{"id":28,"date":"2007-09-29T18:22:35","date_gmt":"2007-09-30T01:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/28"},"modified":"2007-09-29T18:22:35","modified_gmt":"2007-09-30T01:22:35","slug":"opened-week-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/28","title":{"rendered":"OpenEd-Week 5"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s assignment:<\/p>\n<p><em>QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does &#8220;quality&#8221; mean?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>These projects have more that differentiates them then they have in common, but here are a few commonalities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> They all purport to be &#8220;open,&#8221; though to different extents. (I have found a great deal of content in these projects and other &#8220;open&#8221; projects that is not really open. More on that in another post.)<\/li>\n<li>They are primarily geared toward adult learners.<\/li>\n<li>These projects all have a far reach, being used by non-traditional lifelong learners around the world, regardless of whether that was the intent. (That&#8217;s one of the great side benefits of &#8220;open&#8221;.)<\/li>\n<li>These are all primarily written in English and at a fairly high readability level.<\/li>\n<li>None have an obviously sustainable model. This is a critical issue for open ed movement. Until people start addressing sustainability, this is going to remain a fringe endeavor.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These projects have many differences. Here are a few:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Some, like <a href=\"http:\/\/ocw.mit.edu\/OcwWeb\/web\/home\/home\/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\">MIT<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmu.edu\/oli\/\" target=\"_blank\">Carnegie Mellon<\/a>, have a producer-consumer model with one entity providing the content. Others, like <a href=\"http:\/\/cnx.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Connexions<\/a>, have a massive collaboration model with everyone invited to participate.<\/li>\n<li>While most of the content in these projects is traditional university coursework, a few like <a href=\"http:\/\/opentraining.unesco-ci.org\/cgi-bin\/page.cgi?g=;d=1\" target=\"_blank\">UNESCO<\/a> are targeted at other groups. As mentioned above though, all are used by a variety of groups.<\/li>\n<li>Some of these projects have the primary content housed in the online system, which others (<a href=\"http:\/\/ocw.mit.edu\/OcwWeb\/web\/home\/home\/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\">MIT<\/a>, parts of others) are predominantly syllabi with references to outside (copyrighted) readings.<\/li>\n<li>The ability to revise or remix course content varies. Many of these projects use the PDF format, which makes it extremely difficult to do much revision. <a href=\"http:\/\/cnx.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Connexions<\/a> has a <a href=\"http:\/\/cnx.org\/content\/m11804\/latest\/\" target=\"_blank\">feature<\/a> by which you can create a copy of a module and revise it or essentially fork the content.<\/li>\n<li>Each handles &#8220;quality control&#8221; differently. The producer-consumer model projects only allow their own staff to contribute, enforcing the strictest quality standards. Others screen content.  <a href=\"http:\/\/cnx.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Connexions<\/a> invites anyone to post, which may imply looser quality standards, but they have an interesting way of facilitating peer review of content.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what is quality? It&#8217;s hard to say; in many cases, quality is in the eye of the beholder. What may be an exemplary course to one audience may be incomprehensible to another.<\/p>\n<p>In a traditional sense, quality at its most basic means factual accuracy. (Even factual accuracy though can be subjective. Read a discussion page in Wikipedia.) Another measure of quality is the degree to which it is free of errors, whether they be factual, typographical, or technical.<\/p>\n<p>Specific to open ed, quality measures might include that the material:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>is truly open<\/li>\n<li>is readily remixable<\/li>\n<li>is suitable for a variety of audiences (accessible, multimedia, etc.)<\/li>\n<li>provides pportunities for social networking [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.edocet.net\/wordpress\/2007\/09\/29\/opened-week-5-question-3\/\" target=\"_blank\">as written about by  Alessandro<\/a>]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I fear that to many, quality is somehow equated with quantity. (I heard this relationship drawn several times at this week&#8217;s Open Ed conference, and it made me shudder.) <strong>More is not necessarily better.<\/strong> In many cases, less is in fact more. Many of the open ed projects are suffering from a quest to get x million items in their repositories. The result is a lot of material that is crap, which will drive newcomers away from these resources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week&#8217;s assignment: QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does &#8220;quality&#8221; mean? These projects have more that differentiates them then they have in common,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6mlV-s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}