MORPH is the acronym for the Multimedia Object Research Platform Host (MORPH) [No, no one could come up with a better name!]. This is a project that was recently approved for partial funding by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI).  It is being led by Sabine Graf and Vive Kumar of SCIS. It is in limbo at the moment awaiting approval for provincial funding.

The MORPH infrastructure will consist of a research platform hosting a Content Management System (CMS) built on an XML database (AlFresco) for conducting research on learning objects, supported by servers, workstations, multimedia graphics workstations, mobile devices and ancillary software to facilitate research and development of new techniques and approaches to technology enhanced learning. Along with the CMS, servers and other ancillary equipment, and software are essential for this research. A platform will be developed for hosting the research. MORPH will enable researchers to study the emerging generation of flexible and reusable user-generated content and the dynamic interaction patterns of users and software agents. This should result in new ontologies for describing the patterns, metadata for indexing dynamic learning resources, new intelligent agents and web services for enhancing and guiding the actions of both learners and instructors, and a wide range of visualization tools for communication with and among the human participants. The infrastructure will be located in Athabasca and Edmonton, Alberta. The XML research database will be created and housed in Athabasca, but will be available online to the AU researchers from anywhere on the Internet and for then collaborating with their partners across Canada and overseas.