Abstract
Through the sharing of SINAPSE's inception, implementation and growth, presenters will raise awareness of this innovative, open source technology and share some best practices with participants interested in online communities in higher education. The presentation addresses the following conference topics: Demonstration of Open Source Projects, Open Source in Higher Education, and Open Source in Training Computer Science Students. SINAPSE is an open source, free technology project developed by students at the University of Oklahoma and other academic institutions under the direction of the OU CIO and University VP for Information Technology. SINAPSE combines a technical framework with an organizational support model to provide a customizable, interactive online community for higher education needs. SINAPSE enhances communication and interaction among students of various academic institutions and within their campus communities and provides a "real world" working environment for computer science majors and others that allows them to gain valuable and marketable IT experience. OU's Sooner Information Network (http://sin.ou.edu), which went live in fall, 2000, is built with SINAPSE technology. Today, 98 percent of OU's 23,000 students are registered with SIN. Averaging 7,000 unique student visitors per day, SIN amassed more than 170 million page views last year. This places SIN as the largest and most used online student community of any university in the nation. SIN also has increased voter turnout for OU student government elections by 450 percent, the second largest online elections among all of academia in 2001. From SIN, the concept of a modular set of interactive student services led by student teams evolved into the open source SINAPSE project. Currently, SINAPSE has 20 partner institutions with student teams, including Duke University, American University, Howard University, University of Colorado, University of Texas, Oklahoma State University, Saint Louis University, California University of Pennsylvania, and Eastern Virginia Medical School. |
