ABSTRACT

In the 1960s, California embarked on a major program to revamp public higher education. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, comprising the world’s leading economies, urged its members to adopt “development plans of the California type.” The development of common courses that could be developed by faculty and instructional designers and accessed by students across all the community colleges would be greatly facilitated if all constituents were working on the same common course/learning management system (CMS/LMS) platform. Membership in the consortium was important for a number of reasons, particularly for providing contractual services for Online Education Initiative (OEI) development, operational support, and governance oversight. The OEI management project staff consists mostly of administrators, faculty, and staff who were in existing positions at the community colleges. To implement the OEI Course Exchange, a common CMS/LMS was envisioned as the centerpiece to provide a set of academic and student support software tools across the system.