER = open educational resource). Currently, only some low level code from this first experiment remains; on the other hand, now CommonSpaces integrates dozens of other valuable Django extensions.

To exploit the work of people with greater experience in the field, from the very beginning we adopted, as far as possible, the classification scheme and the metadata terminology proposed by the OER Commons initiative.

Functionality

CommonSpaces supports Communities of Practice (CoPs) in their activities. CoPs comprise teachers, students, young and senior professionals; they work mainly to the retrieval, adaptation (including translation), reuse and remix of available educational contents, to be used as building blocks of learning pathways.

Among the functions that the Commons Platform provides, we can mention:

  • authentication and user management;
  • management of Projects (ako work groups), which are grouped in Communities;
  • collaborative cataloguing of OERs;
  • OER search based on a rich set of metadata;
  • prototyping of Learning Pathways (LP);
  • forums and blogs;
  • support to mentoring: the mentoring relationship is modeled as a special type of private Project;
  • content analysis: we provide Django extensions exploiting the spaCy NLP library;
  • a few native learning analytics (LA) functions, based on activity streams;
  • xAPI support providing an interface to a Learning Record Store (LRS);
  • multi-language support for the UI; currrently the UI strings and the metadata terminology are available in 9 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Greek, Croatian, Russian and Arabic (but the translation in the last two languages needs substancial revision);
  • multi-language support for the UGC (user-generated content): textual metadata values, including those of titles and descriptions, and plain or rich-text fields of some content types, can be translated to each of the configured languages by means of dedicated multi-pane forms.

A User Guide is available online as a number of help pages, under the Help menu of CommonSpaces. A deployment guide was also produced.