Stian Haklev
4:09pm 5 March 2009 (Edited 12:04pm 2 December 2009)
The Openlearn report mentioned during the meeting can be downloaded from this page:
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Andrew Moore
7:29pm 4 March 2009
Lessons in Building "Regional" OER Communities
Presenters: Liz Levey, John Dehlin
• 4-5 years trying to build communities
• Regional can mean location, topical, etc.
• How do you derive productivity from professionals with "day jobs"?
• How to manage competing issues/motives across projects?
• Collaborative vs. authoritative
o Lots of talk vs. meaningful results
• Funding?
o Meaningful progress WITHOUT funding
• How to communicate in early stages?
o Time zones?
o Languages?
o Cultures?
o What medium to use for communication?
• Technology?
• Open coursework consortium
o Publishing online courses is necessary for membership
o Growing through regional consortiums
o Less issues at the regional consortium level
• Finding the right scope is essential
• What are the right scopes in Africa?
• Work together in a local network to make easier
• Growth rate in US is slow
• Scale is the largest issue
o People tend to self identify
o People want to only work in their own area
• You have to find two people who want to work together, you can't just put people together
• Took a long time to get all the big-name universities together
• Korean consortium grew to rival Japanese consortium
• Would consortiums work together?
o Salad bowl not melting pot
• MIT link consortium
o Middle east consortiums decided work cross border
o Math and science videos for high schools
o Project has been demand driven
o Difficulty would be freeing up the teachers to create the videos
o Videos used and evaluated starting next year
o Bring universities together with secondary schools
• If we make content available that is solving the problem? How are we getting students to use it?
• OLnet is to push research and share research
• Everyone fell into the cycle
o Mentoring was a key part to continue cycle
o Power relation aspect holds up cycle
• Good to have students in on content creation
• OER movement is just leaving the sharing only stage
• You have to start with a clearly defined need
• TESSA has a partner advisory council to govern and strategize (this was necessary for it to work)
• Open blinds so people can see what is happening not necessarily take from and use
• Convert content to online to share and improve all content
o Get content online so we can move on to working on teaching and learning
• Is there anyone who knows how to evaluate how the content is used?
• Emphasis on expanding networks and contacts
• Not enough resources to create new networks so make use of current network
o Must have to have a mutual interest in collaboration and it must be demand driven
• Demand driven approach is the base not the second step
• Teachers are not getting source content from OER repositories
• Simple streamline mechanisms to communicate between all projects at the same time
• OLnet is trying to be a channel for communication
• Teachers need information literacy skills (they need to be taught the most productive places and processes to search for content)
• Central point for open learning content
• You need to know what you are looking for and how to find it
• Should be solvable without extensive training
• "Dating service for projects"
"Ditched regional and just talked about collaboration."