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).

Quick review:

The ALMS Analysis gives us some practical considerations when discussing the reusability value of a particular OER:

• Meaningfully editable
  Can the content of the file even be changed?


• Self-sourced
  Is the file preferred for editing also preferred for using?


• Access to editing tools
  Are editing tools practically available (platform / cost)?


• Level of Expertise
  Can a file be adapted with little or no training?

The 4 Rs of Resuability

When people speak of "reusing" an OER, Dr. Wiley believes that they really could be talking about any one of four things:

• Reuse - use of the object in its verbatim original form


• Redistribute - sharing the object with others


• Revise - making derivatives from the original


• Remix - making a combination of the object with other objects

So, with these things in mind, let's proceed with the analysis, in order of most frequently to least frequently encountered media types:

HTML

Perhaps this one is so obvious that I don't really need to mention it, but since it is the backbone of every page on the Web, I think it's important enough to include here.  Each of the websites I visited (with the notable exception of UC Berkeley) offered at least some OERs in HTML format.

MIT OCW, Stanford SEE, Open Yale Courses, CMU OLI, Rice Connexions, and Open University all offered HTML-based OERs.  Some of these OERs were simply syllabi and reading lists for the courses, while others contained textual course material (akin to an online textbook.)  Stanford SEE and Yale provide HTML versions of video transcripts as well.

How does HTML hold up to the 4 Rs and the ALMS analysis?

HTML is quite reusable in terms of one's ability to reuse, redistribute, revise, and remix HTML content.  In terms of the ALMS analysis:

• Access to editing tools: HTML editing tools are rampant and cheap.  For every platform there are dozens of free solutions for editing.


• Level of expertise: Editing HTML is almost as easy as editing a word processing document.  If people can type and can memorize a minimal set of HTML tags, they can edit HTML.


• Meaningfully editable: HTML files are straight text files that are generally not locked up in any way so as to prevent editing.


• Self-sourced: Because the source HTML file is the same file that is viewed in a web browser, simple access to HTML data guarantees the opportunity to edit that data if so desired.

Conclusion

HTML is one media type that lends itself extremely well to reusability of textual OERs that do not require a high level of textual stylization and formatting.  For those textual OERs that do require higher levels of formatting, a small amount of CSS knowledge can go a long way.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

The majority of sites also included many resources in PDF format.  MIT OCW in particular made heavy use of this format.  However, Yale, Stanford, Connexions, and the Open University also made significant usage of this media format.

PDF documents provide a convenient way to present highly structured, stylized, and formatted text and images in a document format that is accessible through the free Adobe Reader program.  It is for this reason that many of these sites used PDF format to encode documents such as essay assignments, problem worksheets, and other class handouts.  Stanford even provides video transcripts in PDF format.  These documents are easily printable; the printed copy is exactly the same as the version one sees on the screen.

How does PDF hold up to the 4 Rs and the ALMS analysis?

PDF really does well at:

• Reuse - To reuse PDF documents in their verbatim original format requires no effort at all.


• Redistribute - Because of the near ubiquity of the Adobe Reader program (in addition to its free availability and relatively small download size of 33.5 MB) there are few technical obstacles for redistributing PDF content.

PDF does not do so well at:

• Revise - This is where things become stickier.  Because the PDF format is so highly structured, modifications to a PDF file are minima, restricted mainly to annotations of the document itself.


• Remix - Remixing PDF content with other content is also not a straightforward process and is nearly impossible if one does not have the proper editing software.

This brings us to the ALMS analysis:

• Meaningfully editable: Not really.  As I mentioned earlier, most of the editing that can be done on a PDF file is limited to adding annotations to the content in the document.  Actual editing of text, etc. is extremely limited.


• Self-sourced: Yes.  In the case ofPDFs, the document that we edit is the same document that we end up viewing in the Adobe Reader viewer program.


• Access to editing tools: Because the Adobe tools for creating and editing PDFs are extremely expensive (US $299 for Acrobat Standard) they are less accessible to editing.  However, some free solutions (and others for a nominal fee) do exist for editing PDF documents and can be found with a quick web search.


• Level of Expertise: Adobe has tried to make the Acrobat product user friendly.  It still has somewhat of a learning curve, and I would not say it is as quickly useful as, say, HTML.

Conclusion

PDF format documents are extremely popular in the OER world.  PDF documents make it very easy to reuse and redistribute open content, but they are severly limited with regard to revising and remixing.  Additionally, these documents do not perform particularly well on the ALMS analysis.

However, a distinction must be drawn between the two types of PDF documents one will encounter.  In my sampling of courses at the OER sites listed earlier, I found only text-based PDF documents.  These documents contain digitized text that can be selected and copied to, for example, a word processing document.  In this case, it becomes much easier for the end user to edit the content of a PDF document, with a much more favorable ALMS analysis.  The user may then choose to export the modifications into a new PDF document.  However, it is difficult to modify a PDF document itself.

The other type of PDF document is image-based, and contains (you guessed it) a bunch of images.  There is not digitized text that can be easily copied into a word processor, which makes the editing of the text portrayed (in image form) an extremely unlikely candidate for revision.  We'll talk more about images later.

Links

While hypertext links to external resources do not necessarily count as an "open educational resource" per se, they are relatively common on OER websites and should therefore be considered in our discussion.

In terms of verbatim re-use, that's what the web is all about -- linking to resources on others' web pages.

However, the reason these resources can't really be considered OERs is that they generally fall outside of the domain of the OER website, and therefore may be subject to different (typically non-"open") license agreements.  Yet, though we typically cannot revise or redistribute these resources, there is something to be said for a collection of useful links that saves me the time of doing all the web searching myself.

Images

Whether a useful diagram or a digital photo of an exemplary instance of architectural design, images on OER websites can be quite useful.  They come in dozens of different formats, with the most widely used formats (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc.) being accessible directly from a web browser.

How do images stand up to the 4 Rs and the ALMS Analysis?

4 Rs

• Reuse - It's a given that standard image files can be reused.


• Redistribute - Also quite easy to redistribute image files.


• Revise - Can be easy to revise (more on this at the ALMS analysis)


• Remix - Extremely versatile for remixing purposes

ALMS Analysis

• Meaningfully editable: Yes, the content of images can be changed, although the process is not as straightforward as for text, which we will see in the following points.


• Self-sourced: Yes, the file that would be edited is also the same file that is viewed in a web browser or other image viewing program.  (This is an oversimplification, but in general you could argue that this holds true, depending on how much control and ability you want in the editing process.  Certain image files like Adobe Photoshop PSD documents are edited and then exported into a more common, less easily editable image format.)


• Access to editing tools:  Again, there are many free, open-source software applications out there for editing images of all sorts of different formats, even proprietary formats.


• Level of Expertise: To make significant and meaningful changes to the content of images probably requires a healthy level of expertise.  However, simple modifications like cropping, annotating, or resizing images can be accomplished with little technical expertise.

Conclusion

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a word is worth about, oh say, 8 or 9 cents (if you're a translator), then OER image repositories are a veritable gold mine.  They are easily reusable, redistributable, and remixable, and depending on the type of modifications you want, easily revisable as well.  They also perform quite well on the ALMS analysis.

Audio and Video

While going through these websites, I found that the OERs I was most interested in were audio and video recordings of actual lectures given by actual teachers.  In fact, I download the Game Theory MP3 files from Open Yale Courses and listened to the first lecture yesterday.  My personal experience was that this was extremely more useful and engaging than an equivalent text on the same topic.

How do audio and video stand up to the 4 Rs and the ALMS Analysis?

4 Rs

• Reuse - There are no real barriers to the reuse of these files, provided one is using a computer or has burned the files to external media for playback in a compatible playback device.


• Redistribute - We actually do run into some limitations here for redistribution--if not in terms of physical media then in terms of bandwidth.  Each of the audio MP3 files was approximately 70 MB, while the medium-bandwidth video was about 200 MB per file, and high-bandwidth 500 MB per file.  This would take quite a while to download for some individuals using slower internet connections.


• Revise - Refer to the ALMS analysis.


• Remix - Not so well.  Because audio and video have so much context (they are "large" OERs), they are difficult to remix and combine with anything else.

ALMS Analysis

• Meaningfully Editable:  Yes, the files can be edited to make those changes which would make sense in a continuous audio / video stream.


• Self-sourced:  The audio and video files themselves are can be both edited and viewed.


• Access to editing tools: Several high-quality audio editing tools are available for free.  However, high-quality video editing tools are rare unless one is willing to spend some money.


• Level of Expertise - If one only wants to make minor modifications (such as separating highly relevant clips from the original work into smaller audio/video files) then little expertise is required.  However, any major modification to an audio or video file (particularly to the content) is much more difficult and requires a certain amount of expertise.

Conclusion

Audio and video recordings of lectures seem to make excellent open educational resources for the amount of information they are able to convey.  However, because of the high amount of context associated with a complete audio or video recording, the chances of remixing this content with others is much slimmer than if one were to take clips from the recordings.  These smaller clips have less context and are therefore more easily remixable with other media types.  However, audio and video editing (or any kind) may seem to be an intimidating technical process to people with little technical expertise.

Also, large audio and video recordings require a large amount of internet connection bandwidth, and this may be an inhibiting factor for some would-be users of these OERs.

Overall, however, I believe that the audio and video resources are my personal favorite as a self-learner.