December 2009

Thinking about platforms for open learning

Posted by karen on December 4, 2009 in Uncategorized

This is a different kind of post for me… I’m really thinking out loud and looking for folks more knowledgeable than me to make suggestions.

I’m working on an OER project plan to develop open “textbooks” (collections of resources with a scope and sequence, not necessarily in a textbook format) for K-12 that can be remixed at a classroom or even student level to differentiate instruction. The focus is on flexibility, ease of use, and appropriateness for average K-12 teacher.

I want to put resources toward high quality content, not a platform. There are so many open platforms out there that there must be one (or more) that are appropriate for this. I suspect that there might be a need for two platforms: a CMS for the developers and an LMS for end users. Some key criteria would include:

  • Support for various media types (text, audio, video)
  • Support for interactive media (quizzes, writing response, assignment submission, etc.)
  • Ability to export in multiple formats (print, electronic)

Here are systems I’ve looked at and thought about (some more than others): Moodle, MediaWiki, Connexions,  FlexBooks, and Sakai.

As an end user tool, I like Moodle for a lot of reasons, including that it is very interactive and geared for remix. It also doesn’t hurt that a lot of schools already use and like it.

While Moodle seems like a good LMS for my purposes, it seems like we’d need a front-end development CMS to host content in. The idea would be that a teacher would choose a course (or smaller content modules) from the CMS and then export them to Moodle where the materials could be customized for individual classes or even groups of students.

Questions:

  • Does this approach make sense?
  • Do you know of anyone using a CMS to export content into Moodle?
  • What other tools or approaches should I be thinking about?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you care to share.

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