Organizations publishing
Open Educational Resources

Project Overview

The Sofia initiative was launched by Foothill-De Anza Community College District in March of 2004. The goal of Sofia is to publish community college-level course content and make it freely accessible on the web to support teaching and learning.

The publication process consists of the following steps:

Contributions
Review Process
Conversion
Publication
Evaluation

Contributions:

Sofia provides a vehicle for faculty to share their intellectual assets, gain wide recognition for their contribution to their profession, and play a key role in improving equal access to educational materials beyond their classes. In addition to the valuable contributions by faculty, reviewers, instructional designers, accessibility specialists, and many other individuals with specific skills and roles round up the Sofia team and contribute to the realization of the project's objectives.

The success of Sofia relies on wide faculty participation and a large pool of quality contributions. Faculty from community colleges and four-year universities who have developed exemplary community college-level course materials, and are willing to share it openly with others, are encouraged to contribute content to sofia.

Calls for contributions will be announced annually. To be considered for publication, submitted course materials must meet the established eligibility criteria.

Faculty participation is voluntary. Involvement by the finalists includes a few email exchanges and a couple of meetings, which will be conducted mostly by phone.

Faculty contributors provide the following:

URL and access to course materials to be reviewed for publication.
Verify authorship and originality of the course materials submitted.
Choose a Creative Commons License and specify terms of use.
Agree to a phone and email interview for a feature story on the development and evolution of the materials and best uses for adopters and learners.
Grant us permission to re-purpose their content for a wider audience.
Grant us permission to reformat content to our standard presentation format.
Review and sign off converted course materials prior to publication.
Participate in a phone interview on the evaluation of the project.

Note: No email addresses will be provided on the Sofia project site for faculty authors unless they indicate that they wish to make their contact information available.

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Review Process:

Quality materials are identified and selected from the submissions through a review process conducted by peer reviewers. Materials are reviewed for quality, depth, instructional design, completeness, and use of interactivity and multimedia prior to publication. Reviewers examine the content to ensure quality, correctness, and adherence to high academic standards. See review criteria for more information. Faculty with experience developing online course materials and teaching with web-based technologies are encouraged to apply to Serve as peer reviewers.

All contributors receive a summary of the reviewer comments (strengths and weaknesses) upon completion of the review process. Feedback suggests that contributors find the reviewer comments very valuable, regardless if their course was selected. In turn, reviewers have indicated that they learned a great deal from the rating process and design of the courses reviewed.

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Conversion:

Selected content is re-purposed as needed to ensure consistent quality and presentation format, re-usability for a wider audience, and accessibility. Instructional designers play a key role in the course conversion process. Quality assurance, copyright clearance, and final QA follows the conversion process prior to publication.

The content will be published in ETUDES-NG (Foothill-De Anza's Sakai-based open source CMS). Content is converted to conform to the system's navigation/template.

In addition, dedicated staff interview finalists and assist in the publication of a profile article, "The Story Behind This Course," about the background of the author(s), strategies used in the materials, information on the evolution of the course design, lessons learned, and suggestions as to how the materials can be best used by students and faculty to support teaching and learning.

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Publication:

Course materials go through final quality assurance prior to publication. Materials are tested for technical quality (i.e. broken links, error messages, spell checking, meta data correctness, etc.), consistent use of terms, navigation, and accessibility tags.

Faculty contributors sign off, agreeing to have their names listed on the course site.

To protect faculty from receiving email inquiries, no faculty contact information is provided unless otherwise desired by a contributor. Sofia staff will respond to email and other queries about individual course materials to offload this obligation from faculty. A feedback form per course is available for this purpose. Select inquiries that may be of value to faculty authors will be forwarded to them for their consideration.

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Evaluation:

The Sofia team plans to assess the level of interest and participation in the project by faculty, as reviewers and/or contributors. The impact, use, re-use, and access of the course materials to support teaching and learning will be examined. Finally, we hope to identify ways to drive down the costs of publication and examine models and partnerships to ensure the long-term success and sustainability of the project.

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