OER - from resources to mainstream practice

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

There is a vast range of open educational resources to choose from if you know where to look and how to search. For most teachers however the main barrier to using OER is the difficulty in finding the right material and assessing its quality and appropriacy. Institutions are reluctant to fully embrace OER since there are few established policies and quality guidelines and inventing these from scratch is simply too time-consuming. The move from a structured world of published textbooks based on a national or regional curriculum to an unstructured ocean of free resources of uncertain quality and with little or no pre-packaging is simply too daunting for most academic leaders to face.

For OER to really make an impact on mainstream education the resources need to be packaged together in related groups of resources or forming a learning path towards a particular learning outcome. This linkage and packaging could be achieved by classifying and tagging resources so that teachers can search for a package of related resources around a common specific theme.

Something along these lines is what newly founded Lumen Learning is offering schools and universities. Founded by open learning pioneer David Wiley of Brigham Young University and education technology strategist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning offer to help replace expensive textbooks with open content that is specifically tailored to the learning outcomes of the school's curriculum. The new company's services are described as:

• Finding quality content and mapping it to course learning outcomes. 
• Incorporating OER into academic strategy and curriculum decisions. 
• Training and supporting faculty. 
• Improving student outcomes. 

The challenge they face is proving that OER can be trustworthy and of high quality, that they can actually replace traditional textbooks and also save the institution and its students a significant amount of money. Institutions are highly unlikely to be able to carry out the above tasks on their own and the niche for Lumen and similar companies would seem clear. If this process works out cheaper than today's textbook-based regime then all the better.

Lumen will earn money from offering these services but they promise to publish the results of their work openly and thus benefit the whole open education community. If this is the opening for OER to gain mainstream acceptance then it will be a welcome development.

Read more about Lumen in an article in Inside Higher Ed: Company Sees Opening for OER

All tagged up

QR codes (quick response)are finally beginning to provide useful services and before long they could be even more common than their less sophisticated cousins the simple bar codes we see on every product in the supermarket. The principle is simple. Most smartphones can download a QR reader app and so if you see a QR-code your phone can scan it and immediately take you to a website or instruction film. No need to put long web addresses on advertising since our mobiles will simply remember the site automatically if the code is scanned.

At the moment QR-codes are being used mostly in advertising where you scan the code and can see more product information on a website. DIY chain The Home Depot have started using QR-codes to let customers access video DIY tips, product demos and further information. You can see how to use the product before you decide to buy. See more on Mashable, Mobile bar codes come to The Home Depot.

In education there are already many innovative applications of this technology, as well demonstrated in this excellent overview (below) by Carol Walker from JISC RSC Scotland N&E (see original post). QR-codes are used in libraries to help students access e-books and e-journas, to speed up borrowing and returning and for catalogue access. QR-codes around campus can be used to help new students get acquainted with the campus. Museums can have QR codes on every exhibit to provide extra information, activate video or audio commentary. Books can have QR-codes leading to new updated material. The potential is enormous.



At the moment this is still not mainstream. You need a smartphone and you need to download the application before QR codes become meaningful. Hopefully new mobiles will have a QR reader pre-installed thus eliminating one major hurdle. We're still waiting for the critical mass to be reached but the potential uses are so wide ranging that the only reason QR won't take off is that an even better solution emerges.

Basically everything could be tagged like this and you can't help wondering when we can have a bar code on our foreheads so people can find out everything about us without all the bother of engaging in long conversations.

The QR-code above will lead you straight to this blog!

Who can you trust?

Many people are wary of the reliability of information on the net: Wikipedia is still far from welcome in many classrooms despite being the most comprehensive reference work ever written. The problem is of course that we don't really know who has written the entries or whether they are academically reliable sources. Books and articles from reputable publishers are looked upon as reliable sources but I sometimes wonder.

The reliable sources of fifty years ago may now appear prejudiced, inaccurate or in some cases downright wrong. But at the time they were authoritative. Reading old encyclopedias is a fascinating exercise. What source is more reliable - the work of one person (albeit highly qualified) or the work of twenty people who have together revised and edited the work over several months? Both can be of course be wrong. The professor could have had a personal agenda in writing the book and the facts have been carefully selected to support his/her argument. The collective effort may have overlooked important issues. Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Which brings me to the subject of course reading lists and their value to students. A teacher selects course literature according to a certain amount of personal taste and experience. No matter how objective we would like to be we never succeed. Today we drown in the sheer volume of material available in every subject area and any list is bound to be a tiny sample and the teacher will naturally select the texts he/she is most familiar with.

Who on earth can you trust? as a famous Swedish protest song of the seventies so nicely put it. Should students put their trust in Encyclopedia Britannica, the official course reading list, Wikipedia, blog posts, academic journals? Everyone tells the "truth" as they see it. We read and construct our own versions of the truth but no-one ever finds that elusive treasure.

I'm not sure that set course reading lists are very useful. They represent the teacher's qualified assessment of the most useful reading for the course but they are still a subjective selection. The main lesson students need to learn is being able to select their own selection of reading material from the overwhelming mass of content available today. A ready-made list is a handy short cut and saves the students all the work of finding their own material. But that struggle with information retrieval, filtering and assessment is an essential skill for future work situations.

Some teachers work very well with social bookmarking where the class builds up its own collective reading list with tools like Delicious or Diigo. All are able to contribute to the list and can collectively assess the value of the different recommendations. The involvement of a librarian in this process is of course extremely valuable. By the end of the process they have an often impressively comprehensive list of resources and have learnt a great deal about source criticism, tagging and information retrieval.

Location location

We seem to love telling people where we are, especially if it's somewhere cool. Facebook and Twitter are full of such messages but with most mobile devices having built-in GPS we soon won't have to write our location updates - they'll be automatically included in the message (as long as we choose that option). For those who love to tell the world of their every movement there is a horde of location tagging services and the market leader of these seems to be foursquare.

I haven't signed up for foursquare yet. I'm tempted, at least to see what the fuss is about, but I am slightly worried it'll require too much attention and time to be worthwhile (however just writing about it here makes me feel obliged to get started). The idea of foursquare and a large flock of similar apps is that you check in to whatever location you happen to be in (especially restaurants and bars it seems) and preferably make a comment for the benefit of future visitors. Basically a sort of virtual guest book. There's also a competitive element in that you can win points and badges for being the first at a particular place or a regular visitor. Some restaurants and bars will even provide a free drink to anyone who shows they've earned enough points.

One interesting article about this trend is by M G Siegler on Tech Crunch (Check-in fatigue) where he attends a conference in Austin, Texas, and attempts to log his movements on all the available location-tagging services. This of course proves too much and by the end he's down to using the two main contenders for supremacy in the location boom, foursquare and Gowalla.

The main problem is that there are too many similar apps and little compatibility between them. Add in the fact that most location enthusiasts are also active in Facebook and Twitter and it becomes very time-consuming to keep all updated. We need interoperability between all these services to get any sustainable use from them. In the end you have to choose a small number of apps that suit you and stick to them even if it means disappointing some friends.But the ideal is some way of getting everything in to one platform.

The other article on this theme is from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Will your college be covered in virtual grafitti?. Here there is concern at how students are labelling various campus locations on foursquare with critical comments. When you "check in" to a particular department or building you can leave a virtual comment that other visitors pick up on their cellphones as they approach the location. That could include criticism of a teacher for example without the victim even being aware of the virtual grafitti. At the same time the university can carry out some official location tagging providing useful tips to visitors as they move around the campus. There are definitely opportunities for education here especially with location tagging and augmented reality.

Location based services are only just beginning to burst on to the mainstream market and there's a bit of a wild west flavor just now with hundreds of wannabe services vying for our attention. In the end we'll get some kind of order and interoperability but for now it's chaotic, confusing and very innovative.

Get offa my tag cloud

I've just added my tag cloud to the blog via Del.icio.us and I'm afraid it looks rather messy. Other people's tag clouds look much cooler. I don't really understand why some of the tags have even appeared in my cloud and it all goes to show that I need to spend more time learning the finer points of tagging. I've got hundreds of bookmarks but have not actively tagged very many of them so I suppose they generate some kind of default tags instead. It's a simple matter of the more effort you put in the better the result and Web 2.0 is no exception to this rule.