OpenEd: Week 5
This week we were asked to assess six OER repositories, and discuss the concept of quality. I will not make a matrix and comprehensively present these different sites, but rather mention some salient observations regarding each one of them.
Repositories
Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative
This one is based on the national distance-learning institution in Britain, and as such they have extensive experience with delivering teaching through an online medium. The courses presented were mostly of the introductory sort, and seemed to be encouraging what in some of the earlier readings was called “conversion”- getting students to sign up for the full official course. The materials were OK, but mostly text based, and not terribly exciting - I would love to see evaluation reports citing how people use it, and whether enough people are motivated to use if they don’t get credit for it. Not terribly exciting to me at first, but I do like all the different collaboration features built in, something most of the other systems are completely lacking of.
An interesting tidbit is that their definition of “Open Learning” is slightly different from ours:
Open learning means that you will be learning in your own time by reading course material, working on course activities, writing assignments and perhaps working with other students.
Rice Connexions
To me, this is one of the more interesting ones - clearly the only one that is built on “commons-based peer-production”, and not a huge institution contributing all the material. I also think the concept of lenses that they promote is one very good way of enhancing quality, recognizing, as one of our earlier readings stated, that quality is contextual - what is useful for me, might not be useful for you in a different situation. However, I wish it was more wiki-like. Even when signed in, there was no obvious way for me to “fork” an article, and create a derivative (for example for translation, but not only), and I couldn’t even “view code”, to copy that code to a new article I created. It reminds me of Wikiversity - which reminds me that I should investigate that, I haven’t looked at it for a long time, and its curious how it doesn’t come up when we discuss these repositories.
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
This repository doesn’t have that many modules, and they are produced solely by CMU. They are produced directly for the web, however, and use interactive methods to teach for example economics. It seemed interesting, however I felt that not enough information was given to someone coming in from outside. Also interesting how they collaborate with other universities who “deliver” this exact same online course, and gives credit for it. (I wonder if I might be a bit annoyed at paying 500$ for something that for anyone else is free - but then again it is nice to free up lecturers from those huge undergraduate introductory classes, where is no interaction anyway).
UNESCO Open Training Platform
This honestly seems like just a huge repository of all the documents that they have produced. Granted, some of their manuals and handbooks are quite neat, and it’s great that they are available. However, as far as I can see, they are all copyrighted to UNICEF (I wish the UN system would just stop copyrighting their stuff altogether, or adopt an open license), and the PDFs I came across were all scanned from the paper versions, which make them quite hopeless to adopt - which is too bad, because there is a lot of valuable material in there.
MIT OCW
This is probably the one I have spent the most time using and thinking about, ref also my earlier post about reading the evaluation reports from MIT OCW. While it’s a great signal project, I question the utility of many of the courses, especially the ones that only contain lecture outline, and perhaps a few scribbled lecture notes. The material was not designed for the web, and while putting online that is generated during the process of teaching online would contribute to making the process more sustainable (if it didn’t cost 25.000$ to put each course online - which I still cannot understand), this does have some impact on the pedagogical use value. I think that if they put more video or audio online, this would be a huge boon - and different repositories serve different purposes, it’s interesting that several faculty around the world have actually stated that they use the video lectures to study a different style of teaching as well.
National Repository of Online Courses
This is a repository which collects various made-for-web units that teach high school level courses, very much directed towards the US curriculum. The courses seem quite interactive and interesting, although because of the way they are designed, it would be very difficult to reuse components, and the website states this as their copyright policy:
Business terms range from competitive license fees for commercial organizations to free use (Open Educational Resource) for select organizations providing access to underserved students.
Saying that it becomes an Open Educational Resource because they grant access to free use for select organizations that provide access to underserved students is the most narrow definition I have ever seen.
Licenses
Connexions is licensed with a Creative Commons BY license, which is great. MIT OCW, CMU and OLI all use CC BY-NC-SA, which is still open, but really I agree with D’Arcy who said:
open content is not the same as open source, as it relates to source code. content needs to be much more remixable - software, while mixable to some extent - is largely self contained. content needs to be able to be reused at a very small level of granularity - a paragraph here, an image there - and the resulting derivative/aggregate work needs to be available for similar remixing by others. what does this mean for copyright? copyleft and viral licenses are not compatible with this type of remixing.
Both NROC and Unesco make their material available under questionable licenses, and both have formats which make reuse very difficult.
Quality
I feel that it is hopeless to discuss quality without thinking about what the purpose of these sites are, who will use them, for what, how. There seems to have been very little research on how people are actually using these materials. I am sure we could partly dip into the distance education research, although we’d also have to look at non-formal learners, creating learning resources together, adoption of resources by teachers, etc. Different purposes will require different tools. I agree that just putting more stuff out there won’t necessary solve all ills, but putting more stuff out there, in easily reusable formats, and with a CC BY or similar license, will enable all kinds of great innovations - people being able to slice up the text, use photos for Wikipedia (a great OER if there ever was one!), etc. I think we are just seeing the very very beginnings of OERs, and all we can do is to pave the way for what will come. And reusability both technically and license-wise is absolute key. (I find myself wishing that Wikiversity and Connexions would join somehow - I think this is the best long-term solution, although there is still so much lacking).
Stian
(thanks to edublogger @ flickr for the nice photos)
