Open Education Resources

4 March 2008 - by Marshall

Over the next few weeks we will post comments about aÂ lot of interesting OER.Â Â Keep an eye on this page.Â Go to this link.

In: Education, OER | 1 comment »

1 Comment

Thanks Marshall, Cathy,

I was going a bit bats after reading “we welcome your feedback, comments and discussion” at the top of this doc, and having nowhere to go. http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf

Do you think we could try and attempt to bring all the discussion which goes on on all HP’s OER initiatives together? Blogs are one step and good as a way to respond to a report. But as John says in the doc, we have a “successful disaster” on our hands. “a teacher now has access to 100 elementary calculus courses’ (and a thousand blogs). We need incentives and mechanisms to promote creation and access to fewer instances of the same course but with more support material, more commentary, more examples, etc”

I wouldn’t even say we need “more commentary”. We just need a way that, when HP/OER funded communities put a doc or report up, people are directed to a forum where a conversation can take place, and be followed if you come in a bit late. You’ve seen John D from OCWC attempt a forum, but because the incentive is for each silo to produce “me too” content rather than collaborate and produce a course together, we end up with so many half baked (institutional) pies rather one good quality pie, baked by a global (subject specific) group.

In short, we need a community hub(s). http://docs.moodle.org/en/Community_hub

It might look something like this COP forum, which is about 250 on Alexa’s top 500. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
So long as each funded initiative is ‘incentivated’ to use it as a place to share what going on in their silo, I’m sure we might see the beginnings of a culture built around global communities rather than institutional repositories.

At least that’s what we’ve found.
http://www.wikback.com/forums/
(PS This hub is only 3 months old)

simonfj on April 7th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

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