Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

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What Is the CCCS LOR?

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Answer: The CCCS LOR is a repository. It is not an LMS.

There is no link between the CCCS LOR and the LMS, D2L. If you would like to add learning objects found in the CCCS LOR to your course, you may download the item and upload it to D2L.


Answer: Yes. The simplest way to handle this is to save a copy of your materials with “draft” in the file name when you upload your materials. Once the review process has been completed, you may edit your submission to remove “draft” from the file name, and upload the final materials to CCCS LOR. For assistance, please contact us.


User Guides

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Answer: Yes, please visit our Support Center for guides, videos, tutorials and manuals.


Answer: Yes. Please visit our Prepare Your Materials page to learn how to best prepare your materials before you upload them into the repository.


Answer: Yes, please visit our Support Center for guides, tutorials, videos and much more. If you would like to schedule a webinar please contact us.


Answer: According to SP 3-125g, Web Accessibility Procedure, the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) is committed to facilitating access to its Colleges’ instruction, communication, and business processes for the broadest possible audience. CCCS strives to employ principles of Universal Design and the use of the World Wide Web Consortium’s WCAG 2.0 standards in the design, development, implementation, and enhancement of its web-based information and services.

Please visit our Accessibility Requirements page for information and tips to help make your learning objects accessible.  Your College Accessibility Committee may also have resources available.

 


Answer: Yes. Please visit our Assuring the Quality of Online & Hybrid Courses page.

The CCCS LOR Support Center provides information, evaluation rubrics, and access to information that can support high quality teaching and learning within online and hybrid courses. We have organized all these sources for you to use as a “one-stop-shop” for information about quality assurance strategies for online and hybrid courses. The California State University also has developed and implemented a free quality assurance evaluation rubric for online and hybrid courses (Quality Online Learning and Teaching, QOLT).

There are nationally recognized quality assurance organizations that you can join to support designing quality instruction into your programs. These organizations provides excellent professional development programs and well-researched and reliable rubrics for evaluating the quality of online and hybrid courses.


Answer: Yes.

The CCCS LOR Support Center provides some design and packaging guidelines for authoring and organizing your instructional materials to help others reuse your materials.

Please visit our Enabling Others to Reuse Your Materials page.

 


Uploading Process

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Answer: Creative Commons licenses are designed for content and not software code so you won’t add the Creative Commons license to the software code.  All software code should have documentation to describe the software code structure and strategy.

Creative Commons has recommendations on their FAQ page about open licensing of software code that we recommend as well. Please see: Can I Apply a Creative Commons License to Software?

“We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.

Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.

Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it here.

Also, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry.

While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for separate artistic elements such as game art or music.”


Answer: Unless a user receives permission from the licensee to upload the purchased content to the CCCS LOR, all proprietary material must be removed before uploading it.  A user may put a statement that says what the proprietary material is and ideally a link to where others can find it from the publisher and arrange for their own rights to use.


Answer: Every employee of the Colorado Community College System has their own CCCS LOR account. It is best if the person uploading materials was the creator of the materials, as they likely will be able to navigate the uploading processes easily. You can develop efficiencies by managing your uploading process but if you have difficulties, please contact us.  The CCCS LOR is very easy to search, and any user can search for materials to use.

 


Answer:  The CCCS LOR should contain an original, complete copy of the material being hosted.


Answer: The Based on URL can be linked to anything even a proprietary source that you are noting in the introduction of the deliverable.

 


Answer: There are no character limits for the CCCS LOR form fields.


Answer: The embargo feature is for restricting access to assessments.

The embargo feature restricts access to files that are attached to submissions. You can place an embargo date on the file. If a user clicks on an embargoed file a message will appear letting them know that the file is restricted. They can at that time request access to the file. An email will be sent to the submitter letting them know that this person has requested access. It is then up to the original submitter (who uploaded the file) whether or not to allow this person access. If the submitter allows access then an email will be sent to the requester with a link to download the file. It is up to the submitter who gets this request to verify who the person is making the request and also up to the submitter on whether or not to approve it.

Please refer to our Embargo Guide for more information.


File Types/Sizes

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Answer: There aren’t any limits on file sizes. However, if they are really large, then contact us and we will work with you on a solution to upload these taking into account connection speed, bandwidth, etc.


Answer: The Common Cartridge option is not a requirement but it can improve the ability of others to reuse your materials. The Common Cartridge option may be a plug-in your LMS administrator will need to add to get the export option for Common Cartridge. A Common Cartridge captures the application files, assessments, web links, and discussion topics in an LMS course for easy import into any other compliant LMS. Here is information about Common Cartridge : http://www.imsglobal.org/cc

You can upload the LMS export file of the OER materials to the SkillsCommons repository for now.


Answer: To enable others to easily access and work with all CCBY-licensed content, content should be made available in a file format that allows anyone to natively and directly edit the content. For CCCS-licensed content, closed file formats are acceptable. Content may be made available in multiple formats, but at least one of these formats must be openly editable by providing the original file format used to create the content. The type of file format varies by type of media:

For documents: Openly editable formats include original Microsoft Office files (e.g., doc, .docx., .ppt, etc) and other editable document files. An example of a closed document format is a PDF, since files with the .pdf extension do not allow edits.

For images: Source files should be shared for images (e.g. Adobe Photoshop), video clips, or Flash (such as FLA). 

For video: Common video formats include MP4 (H.264), MOV, OGM, WEBM, FLV, and AVI

For audio: Common audio formats include MP3, OGG, FLAC, and WAV, Theora and MP4. For audio-only files, exporting to OGG Vorbis and MP3 is recommended. Include high-resolution versions of videos where possible.

 


Answer:  Given the broad availability of Microsoft Word®, you can upload the material in the .doc or .docx format, so that other people can edit the original with full fidelity.


Editing Submissions

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Answer: Instructions on how to edit submissions to the CCCS LOR can be found in the User Guides under “Editing an Item in the Repository.”

Please see the Contribute Materials section in our Support Center to learn how to edit submissions.


Answer: There are no requirements for users to maintain the materials after they are uploaded to the CCCS LOR.  However, there are many benefits to users and their Institution if they continue to participate in the CCCS LOR community by editing and updating their submissions or uploading new submissions.


Answer: Currently there is no way to cross-reference two deliverables within the submission process.

However, here are two options to work around this limitation:

  1. You can include, in the description, a link to each submission. So, you will first need to upload each submission. Then you will have URLs for each submission. At that point you can go in and edit the descriptions (referring to the Editing section in the user guide) and paste in the URLs you want to cross-reference. OR
  2. You can use the “Based On” field and paste the URLs in this field.

In summary, you will have to complete each submission first to obtain the URLs that you will end up using. You will need to then go in and edit each submission with the URL you have obtained.


Answer: It will not be necessary to use this feature, as the CCCS LOR is a closed repository.


Answer: It will not be necessary to use this feature.


Answer: It will not be necessary for grantees to use the “Withdraw” feature. But yes, if an item is withdrawn it still exists but will be removed from view, search and browse. If the item is withdrawn and then a grantee would like to re-instate the item they will need to contact lor-support@cccs.edu and supply the full URL of the item.


Answer: No. Each collection has unique fields that need to be captured and therefore can not be  moved between collections.

If you have mistakenly uploaded a submission to the incorrect collection you will need to delete the submission and then add it to the correct collection via the regular single submission process. This will ensure that the required fields for that particular submission are in place.


Answer: Yes, if you click “permanently delete” the item will be completely removed as if it were never uploaded.


Downloading Material from the CCCS LOR

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Answer: When downloading, moving, or sending many files, it can be convenient to first compress into a single file the set of many files.  This single file is referred to as an archive or “zip” file.  An IMS Common Cartridge is such an archive with an extension of “imscc”.  Many Learning Management Systems (LMS) can export and import a course’s files in this format.  To view the content of the “imscc” file, simply rename the file’s extension to “zip”.  Your operating system should then offer a way to uncompress the file, by clicking on it, through a file menu, or tool such as Winzip on Windows and unzip on a Mac.  Note that to import the content into an LMS, refer to the imscc file and not its expanded folder of files.


Answer: SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is a specification for how a set of files are packaged and played.  A SCORM file is really an archive or compressed set of files.  To view the content of the SCORM file with the extension “zip”, uncompress the file, by clicking on it, through a file menu, or tool such as Winzip on Windows and unzip on a Mac.  If the file extension is not “zip”, rename it to “zip” first.  To run a SCORM file, you need a SCORM player, which is included with many Learning Management Systems (LMS).  You can also run a SCORM file in a more limited way from your web browser by clicking on the launch HTML file, which might be named index.html, story_html5.html, or similar.


Answer: A “zip” file is a compressed set of files that have been gathered into a single file for convenience.  Some browsers are configured to download a zip file and expand the zip into a folder of files while other browsers leave the “zip” uncompressed.  Given a zip file, uncompress the file, by clicking on it, through a file menu, or tool such as Winzip on Windows and unzip on a Mac.  A zip can contain many types of files.  Some files can be viewed simply by selecting them or double-clicking on them.  Other files may be specific to an application that you must have installed before the file can be launched.  For example, a file with the extension “doc” likely is intended for Microsoft Word and you will need that application installed before the file can be viewed.


Answer: In order to view .scx files you will need the LLEAP – Laerdal Learning Application. LLEAP is a software that unifies the control of all PC-operated Laerdal simulators. Visit the Laerdal website for more information.


Reusing Materials from the CCCS LOR

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Answer: Please refer to the Guide for Attribution of CC-BY Licensed Material for Derivative Works.

OPEN Attribution Builder is a free online Attribution Builder available from Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).