Open Ed. Quest 5 -- Searching for a Better Way (to Search)

Quest 5

"Many BYU faculty already openly share their syllabi and other course materials on personal websites, through iTunesU, and through other mechanisms ... Find as many of the open educational resources being shared by BYU faculty as you can..."

It seems to me that discoverability is really going to be the ultimate make-or-break hinge issue for OER.  One could produce world class, high quality OER that trumps everything that any institutional OER effort produces, and yet remain in complete obscurity with no hope of ever actually sharing these wonderful OER with anyone at all.  And after all, if you take the time and trouble to make some kind of resource with openness in mind, it seems silly to have it be completely worthless (or at least, gravely underused) in the end because you weren't able to put it somewhere that people would find it.

This post isn't going to discuss the hows and whys of publishing open educational content for maximum discoverability. We'll save that for another time.  However, Quest 5 gives us the specific assignment to comb over BYU's web presence looking for faculty-produced OER content, and it begs the question, "How would one go about finding all of the OER on a university's web space?"

The task is not trivial.

Quest 2 - For Real Now

Up to this point in the course we've done a lot of talking.  We've had great discussions about the history of the open education movement, usage rights, sustainability models, reusability, remixability--even hippies!--and just about everything in between.  But now it's time to get to work!  No more talking!  This is going to be fun.

So, looking ahead to Quest 6, we in our guilds will need to collaborate to create a course entirely out of open educational resources.  Because we have so little time left, we decided as a class that we would devote everything we do in the remaining quests to work toward our goals for Quest 6.

The course that we as a class originally (more on that later) decided to build is 10th grade social studies--World Civilizations.  We will attempt to build this course entirely from OERs that meet the Utah State K-12 Core Curriclum Standards for World Civilizations.

So I decided that for Quest 2 I would just jump into the pool and do my best to find as many OERs as possible that could help us meet the objectives and standards set out in the Utah K-12 Core.  This actually turned out to be the first time I've ever made a real attempt to collect a large number of OERs from multiple repositories for a single purpose.  Everything that follows here is a description of my first purposeful experience looking for OERs.

If at any point you feel like cutting to the chase, click on this link or just scroll to the end.

Quest 1 - Reusability in the Land of OERs

Aaron's Rogue Quest 1

"Carefully review the following sites that publish open educational resources, noting the types of media predominantly used by each site and any site characteristics that seem unique. Pay close attention to the quality of reusability exhibited by the media from each site.  Be certain to review a sufficient sample of courses per site to gain accurate insight into their practice. Write a substantive post with references on the variety of media, touching on the reusability aspect of each medium type you encountered."

In this post, I have sampled a number of courses from each of the following websites that offer open educational resources.

MIT OCW
Berkeley
Yale
Stanford
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Connexions
Open University of the UK

Throughout the rest of this post, I intend to discuss each of the different media types of OERs that I found on these sites, discussing their strengths and weaknesses with particular regard to the 4 Rs of Reusability and the SLAM (or, less violently, the ALMS) analysis (from our in-class discussion on 15 Jan. 2009).

Quest 0.5 - Sustainability in Open Education

"Carefully review at least 50 pages of information on issues relating to the sustainability of the open education movement. Write a post describing the nature and level of success of sustainability work in the field."

Success is doing what you set out to do or, in other words, achieving your goals. And this really is what sustainability is all about. This is why Wiley (2007, p.5) defines sustainability as "an open educational resource project's ongoing ability to meet its goals."

So, to discuss the "nature and level of success of sustainability work in the field," we really need first to talk about what our goals actually are. Stated more generally, to talk about sustainability in the context of one's own OER project, one must first understand what the project's goal's are (Wiley, 2007, p. 19). For right now, let's talk about overall goals for the field of open educational resources in general, leaving aside for the moment any discussion about institutional OER projects.

Quest 0.4 - Creative Commons (CC) Licenses

"Carefully review the Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/). Write a post describing the different licenses."

The Creative Commons website identifies six main license types. For each license listed is provided a brief summary, a link to a "human-readable" description of the specific conditions of the license, and a link to the full-blown license text, which one might suppose could be described as "lawyer-readable".

After reading the full text of a couple of the licenses, I began to lose my will to live. I guess there's a reason I'm looking to become an instructional technologist instead of a doctor of jurisprudence. However, here is my best attempt to summarize the things I learned.

Quest 0.2 - Motivating Factors for the Establishment of Open Education

"Carefully review at least 20 pages describing motivations for the open education movement. Write a substantive post with references on the motivations of the movement."

Carmack, J. K. (2004). The Perpetual Education Fund: A Bright Ray of Hope. Ensign, (January), 37-43.
Hinckley, G. B. (2002). Reaching Down to Lift Another. Liahona, (January), 60-62, 67.
Wiley, D. A. (2006). Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education: Panel on Innovative Teaching and Learning Strategies.

I had wanted to start out this post with some explicit definitions of my terminology (thanks, Jeremy =D). While looking for a definition of the word education, I decided that this is actually a difficult concept to define precisely, given its broad scope and its relevance to almost everything that happens in our everyday lives. So for the sake of this discussion, when I say "education" just assume that I am referring primarily to institutions of higher learning.

I'm also going to commit another oversimplification and define the open education movement as making "education" available to everyone.

You don't need to be current on the considerable amount of debate that has taken place with respect to the open education movement to realize that providing "education" to "everyone" is an extremely ambitious goal facing some formidable obstacles. But instead of focusing on these obstacles and asking questions such as who will be handing over the cash to make this kind of thing happen, I would like to ask a more fundamental question -- Why is open education something that we should be desperately trying to achieve?

It turns out that open education has something sweet for everybody.

Quest 0.3 - A Comparison of MIT OCW and CMU OLI

"Carefully review five (5) random courses from MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/) and five (5) random courses from CMU OLI (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/). Write a post on the different ideals of quality expressed in the differing course designs; describe how you feel the different designs reflect on the different universities."

Click here to see a list of the courses I reviewed and a comparison of some of their respective features.

First, let's start with MIT OCW. Specifically, let's start with their website. I came to the website, and, looking around for a second, quickly found where the free stuff was. I clicked on the "Courses" tab and was presented with a daunting list of Department links. Let's see ... "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science." Click. Then, an even more daunting list of the courses themselves. With over 1800 courses on one page it seemed a bit cumbersome. OK, I'm just complaining. But there really is something psychologically intimidating about being confronted by 1800 hypertext links all at once.

Quest 0.1 - A (Very) Brief History of Open Education

"Carefully review at least 50 pages of historical information on the open education movement. Write a brief summary post on the history of the movement."

The modern history of the Open Education movement essentially began in 1992 with the development of the internet.  While some may argue this point, I believe it is true to say that, despite the existence of all the prerequisite conditions for the formation of the OE movement, the absence of the internet (or some other medium serving the purpose currently served by the internet) would make the very idea of an open education movement an impossibility.