Earlier this year, at the Open Education Global conference in Delft, I went to a session where members of staff from CUNY talked about ‘Commons in a Box’. The latest version, now referred to as ‘CBOX OpenLab’ has just been released:

CBOX OpenLab provides a powerful and flexible open alternative to costly proprietary educational platforms, allowing individual faculty members, departments, and entire institutions to easily set up an online community space designed for open learning.

Its name brings together two important ideas: openness and collaboration. Unlike closed online teaching systems, CBOX OpenLab allows members to share their work openly with one another and the world. Like a lab, it provides a space where students, faculty, and staff can work together, experiment, and innovate.

It’s effectively a WordPress plugin which transforms a vanilla install of the content management system into something that allows for collaboration in an academic context. I’m looking forward to having a play!

I had to click through several link-strewn pages to get to the meat of it, so let me just share that here, for the sake of clarity.

Sources: Announcement / Showcase / WordPress plugin