Over the last year or so, there have been occasional mutterings about how we might go about producing 'contentless' courses - that is, courses light on OU sourced content that reuse third party materials, wherever possible.
Many courses in the past have drawn on third party material, of course, most typically by "wrapping" readings from a set text with a study guide. Our Cisco Certified Networking Course goes one further, by wrapping Cisco's own elearning materials with some of our own assessment material.
The role of the study guide is to pace progress through set books and support learning by means of additional self-assessment material and short reflective exercises, as well as providing extended notes on particular topics.
But as far as I know, there haven't been any courses produced to date that have sought to exploit a significant amount of 'open content licensed' materials and incorporate them in our own teaching materials.
In fact, just how we might make use of online, third party materials, I'm not sure, because as far as I can tell, "open content" licenses don't really lubricate the process of reusing such materials within our own courses, behind closed paywalls at all...
(If our students are customers, and we're adopting the language of commerce, then "paywall" is the correct term, I think?)
For example, I'd love to be able to embed a document a from Scribd, or a presentation from Slideshare, into a set of online materials, along with a YouTube movie and a maybe an ITConversation or two, but while grabbing the embed code is easy, getting the rights clearance is not...
What I would like to be able to do - what I would love to be able to do - is search for content licensed in such a way that I know I can embed it in my own online course materials without rights hassles, that I can archive a copy of the material in case it disappears from the orginal site, that I don't have to worry about embedding someone else's Flash player in our course materials...
I'd also like to think I could structure an online course in such a way that I could use resources like this game about the history of games without having to worry that the quality is not quite up to scratch or that most of the time students are being referred 'optionally' to third party sites because we can't get the third party material needed for a contentless course onto our own site...
But it feels late, tonight, I'm tired, and my imagination is lacking...
Posted by ajh59 at September 24, 2007 11:24 PMFor someone who says he doesn't feel up to blogging, I think this post is pretty damned fine. Maybe you don't have a turnkey solution, but you sum up a host of diverse problems very clearly.
Wish I could push the thought process along, but I feel as muddled as you say you are.
Posted by: Brian at September 25, 2007 06:21 AMIt seems to me that what you want is an Open Access repository. What you describe is what they are hoping to achieve: a source of re-usable objects that you don't have to worry about the copyright issues of, and which are of high enough quality for use in HE.
The main problem with repositories like JORUM and institutional repositories that I have come across is that three simply isn't enough content in them to make them useful. Sribd and Slideshare and other sources of file sharing are much better at getting people to contribute content, perhaps because their purpose is very simple and the process of uploading content to them is so very simple. With any luck Open Access repositories will learn from those models. I certainly plan to try with Warwick's new institutional repository, which I have just taken on project management for starting up. Repositories have a lot of potential, if only they could get over the formal approach that characterises them as different from the likes of YouTube.
Posted by: Jenny Delasalle at September 28, 2007 10:53 AM"It seems to me that what you want is an Open Access repository. What you describe is what they are hoping to achieve: a source of re-usable objects that you don't have to worry about the copyright issues of, and which are of high enough quality for use in HE."
yes and no... I don't really want "reusable learning objects", if by that you mean things people have tried to craft for this purpose that are actually not very good for anything... I want stuff I feel I can reuse in an educational context as I see fit... I can cut and paste, I can make my own arguments, I can write stuff around stuff... ;-)
"The main problem with repositories like JORUM and institutional repositories that I have come across is that three simply isn't enough content in them to make them useful."
And they don't necessarily make it easy to embed the result in a page of my creation, for example... Scribd and Slideshare both have the embed code - and a link - right up there..
Geting people to use the JORUMs and OROs of the world is an issue, I agree (and as I've commented on before: ./010073.html )
"With any luck Open Access repositories will learn from those models."
Do you think they will? In all honesty?
tony
PS I'd be keen to hear more about your Warwick project and how you'll be trying to address the engagement problem...