While looking at open educational resources (OERs) for the OU MOOC H817, I am reminded of one of the big failures I identified in "open" materials right from the early days.
The Creative Common aimed to create something analogous to the open source movement in computing. In open source, whenever you get an application, you are entitled to a copy of the "source code", that is the program in an editable manner, so that you can change its functionality easily.
The Creative Commons did very little to replicate this, with most items released on a Creative Commons license being released in their finished form only. Yes, you can take material from a JPEG image or an MP3 file and reuse it, but the end result will be heavily degraded.
Just search YouTube for "best science experiments" or "best piano cats" or anything of the like, and you'll find a very blurry video made by editing a series of slightly blurry videos together -- at every stage, quality is lost.
Wikimedia Commons has made efforts to correct this, by encouraging people to post their images using the editable scalable vector graphics (.SVG) format. This has been widely accepted among the Wikipedia community, as it has led to the production of high quality diagramming that can be readily translated, eg this rather beautiful map of the Scottish island of Islay, originally produced by an French-speaking amateur cartographer.
But the biggest stumbling block, as I see it, is video.
Filming is a complex, time-consuming activity that needs dedicated, trained personnel. Editing is a complex, time-consuming activity that needs dedicated, trained personnel.
The Open University has the personnel and the resources, and they have released various video resources under a Creative Commons attribution - non-commercial - sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license, explicitly giving users permission to adapt and remix the content, including creating translations into other languages... but how can you translate a video when the audio has already been mixed down?
Consider that you often have the "live" background sound from the scene (footsteps, wind, birdsong etc), and then a piece of music played over the top, and finally a disembodied voice speaking over the top of that (known as voiceover, or VO). To make a decent translation of a video, you need these tracks separately, so that you can replace the VO alone, or to allow "ducking" of on-camera interviews without losing any continuing music (ducking is when you turn down the volume on one track to allow someone to speak over it, as used in most news and documentary programs when there is a foreign speaker on the screen).
But the Open University provides only a web-quality video with premixed sound, so I couldn't, for example, do a simple translation of their digital film school videos to Scottish Gaelic (something that would be quite useful to people interested in taking part in the annual short film competition FilmG). I could ask, I suppose, but I don't even know if they would still have the source files.
Besides, one of the most overlooked senses of the word "open" is the idea of being "out in the open". Materials are more useful if they're immediately available, so that someone can just get the notion to do something and do it. If it takes a lot of effort, and there's no guarantee you're going to get what you really want, in the end, it's easier just to cobble together something for yourself, something that's unlikely to see any reuse....
Showing posts with label OER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OER. Show all posts
30 March 2013
29 March 2013
OERs: moving towards further reusability
I'm pretty skeptical about OERs (open education resources) as I've said before. A lot of the talk on the H817 blog aggregator is about how things are too tightly coupled – you can't break apart the courses as you'd like.
To have any real evidence of any substantial OER use in the real world, we'd need to see the same thing appear in two places... and it just so happens that I have seen the same thing occur in two places. Take this picture:
Last year I was studying Gaelic full-time, and for a bit of variety I took anatomy and physiology as an outside course. It was all online, and there were a lot of pictures of the same style as the above, and every time I failed to understand something in the course notes, I turned to Wikipedia for guidance and more often than not found identical pictures to the ones I was seeing in my course. The picture above was taken from the Wikimedia Commons site, where it is free for any use, commercial or otherwise.
But more interestingly, it originated from a US federal government scheme, and all works of the federal government are property of the US people, meaning that effectively they're in the public domain as soon as they're published.
Now, the original purpose of these images was to support a basic module entitled Anatomy and Physiology on the US National Cancer Institute training site, SEER. As I've still got an archive of my course notes on an external hard drive, I decided to see whether the course organisers had just gone to Wikipedia, or if they'd gone straight to the source. It turns out they'd just gone to Wikipedia, and created a lot of unnecessary work for themselves in the process. At first glance, the SEER material looks far better written than the actual course materials, in that it is less disjointed and easier to understand. There is far more consistency in the look of the various images, whereas the course I took is a hodge-podge of widely varying drawing styles.
So there is clearly some reuse going on, but it really only seems to be starting at the level of images.
This, of course, is where it makes most sense: it's the "media" part of any course that is the hardest and most expensive to produce, so it seems only right that this is the place to begin.
Perhaps, then, the most suitable approach to improving uptake of reusable materials is to start with individual media resources, then build bundles of media resources, only once we have these bundles encourage teachers to start building text around them.
The problem with current efforts is that the text is added in too soon. As soon as we start writing a text, we are making decisions about what to include and what to exclude from the activity/lesson/whatever. Once we've made those decisions, we unconsciously blind ourselves to the gaps in the media set – if we don't need it for our lesson, we don't see it as required to complete the set, and the media set remains conceptually linked to our lesson.
For many types of media, no-one but the original artist/producer can mimic the style of the set. Say one person records 101 anatomical terms so that learners can hear the pronunciation, and includes renal artery but misses renal vein. The next guy who wants to use the set either has to adjust his lesson to suit, or record the word, but it will be in a different voice, so will be very noticeable.
To have any real evidence of any substantial OER use in the real world, we'd need to see the same thing appear in two places... and it just so happens that I have seen the same thing occur in two places. Take this picture:
Last year I was studying Gaelic full-time, and for a bit of variety I took anatomy and physiology as an outside course. It was all online, and there were a lot of pictures of the same style as the above, and every time I failed to understand something in the course notes, I turned to Wikipedia for guidance and more often than not found identical pictures to the ones I was seeing in my course. The picture above was taken from the Wikimedia Commons site, where it is free for any use, commercial or otherwise.
But more interestingly, it originated from a US federal government scheme, and all works of the federal government are property of the US people, meaning that effectively they're in the public domain as soon as they're published.
Now, the original purpose of these images was to support a basic module entitled Anatomy and Physiology on the US National Cancer Institute training site, SEER. As I've still got an archive of my course notes on an external hard drive, I decided to see whether the course organisers had just gone to Wikipedia, or if they'd gone straight to the source. It turns out they'd just gone to Wikipedia, and created a lot of unnecessary work for themselves in the process. At first glance, the SEER material looks far better written than the actual course materials, in that it is less disjointed and easier to understand. There is far more consistency in the look of the various images, whereas the course I took is a hodge-podge of widely varying drawing styles.
So there is clearly some reuse going on, but it really only seems to be starting at the level of images.
This, of course, is where it makes most sense: it's the "media" part of any course that is the hardest and most expensive to produce, so it seems only right that this is the place to begin.
Perhaps, then, the most suitable approach to improving uptake of reusable materials is to start with individual media resources, then build bundles of media resources, only once we have these bundles encourage teachers to start building text around them.
The problem with current efforts is that the text is added in too soon. As soon as we start writing a text, we are making decisions about what to include and what to exclude from the activity/lesson/whatever. Once we've made those decisions, we unconsciously blind ourselves to the gaps in the media set – if we don't need it for our lesson, we don't see it as required to complete the set, and the media set remains conceptually linked to our lesson.
For many types of media, no-one but the original artist/producer can mimic the style of the set. Say one person records 101 anatomical terms so that learners can hear the pronunciation, and includes renal artery but misses renal vein. The next guy who wants to use the set either has to adjust his lesson to suit, or record the word, but it will be in a different voice, so will be very noticeable.
24 March 2013
Evaluating Open Education Resources (H817)
I'm getting rapidly disillusioned with the Open University's MOOC/non-MOOC Open Education. After kicking off with a course "reading" that was a 77 slide PowerPoint file with no speaker notes, in week 2 they set a long reading from a decade ago, on a topic called "Learning Objects". Now, it's not the length of the post in itself that bothers me, and the age is not a problem as this notion was a significant stepping stone to the open education systems of today... what winds me up is that after the link to the article, there was a little button marked "reveal" comment. After the link. So you would assume, wouldn't you, that it was to be read after reading the article... which is what I did. Here is the content of the hidden comment in full:
This week's activities then follow on with one of the most spectacularly vague tasks ever, and judging by the stuff coming up on the course blog aggregator, I'm not the only person who thinks so. Our task is to look at several repositories of "open education resources" (OERs) and evaluate the suitability of the material presented for assembling a course on "digital skills".
I'm presuming that they've chosen the task title "digital skills" to allow it to be an open task, but they've taken the original MOOC philosophy to its erroneous ultimate conclusion. The philosophy of MOOCs (as embodied in change.ca) is the idea of learner independence, and the notion that learners work better when they can choose what to work towards, but yet unrestricted choice has been shown to be absolutely crippling, because with open choice comes indecision. (If you're interested in this idea, check out Barry Schwartz's TED talk The Paradox of Choice.)
Consider also that many of the great artists imposed limits on themselves, such as Pablo Picasso's famous "blue period" (not that I personally rate Picasso's work much), in order to stimulate extra creativity.
But here I am with an excruciatingly vague task description, and there's nothing in the task to force me to narrow down and focus on a particular aspect of the large potential space of meaning before I am expected to wade through gigabytes of texts and videos looking for things that are specifically relevant or useful.
And the course to date hasn't given us any real guidance on how to evaluate the usefulness and applicability of the material anyway. And we're back to this idea that there's no rules, and that individual creativity and "engagement" with material will show us the way, throwing out all the hard-learned lessons in pedagogy, instructional design and other closely related fields.
It is far easier to do a complex task by following a defined process than to try to intuit the process by attempting to complete the task. Early guidance can develop good patterns of activity that are internalised over time and become automatic.
Note: Downes goes into detail on many aspects that are not necessary for this course. You do not need to read the article in detail – your aim is to gain an understanding of what learning objects were and why they were seen as important.... and you'll see why I was unhappy. It's utterly sloppy design to leave you reading the whole thing before telling you not to!
This week's activities then follow on with one of the most spectacularly vague tasks ever, and judging by the stuff coming up on the course blog aggregator, I'm not the only person who thinks so. Our task is to look at several repositories of "open education resources" (OERs) and evaluate the suitability of the material presented for assembling a course on "digital skills".
I'm presuming that they've chosen the task title "digital skills" to allow it to be an open task, but they've taken the original MOOC philosophy to its erroneous ultimate conclusion. The philosophy of MOOCs (as embodied in change.ca) is the idea of learner independence, and the notion that learners work better when they can choose what to work towards, but yet unrestricted choice has been shown to be absolutely crippling, because with open choice comes indecision. (If you're interested in this idea, check out Barry Schwartz's TED talk The Paradox of Choice.)
Consider also that many of the great artists imposed limits on themselves, such as Pablo Picasso's famous "blue period" (not that I personally rate Picasso's work much), in order to stimulate extra creativity.
But here I am with an excruciatingly vague task description, and there's nothing in the task to force me to narrow down and focus on a particular aspect of the large potential space of meaning before I am expected to wade through gigabytes of texts and videos looking for things that are specifically relevant or useful.
And the course to date hasn't given us any real guidance on how to evaluate the usefulness and applicability of the material anyway. And we're back to this idea that there's no rules, and that individual creativity and "engagement" with material will show us the way, throwing out all the hard-learned lessons in pedagogy, instructional design and other closely related fields.
It is far easier to do a complex task by following a defined process than to try to intuit the process by attempting to complete the task. Early guidance can develop good patterns of activity that are internalised over time and become automatic.
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