Every student at this university needs to register for classes. Course catalogs, major requirements and friends help determine what to take.

However, there is another tool that can be used – Open.Eau Claire. The student-run project aims to give people a look at UW-Eau Claire’s educational experience and, in some cases, help students fulfill service learning, said senior Tim Lauer, project director.

The project started in 2007, but substantially moved forward 15 months ago, Lauer said. Currently the program has 17 courses, but the website is being revamped, he added.

Lauer said students can have a chance to see what a course or major entails before registering for that course. Open.Eau Claire has everything from syllabi to video to other related materials.

Eventually, Lauer said he wants previews called vignettes, which are small views into a section of the course with video and assignment lists.

“(We) try to get someone who’s out there looking at this website … to be able to get a really good understanding of something without having to spend hours and hours going through full lectures on it.”

Sophomore Lacey Patzer said this would be beneficial to her.

“The little class description that they have on the CampS system is maybe two sentences long,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to know more about the class you are taking.”

Another example Patzer gave is the advantage of knowing if a course’s grading is based more on exams or not through the website.

The project can also provide prospective students a chance to see what courses or majors are like at this university, and can give the community-at-large a chance to view materials from UW-Eau Claire, Lauer said.

Open is based off of the Open CourseWare Consortium, or, OCW, Lauer said.

OCW is a project that aims to put university-level course materials on the Internet for anybody to use. UW-Eau Claire is a member of this consortium.

In terms of obtaining course information, Lauer said Open.Eau Claire looks for professors who share their goals and want to put their course materials online.

One such professor is Philip Ostrander, an associate professor of trombone who also conducts the Symphony Band. He believes that it’s a useful project.

“This encourages transparency in terms of what you see is what you get,” he said. “It’s always good to have more information going to a class than less. So in general it’s a good philosophy.”

Another benefit he described was that it could help with student recruitment, especially for the music department.

Ostrander also mentioned that it involved little extra effort on his part to contribute. The students did all the work, he said.

These students, called Digital Scribes or dScribes, speak with a professor to see if they would be interested in contributing. The term dScribe is borrowed from the University of Michigan’s OpenCourseWare program, Lauer said. The position also fulfills service learning.

Senior Aaron Wingad, a student Regent for the UW System, is a dScribe.

As a student senator in 2007, Wingad voted for the project’s initiation.

Wingad said that although the dScribe gets the information from the professor, the professor controls exactly what goes online.

“It’s their own intellectual property so they decide how much they would want to share and exactly how that’s formatted,” he said.

Lauer said that while Open.Eau Claire is always evolving and reworking things, they are now more focused.

“Now we’re at the point where we know exactly where we want to go,” Lauer said. “We have developed a mission statement, plans … we’re really excited about it.”