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Structured content editor for OERs
From WikiEducator
Concept proposal prepared by Allyn J Radford, Learnilities (Pty) Ltd., email
Project overview
This section provides and overview of the OER Editor and Aggregator Project.
In recent years there has been growing investment into Open Educational Resources (OERs) as an approach to reduce the cost of education through availability of high quality educational content that can be reused and adapted. Many of the government funded research and implementation projects amounting to many hundreds of millions of dollars are contributing to pieces of a broader vision for education. These include initiatives concerned with content development, repositories, discovery, federation and various approaches to interoperability and service oriented approaches to infrastructure to name a few. In many of these initiatives there is a direct relationship with OER and with others the value is indirect or shared with other education sector objectives. Nonetheless, there are large investments being made globally by foundations and governments in support of the promised benefits of OERs.
While the amount of OER content is increasing the ability to reuse that content in flexible ways is not. Internationally, the most widely recognised initiatives include MIT's Open Courseware (OCW) initiative, California State University's Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), Rice University's Connexions initiative and Open University UK's OpenLearn. These and other initiatives will be covered in more detail later in this proposal. Both OCW and MERLOT are comprised of content that varies considerably in terms of format and structure and this impacts and often constrains the ways in which materials can be reused. While Connexions and OpenLearn both have structured content approaches that are more suited to content being adapted and reused, neither of these initiatives have a simple authoring/editing/aggregation tool that can be readily used by faculty members (academic staff) and possibly students in social learning contexts.
This project is intended to address a pivotal area of difficulty that currently impacts the adoption of OERs and detracts from the substantial value that OERs can provide. While the sole reason for the existence of OERs is for reuse and adaptation, there is difficulty in maximising these goals due to a lack of simple tools to create, edit, remix and output OER content into different formats for use within differing educational contexts. It is important to note that this particular problem will continue to increase in scale until a viable solution is provided.
High level objectives
| The goals of this project exist in two parts. Firstly, to develop an open source, structured content authoring and aggregation tool that has the high-level characteristics outlined below, and secondly, to provide practical guidelines and best practice advice for creating and reusing content consistent with the objectives of OER.
The open source authoring and aggregation tool will be:
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- These objectives and functionalities are described in more detail in later sections. It is expected the project will evolve in stages with a simple tool being available for use within a relatively short period of time (subject to funding) thereby increasing the value of this project, confidence in its progress and reducing risk.
- During development, the project team will also develop an active developer community to enhance the functionality of the tool and shift to a community-source approach that focuses on release management and strategically seeding the community for the development and sharing of new functionality.
| Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page. |
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