Content Management - Equella

I originally thought this presentation was going to be one where eCollege representatives would talk about their Content Manager product where Educational Partners can re-use content over and over rather than have static content in individual courses. Not the case. Peter Van Tienen from The Learning Edge International company presented on a product they have called Equella. I've linked to their website on the title of this blog. Equella is a large repository of user-created content that can be used in all kinds of ways in all kinds of courses. It was actually very impressive to see Mr. Van Tienen demo this product for is. It's all about finding and creating content for the repository and making sure that the content is tagged properly using metatags. They describe it as "Content as a Platform" which is, again, a repository to pull and use content in many different ways in online courses. Some of the things I found most interesting are that you can search for a keyword or term (for example: "Nursing"), and then on the search results page, there will be a RSS or XML feed link that you can use...so that when new "Nursing" Content Items are found...your RSS or XML feed will update you automatically. Also, you can e-mail all your search results to anyone you like. You can set up your search results many different ways...including using other search engines, the Library of Congress, and other valid library sources. Users can comment on the searchable content, too. And, those comments are also searchable. You can also see a complete history of any piece of content that has been found or created...which would include any changes to the original document since it's "birth" within Equella. Finally, I thought this was a really cool feature... Let's say that you find a website of interest to you that you want to add to the repository. Next, let's say that two years down the road, that website vanishes from the Internet (there could be several reasons why this may be). Equella has a built-in link checker that checks links every five minutes. If a link is determined to be broken, the system will e-mail the person who created that piece of content in the repository and let them know the link is not working any longer. This seemed like something that would be beneficial to many people, and I'd like to investigate this more in the future.