Project CORA - Community of Online Research Assignments

LMU’s Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA) needed an open education resource (OER) web portal where faculty and librarians could collaborate on research assignments. We built CORA this custom online networking tool that would fit their immediate needs while at the same time give them the ability to scale and grow as they saw their needs change and enhance.  

By using Drupal as the CMS to build this web portal, it allows for simple and manageable backend for administrators to have a smooth contributor approval process, manage content, and respond to enhancement suggestions. It also allows each individual user to:

• Share their different success’ and lessons learned so that others can benefit.
• Add to the database of research assignments while still allowing for a simple UX.
• Provide feedback on research assignments to build upon the integrity and quality of content in the web portal.
• Interact with other contributors by flagging content they support, commenting on other contributor assignments, and tracking the statistics of assignments and users by way of leadboards.
• Search both the assignment  and user database on multiple levels of granularity using optimized search filters.