Grace Agnew presented the CourseID Draft for review prior to it being distributed generally for review. The draft can be accessed at:

http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseid/docs/draft-ag-hz-course-id-04.htm

Under the Teach Act, if access to resources can be limited strictly to the members of a course you can offer many more copyright restricted resources. The teach act only allows you to offer the material for one course. Resources must be removed as soon as the course is over. You can enter it again for the next course but the courses must be differentiated in some manner, such as time. You can’t appear to offer the content in perpetuity. So if you need to distinguish two things, then you need to give them two different identifiers. They can be bounded in time (i.e. Spring 2004, Fall 2004), how it is encoded is a local decision.

CourseID would serve as a unique identifier that could extend across course management systems. It should also be transparent between institutions. Eventually it could be used to create ontologies to compare courses across campuses. Determining course equivalencies is outside the scope of the project. Universities would have to work that out between themselves. The focus is more on courses cross-listed between institutions or departments. It can enable access to expensive resources that are limited to course registrants by allowing students at other universities to enroll in those classes and access the resource remotely with their home institution credentials.

Questions to consider:

Who are the academic stakeholders?

Who should we approach for feedback?

How could this be integrated into CMS systems like BANNER, course catalogs, etc?

The desire was not want to limit the identifier by session and did not want to put dates into the identifier stream. It has to be tied to the offering id as meta-data. Requiring a section id was debated though many courses only have one section. Section could potentially be metadata as well. The intent was to make it modular so the pieces that make up the identifier can be extracted from elsewhere in the campus system. Someone beyond the registrar could assemble it by pulling information from the registrar and building the string.

The identifier needs to support the business rules implemented. Some resources would be at the offering level and others at the section level. Need to be able to support those different possibilities.

The next step will be to circulate the draft to a wider audience for comment.