Why I like my job...

I work as a quality assurance analyst for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) and as an instructional designer for the Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching (FACT). In the afternoons I am at COSL, and I test software that is used to publish university courses online for all to see and use. Being part of the OpenCourseWare movement and getting paid to do it is a pretty sweet deal by itself, but last week something happened that was cool enough to make me want to stop and blog about why I like my job.

One of the features in our eduCommons software is the ability to track whether or not course content has been cleared for copyright. It’s just a check box that you can click as you create course content. The only problem is until last week there was no easy way to view this for all your content at once. You had to click on each item to check copyright. So on Thursday I suggested displaying a copyright symbol or a check mark next to each item when viewing the contents of a course. And Friday morning Brent shows me the new version of eduCommons with the copyright symbol idea implemented. He had also added an “M” flag as well to show which course content items had metadata entered. This is the kind of software development you don’t see every day. A suggestion for the QA guy gets implemented in less than 24 hours. Sweet.