“Open Educational Resources”Leave a Comment:
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[…] Meiszner, who I first encountered via FLOSSCom.Net (see OER- Open Educational Resources) recently dropped me a line to let me know about a new online learning experience aimed at […]
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I read your post from a link from Stephen Downes and wanted to add a link to an Introducation to Open Education course being facilitated by Professor David Wiley at Utah State University – see http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus
Dozens of participants from around the world are reading the course material (good additions to your list above) and preparing weekly blog reflections. For anyone interested in the open education “movement”, this course site is also a great place to start.
Hello Jeff
Let me just pick up on a couple of your points and also explain a bit more what we at the FLOSSCom project aim to do.
The open educational resource movement is indeed about sharingcontent and to allow others to use it and edit it. As you point out this is currently most visible at the higher education sector, though the K12 school education sector – at least the European one – has also a strong stand. Somehow they seem to have less problems of sharing.
The OER movement was partly inspired by the open source software movement where you give software away for free and allow others to use and improve it (this is the open side). As we have seen this model works out well from a business perspective and from the quality perspective. What we further can see at open source is the benefit of “collaborative production”. Taking Wikipedia we see that this principle also works on the content side (I know that there are quality concerns, but I also know how many bad lectures I listened to at my university time – so everything is relative).
With OER we are – by now – still at an early stage as we make the content “free” available and “open” to be modified, remixed and improved. The second part however, the modification, remix and improvement, as we see it in open source or at Wikipedia still does not take that much place. There are several large scale projects today that aim to foster exactly this second aspect. The OpenLearn project (http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php) in example not only provides open educational resources, but also features a learning environment where people can engage with the content. The project is still fairly young and constantly improving by closely monitoring users’ feedback.
Our FLOSSCom project enters somewhere here. We believe that education can learn a lesson from open source communities on collaborative content development and the establishment of learning communities. I am not talking about the use of open source software in education, but the use of the principles of open source communities for education. The open source case also shows that “content” is more than only some “courses” or instructional materials and that content is not “static”. It also provides some insights on who develops content for which purpose and how.
A presentation that might provide an idea of what I am talking about is available at: http://www.slideshare.net/andreasmeiszner/learning-resources-in-floss
Thank you also for featuring our presentation about the “Learning the open source way” project and our current summer university. Here we exactly try to get in open source members (like the Ubuntu community) and to bring them together with educators to identify principles that have a potential to improve education. The project is open to every one interested and we are keen to learn from / with you!
If you like to leran more about these topics chack also out the FLOSSCom website that (I think I can say this) provides a good picture on the subjects and covers a broad field. There are also several links to other ongoing OER projects, academic research and so on.
Best
Andreas