Hey Richard,
This virtual environments are weird - I didn't connect this discussion with your short visit to Canada soon. No worries - I'll buy you that beer, and if its “Free beer” I'll buy you another :-) .
You guy's are doing pioneering work - that Kiwi No.8 Wire experimentation we were talking about. The rest of us are going to learn from your experiences - and I know from your work on the NZOSVLE that your experiences will be refactored back into the community - like this discussion.
The nut we still haven't cracked in the free content movement is the value proposition at the individual educator level. The “costs” of remixing in terms of time, ego (psychological ownership) etc. must be less than the real and perceived benefits. So in other words the benefits of mixing bits and pieces of free content must be more than the temptation to create my own resource from scratch. I don't think we have got this right yet (our wiki approach included).
The value of show casing is that we can visualise undiscovered potential. So go for it. I do think modularity helps overcome the pedagogical structure challenge. At the same time there is an inverse relationship between reusability and the “amount” of learning design we embed in our resources. The more learning design – the less reusable they become in other contexts. This is not a rebuttal against learning design - but a recognition that learning is always contextually bound. Its a tough challenge - but we've got to get smarter.
I like your house kitset example. It emphasizes modularity and some freedom of choice. The analogy breaks down if you want to build a boat. (Sorry - I come from Auckland, although the sailing would be better in Wellington given the wind you have down in your neck of the woods!)
I'm very interested in your experiences and suggestion that if you were to do this again, you might do things differently. What would you do differently? I know that you are hectically busy but if you could summarise this in a few bullets - we could avoid any mistakes you made - thus your contribution back to the community.
I take your point that typical LMS users want quizzes and forums. This harks back to my point about the unique differences between f-t-f and DE pedagogy. If we are smart we separate out those interactions that are typically facilitated by the LMS and other web-server technologies. However the monolithic attitude of LMSs is to control and divide. I can illustrate this with a practical example.
About halfway through the eXe project we came up with this neat idea to set up the parameters for a Discussion iDevice in eXe. The idea was that you could author the “content” for a discussion forum external to the LMS. With some neat XML, when you imported this external content into your LMS it would automatically instantiate a discussion forum, see eXe Discussion Forum iDevice . At the time, interoperability specifications did not drill down to this level of functionality. We hacked our own Moodle patch to demonstrate the utility of this approach. In our excitement we communicated with the lead developer of Moodle. My response from Martin was “I don't like it” - nothing more. I responded – Martin - why don't you like it? Was it because of security concerns that we can write a patch that instantiates a forum externally from the LMS or because this was a nail in the coffin of the LMS control over eLearning. I never got a response.
Regarding the requirement for formative quizzes, close activities, case studies etc. We can achieve these without a database or requirements to be connected to an LMS. We proved this with the eXe project. Therefore - there is a lot we can do outside of the LMS in terms of free content design and development. Lets use the LMS for the interactions that require student-lecture interaction - but keep free content development outside the LMS. If we don't - we're shooting ourselves in the foot.
LMSs are organizational based installations - exponential growth in free content will come from individuals. If we embed our OER initiatives in organisational-based technologies, we will not be able to scale up free content production or reuse across institutional boundaries.
The issue is that the overwhelming majority of institutions and educators don't buy into the free content model. However, at a global level we don't need 95% of the educators to build the free curriculum - we only need 5%. Lets give the 5% the freedom to help us build free content - the rest will follow.
In this world we have two choices - to lead or to follow.
I know what side you're on. Cheers
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