Launch of the Course Atlas

My http://www.courseatlas.com/ initiative was launched October 1, 2004 after I left SunGard Higher Education to form a new venture nick named SKEEDU. SKEEDU was the term I coined to describe the initiative focused on students as consumers. I had thirty years under my belt developing and refining systems centered on the administrative and academic processes of learning. I now felt it was worth spending my 2nd career developing systems that could bridge institutions and students as consumers.

The rationale was to build a set of platforms centered on the principals of collaboration and sharing across institutions which could better serve students and their stakeholders. Most institution's IT focus is influenced by their desire for autonomy and control perspective. Their self interest is motivated by utilizing technology and tools as a means to end. That is not a bad thing. It is just difficult to address an idea of sharing and common specifications with a group of institutions, because they all believe they are so different. Work on common specifications from SPEEDE to PESC to IMS reflected that.

Through my experience working across hundreds of institutions and state systems of higher education, I found the motivation and desire to share a common digital utility hidden and difficult to embrace and often complicated by the same motivations I leveraged for years. The problems spanning policy, process and data across institutions was overwhelming. Yet, selling system solutions and customizing them for each institution was a good business. And, I enjoyed the experience. But, I felt the implications of what was left unfinished off the table unfulfilling.

Information and course management systems reflecting their institutional missions have evolved as well over the last thirty years. Yet, most are still self contained and augmented by localized instances - even in hosted environments. Only recently (post 2000) have we seen the open commons movement from Open Courseware to Merlot sharing course content.

Even though some are hosted centrally, the bridges across institutions are still not revealed. In other words, I get instances from an institutional perspective, but not how they fit together. Which then results in duplication and gaps in processes that has impacted student learning and success.

The concept of the course atlas was developed over decades as I worked with centralized systems of higher education throughout the United States. My first idea was to create a shared course database coined Course Select. Back in 1998, I launched a website by that name and attempted to get institutions to buy into the idea of advertising their courses on the site. It was attractive to continuing education programs, but not traditional course based programs because no one wanted to reinforce the idea a student could cut and paste their course work to a degree.

As you may recall, institutions have long had separate systems managing student information and course information. As evolution of software system continued from the 80's to 90's to 2000, I realized how the industry was hampered by vendor competition between the SIS and LMS players. It separated the technology stack, further complicating the management of learning and increasing operational costs.

I continued to see the emphasis of isolation, rather than sharing a common infrastructure, for which the internet could provide.

The course atlas was my first test of launching a digital asset that could demonstrate the value of working together, on a common platform that could address the start of alignment between institutions. It could be the tool that could help institutions differentiate or align, depending upon their use of it.

We set out to compile and aggregate in one searchable and free database all the current course offerings of every college and university in the United States. Today, it is a full compilation of current course offerings representing 4,000 higher educational institutions. We are now adding corporate universities and their course offerings. Our database has over 3.5 million current course offerings. Which you can search by keywords and attributes across all institutions. Nothing like it exists that is free and open to the public.