OUseful Info

The Problem With OpenLearn...

Downes linked to a post yesterday - Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn? - that raised various concerns about the value of the OpenLearn endeavor. The post also picked up on another post - OpenLearn - another document dump - that was even more critical in tone (I posted a comment a few hours ago but it doesn't seem to have got through owner moderation yet...).

Martin posted a response earlier today - In defence of openlearn - and I'm sitting here on the boat back home wondering whether Laura has entered into the debate yet with an "official" comment, either in the form of a direct response via Open Air, or a comment on either (or both) of the blogs concerned.

Long time readers will know that on occasion I've been publicly critical of some of the technology and user interface decisions made with respect to the OpenLearn environment, (which is nothing compared to some of the feedback I've given in private!;-) but I've tended to keep out of the argument about the quality of the materials posted up there. So I was in two minds whether to join in the debate, or just to keep my own counsel... but as I figure Martin needs all the links he can get in our Technorati ranking race, here's a thought or two of my own on the subject...

First off, Martin made a valid point in his post about the origins of the OpenLearn content as distance education teaching material that is actually something worth remembering when considering who the intended audience is for open courseware, and the ways in which OERs might potentially be used, and by whom.

Many OU materials are based on the idea of a "tutorial in print", in which the text is structured in an almost conversational way between the author and the reader. SAQs - self-assessment questions - and exercises engage the learner in activities that help them question their own understanding of the material they have been studying, much as a tutor might question a student on their understanding of a particular point being covered in a traditional tutorial. Answers are generally provided to both exercises and SAQs, and often include explanations correcting "gotchas", such as common misunderstandings or typical errors. [It's also important to remember that for-credit OU courses are presented within a formal assessment framework, which provides a strong motivational context for study (hat tip, Sarah for pointing that out, in a )]

Formally delivered OU courses also come with a community, both online and in the form of small, face to face tutorial groups. Although many of our courses have cohorts in the many hundreds, the 25-1 student to tutor ratio (or whatever it is), and regional structure (students are allocated to one of thirteen or so geographical regions) means that despite dealing with at-scale, home study courses delivered on a national (and even international) basis, we still manage to provide a very personal delivery model.

OpenLearn hasn't managed to get that community - or local support - vibe going, although tools like the MSG messenger (try logging in with an OpenID;-) and Flashmeeting videoconferencing tool are both attempting to support synchronous one-to-one and small group conversations that might contribute to a peer-based support model that takes the place of the OU's formal SOL - Supported Open Learning - mechanism in our 'commercial' courses. Forum activity hasn't really got going either (at least, not in the forums I've seen - though I think there may be some active ones?). My opinion, for what it's worth, would be to aggressively push something like the Course Profiles Facebook app and get learners to badge themselves with OpenLearn unit codes and maybe meet up in subject or topic focussed Facebook groups, using OpenLearn as a potential entry point for people into the Facebook community, and hoping they will then associate Facebook with OpenLearn, at least some of the time!

The distance learning origins of the OU materials place them in stark contrast with the opencourseware offerings of the likes of Yale or MIT. Those materials are typically collections of resources, ordered by course, and aggregated on a per lecture basis. My feed based disaggregations of those courses (such as MIT OpenCourseware for High Schools or Yale OpenCourseware Feeds) compared with the content feeds offered by OpenLearn as a standard. My own experiments with the OpenLearn XML Processor (and a new post out hopefully in the next few days) offer a starting point for a closer comparison of feed based representations of current opencourseware.

For my sins, I lobbied long and hard for OpenLearn to release its content as RSS feeds. That was perhaps an error of judgement - getting the content into a wiki or disaggregated into a triple store might have encouraged more participation (in the case of the wiki), or more benefits from content scaling and consequent data mining (in the case of the triple store), but what's done is done... and I guess the feeds did make openlearnigg possible (I'd had that concept of a feed powered environment in my mind's eye from the day OpenLearn launched...). Some of the other benefits are described here: Feeding from OpenCourseware (if you're one of the reviewers from that OpenLearn 2007 conference submission who slated me for not providing any references to other work in the area, I'd really appreciate knowing what you expected me to reference?)

On a practical note, lobbying early on for a wholesale change to the underlying database/course representation that a port over to MediaWiki or a triple store would have required, compared to the simple elaboration of the current OpenLearn content that was all that was required to support the course content RSS feeds, would have been a non-starter; and probably still is...

That said, one thing I'm keen to try is importing OpenLearn modules wholesale into a MediaWiki by converting the OpenLearn unit XML into the MediaWIki Export (and hence import) XML format, especially now that a page level RSS feed output module is available (hat tip to Leigh Blackall at wikieducator, who tipped me off to the Wiki Article Feeds Extension that they're trialling. Could this be a possible project, Leigh?;-)

Making the feeds available as they currently are on OpenLearn was not the be all and end all of what I envisioned, though as I hope to show below it does demonstrate a difference in approach to the interpretation of "open" in the phrase "open courseware". The course content feeds do offer a way of syndicating content and allowing others to republish it alternative environments (as I demonstrate within the openlearnigg demonstrator and the OpenLearn Content Grazr Facebook application) but they don't really represent an innovation in how students might consume the content. The closest I feel I have come to that is with the OpenLearn_Daily demonstrator (now deprecated), a feature which is also made available via openlearnigg. (OpenLearn_daily uses a "feedcycle", or serialised RSS feed (in the sense of magazine or radio serials), whereby users can subscribe at any time and then receive one item per day (or week, or whenever) in their feedreader from the day they subscribe).

A few thousand of the OpenLearn grant spent with a third party developer (how much, Andy T? ;-) would have been enough to build a OpenLearn_daily demonstrator in pretty quick time, bashed out in Rails or within some other framework, but anyone working in a large institution knows that it would cost way more than that in terms of time, coin, stress and specification wars than is worth contemplating!

As hinted at above, I do think that exposing the full content RSS feeds expresses a powerful philosophical point about the nature of open. Document formats such as PDF are not open in the sense that I can edit those documents using freely and readily available tools. (Okay, I know some of the OU material has been released as PDF, but for most of the units, most of it is HTML delivering text and embedded assets). The extent to which you can consume the course content in a feed reader, or embeddable feed rendering widget, such as Grazr, is for me a useful rule-of-thumb as to the 'representational openness' of the resource.

As to the delivery of OpenLearn content via Moodle, I do think this represented something of a lack of vision. The idea of making OpenLearn content in a learning environment, rather than just releasing it via lists of materials in an opencourseware micro-site, was something of a novel initiative at the time, I think, Connexions aside, maybe? (which doesn't say much for the rest of the OER community's efforts in this area... ;-)

But as far as innovating in the delivery of online course material, I'd agree that OpenLearn/Moodle was as boring as hell. And not particularly well executed (the navigation is lousy; the search is poor; the aesthetic is pretty mundane, the usability is questionable, and so on (my browser shortcut to a Moodle test server I used to run was 'muddle';-).

This is all pretty much par for the course across a lot of "elearning" though, so I won't labour the point here (maybe I'll do another post about that in the next week or two...?;-)

Anyway - is OpenLearn making right content available?, and is it just another document dump?

Who cares? The take home points for me about OpenLearn is that it makes available authentic distance educational material, some of it designed for online delivery, in an open format and under an open license.

I'm forever banging on here in this blog, and internally whenever I get the chance, about how I think we're doing lots of online stuff wrong... and how it's impossible to try out anything with our materials in the current production system ("LTS just aren't very helpful" - me, quoted-ish, and overheard in the bar by senior LTS management ;-)

But now I've got access to some real content - indeed, we all have, and for over a year now - which means I can try to figure out, in public and in the wild, what the right way might possibly be, using real'n'authentic OU content - as approved by the quality police, and the rights police ;-) heh heh, love ya really :-)

...albeit at 1am on Saturday night/Sunday morning after delivering an OU residential school activity a hundred miles or so away several hours ago today, yesterday, whatever.

Ho hum, it would be time for bed, but I think I've got some "work" to do...go figure...

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Tags: oer, open content, opencourseware, openlearn

Posted by ajh59 at February 10, 2008 01:11 AM