Amee,
First, thank for this fantastic (interesting & thought provoking) posting. There are a lot of ways of approaching the topic of “doing OER,” and posing the types of developmenta l questions that you have takes us beyond the topics of licensing and storage. Looking at the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium's use of problem spaces that you cite in the posting, for example, I think points us down a path not unlike the use of participatory action research for the development of curriculum, which I think is pretty exciting.
I have been involved in various roles with a number of institutions, principally in higher/tertiary education, that do a lot of distance and online education. Most of those organizations had adopted pretty traditional curriculum and course design and development process. The processes have tended to group in two general areas:
- Sometimes these processes were really traditional, faculty-centered processes that were augmented with assistance from a learning designer, perhaps a graphics artist, multimedia professional, etc.
- Sometimes the processes are based on a “production model” intended to achieve some economies of scale through divisions of labor and use of other techniques for achieving efficiencies.
Although I do not have a handle on the actual amount, but if I were to guess at the volume of content that is created for distance and online education annually through formal processes, it would be quite significant. It seems that in this posting, Doing OER implies a third model that connects:
- Design
- Development
- Delivery/Use/Distribution
- Assessment
- Redesign/Redevelopment (for reuse)
in an environment where the whole process is educational and open to learners as well as faculty, designers, etc. This type of approach would obviously be quite powerful, particularly if the process included the introduction of new student generated content/artifacts.
So, is this the type of thing that is worth doing? (It seems to be a natural enough extension of what Amee is talking about.) If so, who is starting to do or fund this type of thing?
Looking forward to learning!!! Ken
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