Oryoki is a simple, open courseware publication system that makes it easy for organizations and individuals to share educational materials online. Oryoki is easy to deploy and maintain, allowing users to concentrate on publishing material not maintaining software. The project is currently in the early stages of development and will be part of my master’s degree thesis before it officially goes public. In addition to the application, I will also be publishing the design research that accompanied the project.

Planned Features

This section is really more of a wish list then an official feature list, but all of these elements are important and need to be incorporated in some form or another:

1. Simple, Clean User Interface
This is key—the interface can’t get in the way of the user. Oryoki’s interface will be transparent and informative, emphasizing the publication and organization of course material.

2. Liquid Templates
Liquid is a Ruby library used for safe template rendering. It’s a great system (I’m using it right now) and it works seamlessly with Ruby on Rails, the framework of choice for Oryoki.

3. Microformats Support
I really want Oryoki to be an upstanding web citizen, and that means that it needs to speak multiple languages. Semantics are important and the Microformats standard is a great way to introduce a semantic layer into your web applications. Support for hCard, rel-tag and XOXO are planned.

4. Oryoki API
Oryoki will give users the ability to share their data at an application level with other programs. An integrated API will allow developers to query course information within an Oryoki application for use in their own projects.

5. Syndication
This is almost a given. All popular content syndication formats will be supported.

6. Document Library
All of the course content in Oryoki will be stored in the Library. Oryoki’s Library will handle the cataloguing, tagging and management of uploaded content like pdfs and images. Library content is available to all of the courses and can be shared across the system. Oryoki also tracks downloads of Library content and can report on usage and frequency trends.

7. Open
Oryoki will (upon completion) be released as open source software. The goal of this project was to promote the open courseware movement, which intern means supporting open source software. Oryoki will remain free and open.

And lots more…