“Alternatively, let this be a call to arms to develop [open educational resources] broad enough
and deep enough to make situations like this moot in the future.” — CWE
So for the last few days I've been talking about the present and possible future of Learning Management Systems (LMS), those online classroom systems with which eLearners quickly become very familiar. And before that I touched on the reasons why open educational resources (OER) are useful, not just because people don't have to pay to use them, but because they can be adapted by anyone for any purpose without payment or permission.
The need now is to find better ways to fit all the pieces together. My friend Wayne Mackintosh, the founder of WikiEducator, remarked recently, “Education is an act of sharing knowledge freely. So
where are all the free education materials that we can adapt, modify and reuse without restriction? Why has humanity taken so long in achieving a free knowledge base for us to share for the common good of education and society? Why are the majority of our global population under served when it comes to education?”
Fortunately this is happening. For some time now there have been efforts to build free educational resources, but now there is effort not just in developing content, but also in making it easier for fellow educators to use. I think one of the best ways to facilitate this, and it's something we're not doing that well yet, would be to put together packages of free educational content that fit seamlessly into Learning Managment Systems. I'm especially referring to Moodle, as it's the dominant open source LMS.
This isn't an original idea. Pearson, the academic publishing giant, bought an LMS called eCollege, and their strategy for marketing it seems to include making it very easy to drop in pieces of Pearson's vast supply of content. Indeed, many textbook publishers have related content that they make available to instructors who can then drop it effortlessly right into their online courses. In this way they make both their own textbooks and their LMS more attractive, so that the odds improve that either or both of those resources will be adopted.
Those of us producing open educational resources should get better that this. For example, MIT gets a lot of attention for its impressive OpenCourseWare project. It's possible to access materials from nearly two thousand courses on their site. Wow! But it's one thing to make lots of content available, and another to make it easy for others to adapt to specific use. They do tend to make their courses available in a format that's easy to import into an LMS. But just imagine if everyone out there producing free content did the same thing, so that educators who were willing to try Moodle, or to try OERs, would know that each would work well with the other. By packaging that content in such a way, its value would be that much greater, and the appeal of the overall system would be multiplied.
I do realize that there are some who are doing this, like MIT. Sites like MoodleShare offer course archives that can be used as is. But we need more of this — a lot more! The better that content people and delivery people cooperate, the sooner we can fulfill the dream of a complete set of free curricula that can be used the world over.
Next up, is Harvard Extension School really Harvard?
Image courtesy of geishaboy500