Thanks for the invite. I'm afraid I'm totally flat tack on another wee initiative here - not a tectonic shift but a small step in an aligned direction ;-) That's why I'm working during Easter and unfortunately need to pay myself pretty much these days, not always easy ;-/
"For example, lets say I plan this big OER project and I embed my resources in Moodle. There isa considerable effort and cost required to reconfigure those resources for another environment.”
True and actually we are doing just that, well sort of. But we are using Moodle to simply showcase courses that have been built in a modular fashion. The “source files” are entered into an open access repository and can be pulled out and used anywhere. The degree of modularity mitigates the problem of pedagogical structures - to a degree. There is effort involved in porting across, for sure. We've been using a few analogies so I'll throw in another. I often describe our OER project as like kitset housing. We've got a showhome but really what you get is the kitset to put together the course and extend or edit as you feel fit. There's effort involved in doing that and some pros and cons with the approach.
You're absolutely right that this approach is not conducive to self-organised collaborative authoring. If doing it again we might do some things differently but overall I'm happy with the progress. The target constituency are Moodle and Blackboard users. They want, quizzes, forums, group activities, case study scenarios etc. and they also want courseware with an embedded QA process. In this model there is a quality assured 'official' release of course materials. Anyone is then free to take that release, reduce it, extend it, edit away etc but there will still be that core release. This is similar to how many open source software communities operate - there are moderator(s) to ensure quality of the code.
This is not the same type of openness as an open wiki and in some ways nor can it be given the context of quality assured credentialing frameworks etc. Within the courseware we also have flash based objects, audio and video rendered in flash. I know this won't fit with your philosophies on openness as proprietary tools may be necessary to edit the content.
In our defense:
- We're not using any NC restrictions. Commercial entities can repurpose this stuff.
- We've designed the materials as OERS, i.e high granularity, learning objects have XML engines to be more easily editable etc. This is as opposed to the trend to put up legacy courseware, call it open and then say you have an OER project when the materials are ill-suited for wider sharing and input.
-
We've focused on high quality learning design so that there will be uptake
amongst the tertiary education sector.
- The goal is to reduce barriers to entry and get better quality courses online for overall less investment at a system wide level. On that I'm a pragmatist and will use the best tools available proprietary or otherwise. There's shades of grey here. In my experience there's many open source projects and OER projects that aren't all that open anyway. But this isn't the final model, it's all a learning curve. A wiki environment and more extensive use of RSS are on the drawing board!
Now about that beer, coming your way in a few weeks ;-)
- 839 reads
