I don’t know if it’s just due to the recent conference, but there’s been a huge uptick in discussion about OCW in the past couple days, and in an attempt to keep up with it I’m providing these quick hits:
First, there were a bunch of excellent posts about conference sessions.
Willem Van Valkenburg (of TU Delft) covers the WikiEducator presentation, and gets a shot of the slide I have been wanting to talk about but not had the time to yet — the quality assurance model of the project. This social QA bit was the really interesting bit of the presentation for me — how to avoid the overbearing paternalism that Wikipedia has got into lately while still providing some level of quality control (The solution, according to Wayne, is to allow tiered levels of content, which you can see on the slide Willem has captured). Wlliem also covers the Board composition (although I think Brandon is included in the list by mistake).
Through the glory of twitter, Stian Haklev notes we may have the first Italian OCW. I’m a little disappointed it uses Flash, which is unfriendly to hacking and things like Google translation — but given they use the ND license, I suppose this is partially by design (Stian notes the ND with a “Come on!”. Yup.) I seem to be saying this a lot lately, but I’ll try to find out more about this project and post it here. To my knowledge, they haven’t talked to the consortium.
Speaking of the glories of Twitter, Jared Stein seems hours away from having his Moodle OCW mod done, at least as I read his recent tweet (updates protected). I saw this demo’d at the conference. Very sweet, and very simple — works the way you would expect it to work. Which anyone in software knows is a difficult thing to accomplish. He’s promised me a screencast when complete (nudge, nudge).
We’ve known for years that if we want to move learning environments forward we need to move to loosely coupled assessment. We need to separate gradebooks and rosters from course materials and communities. Scott Leslie argued this point eloquently over a lunch I shared with him and others at OpenEd, and I’ve argued similar points much less eloquently in the past.
In OCW production, the need is particularly strong. At least some of the duplicated work in OCW production is necessitated by the fact the course materials have to be produced in an LMS (because that’s where the student roster lives) as well as on the broader web (which can’t talk to the roster).
One sustainable model would have the OCW site replace the repository function of the LMS entirely. In such a system, certain materials might be made available only to rostered students because of IP concerns, but these materials would live side by side on a single courseware site, and eliminate the “double-entry book-keeping” issue that many institutions currently have.
But to get to this LMS-free world, professors need access to the one piece that has traditionally been the sole domain of the LMS — a gradebook. And if developers of courseware want to structure permissions based on that roster, the gradebook needs to be able to communicate with multiple systems.
Luckily, Jon Mott is working on just such an application. He took a moment at the conference to talk about it with me:
Jon later commented on the crowdvine site for the conference that the feedback he got on this project at OpenEd was extremely positive. We’ll let you know more as the project progresses.
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We have plenty of video and reporting on the conference coming soon, but this, to me, was the sort of thing the conference was about — getting people from different areas together to find common cause.
In this clip, if you can hear over the ambient noise, you’ll see Brian Lamb giving a presentation on edupunk approaches to course publishing.
Christine Geith, who has been in distance education since 1989, is excited. But when Brian says it deals with everything but the gradebook, Christine (quite rightly) wants to know how that is handled. At which point John Mott, standing next to her listening to Jim, describes a new grant funded project that he is working on at BYU — a separable gradebook application that can work as easily with WordPress as with Sakai or Blackboard.
Christine remarks that it reminds her of way back, when people first began using online threaded discussions, and it was such a simple powerful presentation mode that made so many things possible.
I’m a big proponent of replacing a lot of face to face interaction with distance technologies. But when you see three people who have never heard of each other brought together like this — well, you can’t beat it.
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