K12 Open Ed

This week’s assignment:

QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does “quality” mean?

These projects have more that differentiates them then they have in common, but here are a few commonalities:

• They all purport to be “open,” though to different extents. (I have found a great deal of content in these projects and other “open” projects that is not really open. More on that in another post.)
• They are primarily geared toward adult learners.
• These projects all have a far reach, being used by non-traditional lifelong learners around the world, regardless of whether that was the intent. (That’s one of the great side benefits of “open”.)
• These are all primarily written in English and at a fairly high readability level.
• None have an obviously sustainable model. This is a critical issue for open ed movement. Until people start addressing sustainability, this is going to remain a fringe endeavor.

These projects have many differences. Here are a few:

• Some, like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, have a producer-consumer model with one entity providing the content. Others, like Connexions, have a massive collaboration model with everyone invited to participate.
• While most of the content in these projects is traditional university coursework, a few like UNESCO are targeted at other groups. As mentioned above though, all are used by a variety of groups.
• Some of these projects have the primary content housed in the online system, which others (MIT, parts of others) are predominantly syllabi with references to outside (copyrighted) readings.
• The ability to revise or remix course content varies. Many of these projects use the PDF format, which makes it extremely difficult to do much revision. Connexions has a feature by which you can create a copy of a module and revise it or essentially fork the content.
• Each handles “quality control” differently. The producer-consumer model projects only allow their own staff to contribute, enforcing the strictest quality standards. Others screen content. Connexions invites anyone to post, which may imply looser quality standards, but they have an interesting way of facilitating peer review of content.

So what is quality? It’s hard to say; in many cases, quality is in the eye of the beholder. What may be an exemplary course to one audience may be incomprehensible to another.

In a traditional sense, quality at its most basic means factual accuracy. (Even factual accuracy though can be subjective. Read a discussion page in Wikipedia.) Another measure of quality is the degree to which it is free of errors, whether they be factual, typographical, or technical.

Specific to open ed, quality measures might include that the material:

• is truly open
• is readily remixable
• is suitable for a variety of audiences (accessible, multimedia, etc.)
• provides pportunities for social networking [as written about by Alessandro]

I fear that to many, quality is somehow equated with quantity. (I heard this relationship drawn several times at this week’s Open Ed conference, and it made me shudder.) More is not necessarily better. In many cases, less is in fact more. Many of the open ed projects are suffering from a quest to get x million items in their repositories. The result is a lot of material that is crap, which will drive newcomers away from these resources.

This is a great video about OER and the Connexions project from TED. (If you aren’t familiar with TED, it’s a phenomenal conference with “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers. The videos from it are licensed under CC-By-NC-ND license.)

[coolplayer width=”480″ height=”380″ autoplay=”0″ loop=”0″ charset=”utf-8″ download=”1″ mediatype=””]

In the United States, most government-published content is public domain. Does anyone know if that is the case elsewhere in the world, particularly in the developing world? A quick web search didn’t turn up much on this, so I appreciate any info anyone might be able to share on this.

A few minutes ago, I heard a comment at a session at the OpenEd conference about content providers’ push vs. learners’ pull. Oh…learners. I’d almost forgotten about them.

With a few exceptions, I have not heard a lot of discussion about learners (or learning) at this conference. There has been a lot of talk about systems, repositories, consortia, alliances, standards, barriers, and theoretical frameworks.

It’s not just this conference — this seems indicative of the OER “movement” as a whole. If OER is going to be successful in changing the world, learners and learning need to be at the center.

I went to an interesting session at the COSL 2007 Open Ed conference today by Christopher Hoadley from Penn State.

One of his ways of looking at technology use was how its’ instructional use fits into the local learning and community contexts. (He talked about a case in a rural village in the Himalayas, but the argument holds equally for any learning environment. In fact, the point is highly illustrative of why ICT has not worked well in US classrooms.) He contrasted a learning environment with 4 Pentium desktops and another with video cameras. The former had challenges of inadequate electrical power, lack of pedagogical fit, and a clash with community values. (Around the world, rural communities often see technology as influencing youth to leave their community for a less favorable urban lives.) The video project, on the other hand, fit in much better both from an infrastructure standpoint (low power requirements, mobility) and a cultural values context (content being student- and community-driven).

The conclusion: desktop technology functioned as an “invasive species” and video (and I would add, mobile) technology as a “native species” in the space of technology tools.

This led to a brief, but interesting, discussion of OLPC both in terms of hardware/technology as well as content. There was a question raised about the degree to which local communities have been involved (or not) in the design approach. Only time will tell (maybe) how local communities use this technology, but I would bet that it won’t be in the context that the OLPC folks envision.