Distributed Version Control for Curricular Content Management

Educators have at their disposal many digital content sources, from textbook publishers to open courseware repositories (OCRs) to specialized collections to shared resources from a network of peers. It is rare one needs to go create new lecture materials, instead one can download and adapt to fit their needs. The proliferation of such resources is expected to result in great productivity for educators, particularly those in higher education where time demands relegate content development to the back-burner. But are we seeing such productivity? Are courseware repositories spawning heavy reuse? Or are issues integrating content to courses causing a loss in productivity and greater frustration? These are the questions being investigated by the Distributed Version Control for Curricular Content Management project. This work-in-progress project has conducted a local faculty survey of curricular content development and used the results to drive the initial implementation of a distributed version control tool for curricular content management.