Talk: Open content in education – the instructor benefits of OpenCourseWare
Talk by Preston Parker, Utah State University at AECT conference, 29th October 2009
Preseton's role was to get faculty to provide open content within his university
Benefits of OpenCourseWare
- Institutional benefits – marketing, reputation
- Benefits to the students – can see material ahead of time
- What about the instructors – not initially clear, so set up a research study to look at this
How are creators compensated? Traditional methods – people still buy books, supplementary goods, supplementary services and support, recognition and reputation, sponsorship and endorsement, advertising (Google, ABC, CNN)
Qualitative case study on MIT courseware, working with the MIT evaluation team – data sources, annual report – based on surveys, personal interviews conducted by phone, and archived emails – MIT stored
Interested in looking at both the benefits and drawbacks, examples from the data:
Benefits
- Greater recognition – instructor meeting with dept heads in India
- Compensation – instructor’s course now being sponsored for public use by private companies
- Greater audience – instructor gets feedback that others are using his course in ways he hadn’t thought of
- Easier content dissemination – students and colleagues have easier access to course content, saves time
- Publication – instructor adds to tenure portfolio that he is doing OCW credit for online course
Drawbacks
- What’s online not really representative of my material
- How do I update it?
- It took longer than I thought
- Allow posting of materials that are fair use for educators. Current substitution of OCW-generated substitutes are not as rich or clear and materially detract from the educational quality of (at least my) OCW courses
Extra content
Comment 1 by Mark Pearson
Comment 2 by Gráinne Conole
Gráinne Conole
6:43pm 31 October 2009 Permalink
Hi some important points Mark - I agree, I think at the moment the promise of open educational resources has not yet been met. For me the answer is in really getting inside the question "what's in it for me?" - unless teachers can see direct personal benefit and unless its easy to do, its just not going to happen spontaneously.
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Mark Pearson
6:05pm 31 October 2009 Permalink
Here are some thoughts:
Other questions