“OER is ___”

At a recent meeting to discuss the agenda for moving OER forward, the predictable topics of quality, effectiveness, and cost came up in the context of defining the value proposition of OER.

David Wiley rightfully pointed out that we don’t generalize in terms of other interactive media, such as software or video, but instead judge individual assets on their merits.

That’s a good point. We don’t look for proof that “interactive video is highly effective” (except for when citing research for grants…a fairly ridiculous practice that I’ll leave that for another post for now). Instead, we look for particularly effective video or more to the point, video that is particularly effective for the audience and purpose at hand. Some video that is great for one purpose may be wholly inappropriate for another.

The same is true for OER. The quality and effectiveness of OER resources needs to be judged in the context for which it is intended. Even issues of cost effectiveness are context-specific, particularly when looking at total cost of ownership/use.

While we are searching for blanket statements that justify the use of OER, we should keep this in mind. Even when discussing the benefits of OER, it may be valuable to make fewer blanket assertions and to focus instead on the specific benefits of individual content assets.

Khan Academy math

Sal Kahn through his Khan Academy has built a tremendous collection of over 1800 open-licensed videos offering instruction in math and science. They cover topics in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics calculus, and more and are licensed under CC BY SA.


However, up until now, the videos have only been available on YouTube. This has posed two problems for educators: 1) YouTube is blocked in most school districts and 2) YouTube’s terms of service prohibits accessing its content through other technologies (e.g. downloading the videos for offline use through other services — I’ll leave the interpretation and debate on this aside for now).

Now, however, the Khan videos are available elsewhere! Curriki has them available as both embeddable and downloadable files. They have also created a group to “organize, extended and build a community of practice around this content.” This is a great opportunity to collaboratively remix this content and add to it. (The videos themselves are mostly narrated chalkboard talks — like most resources, very useful to some students and as much to others. They could however be combined with some other great open math content out there and used to differentiate math instruction. I have an idea myself to to remix some of this into a series of middle school math courses in Moodle.)

Another site has collected the Khan videos for download onto a USB drive or server. (Thanks to Steve O. for this link.)

There are sure to be more creative uses of this great collection of content to come. Let the remixing begin!

Shareable media sets

Awhile back, I was thinking about the idea of shareable media sets — collections of open-licensed photos, diagrams, maps, audio, video, etc. that could be used by teachers or students in word-processed documents or presentations or used to create web sites or other multimedia presentations.

I’ve taken this idea a little further and have now developed the following shareable media sets:

ancient_egypt

Social studies

Science

For each media element in the set, just right-click the file to find the credit, license, and source link.

I hope to do more of these over time. Let me know if you have ideas or requests.

Media sets for remix

There are so many great open resources that teachers can use in creating multimedia projects (reports, PPTs, web pages, wikis, etc.) with their students, but they take a lot of time to find and correlate.

As a part of a recent project, I’ve started putting together “media sets” — bundled collections of photos, maps, diagrams, videos, etc. on very specific topics for teachers and students to use.

Here’s an example of one on Ancient China. It includes a timeline, photos of art from various dynasties, maps, etc. Each piece is open-licensed. You can right-click the file to get source and license information.

We also have media sets for ancient Egypt, contemporary Asia, contemporary Africa, American westward expansion, human interaction with our environment, etc. with more to come.

Questions for you:

  • Is this something that is useful to you?
  • What would make it more useful?
  • What other topics would you like to see?
  • Would you be interested in attending a 3-hour workshop at a conference at which participants would all build media sets on topics of their choice?

A new way to search and new ways to think about sharing

I’m not sure when this came out, but Google Advanced Search now has a filter for licenses.

google-advan_srch

I also stumbled upon a really brilliant survey about sharing from a group called Latitude. If you haven’t already, you really should take this survey. It takes a few minutes, but in going through it, I learned so much. It really made me think not only about different approaches to sharing, but also about different things in my life and how they are connected.

After taking the survey, I went to the partner site Shareable. Again brilliant. I immediately subscribed to their blog and then didn’t know whether to file it in my folder for open content or the one for sustainable food production, since it covers both of those topics and more. Wow! (I ultimately settled for the open content folder, but only because that’s the one I read more actively.)

If you care about sharing, sustainability, or the future, make sure to check out these great resources.