With the OU presenting more and more courses online, the question of whether - or how - to allow students continued access to the course materials after the course has finished is increasingly likely to become "an issue".
At the current time, I believe that courses presented largely online - such as those on the Technology Short Course Programme - remain accessible to students for a matter of weeks after the official end date of the course, but then access is denied in the longer term.
This is potentially problematic in a several ways. For example, it's not just students following a longer programme of study such as a certificate or degree that do not have a resource they can refer back to... However, those continuing students in particular are essentially being denied a resource by the OU, and that was originally offered by the OU, [and] that may support their future studies.
Institutionally, I am not sure how electronic courses are archived from one presentation to anothe. Print material is electronically archived each time a revised edition is printed, but the same archiving process does not appear as yet to be provided for electronically presented courses.
[Managing digital assets in general appears to be fragmented, with print materials being archived in electronic form in one system well known to course manageers, software and web interactives in another well known to LTS developers, and so on. The OU library increasingly provides access to digital assets, with subject librarians being a key point of contact when trying to identify relevant resources for new courses. With courses increasingly blending the format of resources used to deliver the course, just knowing where potential assets are likely to be found is not necessarily straightforward!]
Providing continued access to electronic, web-delivered course materials - and providing persistent URLs to those materials - should be on the agenda. Ideally, URLs should uniquely identify the reosource they address.
Identifying a course with a memorable - and simple - URL such as http://courses.open.ac.uk/t183 may appear attractive at first site, but it raises several issues....
If the URL identifies a single resource, then what happens for overlapping presentations of T183? This would not be a problem if the course site were static, but there are various dynamic elements to most online sites - scheduled reveals of course material, presentation specific assessment materials, and news from the course team, for example.
In the above example of T183, the simple URL actually redirects to something a little more complex once SAMS authentication is negotiated, but again there is nothing to uniquely identify the presentaion code of the course, or potentially a student's personalised version of it, in the URL. It may be the case, of course, that while the URL is common for all users, the content is different - tuned by the SAMS ID used to log in to the site - but this potentially wreaks havoc in the case of a student asking e.g. a member of the CT - or even someone on the help desk - for clarification about an item on a particular page...
Getting persistent URLs right potentially solves several problems, then:
1) If the persistent URL points to a persistent site, with content frozen at the end of a presentation, legacy presented material is implicitly archived.
2) Persistent URLs provide an opportunity for students to retain access to the course materials.
If persistence is not desired, however, what other ways might we support students? One way of allowing students continued access is to provide them with a downloadable - or CD-ROM/DVD-ROM based - archive of a static version of the course materials. Many students effectively do this anyway, saving each page on their own machine, although navigation frequently breaks unless the student uses a site ripping tool to download the site in one go and preserve the relative links.
Another opportunity that may potentially allow students to retain access to a site lies in 'personal web' archives, such as Furl or Yahoo MyWeb (follow the MyWeb BETA link). This sites allows users to save copies of web pages they have visited, although I'm not clear about the extent to which they can copy firewalled pages.
The Personal Web model offers another possible model for allowing students continued access to electronic resources. Students registered with the OU could be provided with a personal web disk quota. This space could be used to archive copies of OU hosted materials, and potentially materials from othr providers.
Two obvious issues arise relating to saving material from offsite sources of course - copyright, and propriety. These issues may be addressed to a limited extent by only allowing students to archive material from whitelisted sites, such as those accessed through the library, or cited in course materials.
The fact that online courses deny students to recoup a fractional part of the cost of the course through selling course materials on (for example, through University Book Search) is not going to be altered by providing persistent availability to the course, however!
Posted by ajh59 at May 4, 2005 07:56 AM