OSP is part of the Sakai project — itself a very robust Collaboration and Learning Environment — and as such OSP can leverage all the features offered by Sakai. Course schedules are merged together for the student to have an at-a-glance calendar of activity. Resources are available for drag-and-drop convenience for students and faculty to collect documents for courses and projects. Faculty can section off their course syllabus and then reuse some or all of it for the next offering. Faculty can see the progress of all students in the course Matrix, and students can publish their portfolios to be viewed by whomever they choose.

OSP is really a suite of Sakai tools: the two biggest players are the Matrix and the Portfolio.

Matrix: Institution's Perspective

With the Matrix you can encourage your students to see their course work as part of a larger learning experience. That is, widen their perspective to see that their homework is more than just a string of assignments — each task is a piece to an educational puzzle that's being built one course at a time.

• Track student development and learning over time
• Enable institution to demonstrate adherence to standards and certification requirements
• Matrix allows for predefined structure in portfolio templates

Portfolio: Student's Perspective

Once your students have collected various artifacts and evidence (course work, assignments, tests, homework and the like) they may feel that some of it is worthy of distribution to various audiences. Perhaps this paper over here would be good to include as part of a senior project; maybe that document would be good to link to from a résumé; maybe another assignment would make a good introduction to an overall showpiece demonstrating the student's learned skills — a portfolio.

• Upload homework or assignment once, use it many times
• Handy respository accessible online — from on campus, off-campus, anywhere, anytime
• Well-structured environment for collecting evidence and publishing it
• Student has control over who can see which documents, which portfolios