Ken, Regarding Commons-Based Peer Production, I think Learning Design in general, and LAMS in particular, are very much in keeping with this idea. From one perspective, the whole point of Learning Design is to try to capture the educational processes we use in online courses so that these can be made explicit, and then shared, localised and adapted. This is compared to the usual alternative which is that an instructor does some innovative things in their Course Management System in connecting content resources to forums and other tools to foster collaborative student learning, but then at the end of the course there is no easily shared “thing” that represents this structuring of links between content, forums, etc.
So having made the educational process shareable, Learning Design supports different kinds of peer production. It could be a course team within a single institution where different individual s with different skills (content expert, learning designer, graphic artist, etc) work together to create online courses. These may never be shared with the wider world, but by making the elements shareable, collaborative development is made easier. LAMS has always supported this through both export of Learning Design files, as well as authors being part of “shared” areas with others on the same server. In LAMS V2, we now support multiple shared areas, so different teams of course developers can work together, each with in their own shared “space”.
In other cases, the focus may be more “global”, in the sense that individual educators share resources with the world in the hope that others will be able to use, adapt and improve these resources, but without this being part of any specific local team effort. I think this more global approach will usually require open content licenses to work (as it is difficult to harness the collective development effort without clear freedoms to use and adapt), whereas this not necessarily a requirement (although still desirable!) for local team production.
The LAMS Community is an example of this second kind of “global” sharing. As at 28th May 2007, we have 2262 users sharing 190 sequences which have been downloaded 5377 times - so this illustrates the Commons-Based Peer Production model applied to Learning Design. It is modest in scale compared to some other initiatives, but nonetheless it provides a first indication of the potential of CBPP applied to Learning Design.
One surprise (for me) from the history of the LAMS Community to date is that we haven't yet seen much direct adaptation and sharing back - most sequences are new contributions, rather than modifications of existing sequences. This may be just part of an evolutionary process (perhaps we need a large body of original work before adaptation becomes common), but when I've talked to educators about this issue, many have noted that they like reviewing other people's sequences for ideas and tips, but that they tend to start a fresh sequence that is *informed* by their review of other sequences, rather than direct adaptation. I've experienced this myself.
If this proves to be a persistent issue, it might limit the potential benefits of using open source style development processes to improve the quality of Learning Design through peer collaboration. This will be worth watching closely over the coming years.
For a more detailed article about the rationale for the development of the LAMS Community, and some reflections on experiences to date, see
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