DIY Resource

From OER_Wiki

On this page you will find the summary logs for each of the discussion topics. It is hoped the following ideas will inform a development outline for the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community to further the project.

Please feel free to contribute to our community’s record of ideas for a DIY resource for OER.

[edit] Who is a DIY resource for?

• For those that learn through reuse and remixing of educational materials;

One group would be people who wish to learn. One of the ways that learning might happen through FORE/OER would be through making reuse of them to create something new.

• For informal experts and pro-ams (professional amateurs);

I would not limit the system only for those with teacher or student status in an institution. May sound radical - as radical as an encyclopaedia which anyone can edit? Yes anyone should be free to create and remix learning resources on the portal.

We will be looking for resources that work across this range of potential users, some of whom have no access to the traditional teacher/student environments.

• For users in low or no bandwidth remote areas;

[…] a site that would allow one to select from a wide range of resources that could be ordered or downloaded on CD/DVD and taken to schools without Internet connectivity (but with a lab.).

It should be open for anybody and everybody who is interested in making education available to the remotest corner of the earth through the new technology.

• For those from cultures underrepresented in the OER movement;

A DIY tool that supports OER Creation, Organization, Dissemination and Utilization for African academics and institutions wishing to contribute to the OER movement is one concrete way in which they may participate on a more equal footing.

I like the idea of creation of a resource for diverse cultures but not to define how that resource is to be used in exactitude. Further, the reason for that could be in that some cultures tend to dominate the discussion thereby creating (not intentionally) an authoritarian structure that is a closed system. What is needed is what this forum group favors: open access that is actually open for all.

• For those supporting poorly resourced educational institutions and novices;

So in this context, we are looking at how we can help currently poorly resourced higher education institutions and all those bodies that implement training programmes around the world, including UN and other international agencies.

[…] for the more numerous knowledge poor (those who may have heard about these concepts but do not know how to get started in practical or theoretical terms). I like the idea of the DIY system but I would also like to put in a plea for us to include some thought for how we can provide support in these areas for people who have little or no experience or expertise.

• For special interest user groups and collaborators;

The idea is to have a common area - the Bazaar - but to give for free the ability for other groups to have stalls - for projects and for shared development. I think this philosophy would not be bad for the DIY site - a series of social spaces in which people can collaborate and share in groups.

The main advantage of having a Portal rather than the Web as a whole is that finding and using resources can be made easier for a targeted group, or groups, or community of potential users.

Perhaps DIY is the wrong name - perhaps it should be Do It Together - an inclusive approach to e-learning - with plenty of opportunity for organic growth of the portal.

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[edit] What should be in the DIY resource?

• Literature on OER;

Basic literature: on the subject (why doing it, reports on previous experiences, etc.). I guess it should not be extensive but seminal. In case it was extensive, some way of voting for the best resource should be adopted.

• OER directory;

Directories of existing OER (or other directories), categorized on how I might use them.

• Quick start guides and models;

Flowchart / milestones / checklist: visual and quick way to get started / don't forget anything.

As for helping people get comfortable with some of the open software and websites - perhaps it would be beneficial to include some short videos on setting-up and working with the programs.

I like to have information on the portal that will help me make decisions in selecting technology/tools - from the demand of hardware, the ease of mirroring to a local server (always take low-bandwidth into consideration), to the ease of localization to another language.

Sustainable OER models. Let's build some creative, sustainable models that can provide revolving funds to support ongoing development and delivery of "open content”.

• Information about existing methods, services, and tools for OER;

What is needed is an identification of what is available, what the available technology can do, and how much infrastructure is needed to support each. I think if this were made available, all in one place, as a reference tool for us here, it would be a first step toward bridging the technology gap and prompt those of us from the developing countries who have just been listening to be able to speak up in a knowledgeable way to discuss our needs.

Services to:

• collaborate and share (social software)
• co-create
• leveraging existing repositories
• wrap existing resources in standards compliant containers (for interoperability)
• find resources (digital/human, by common interest, educational level, quality criteria, etc.)
• aggregate resources
• download
• localise
• tag
• publish, etc.

The key I think is to close the gap between creators and consumers. So a portal should offer access to tools, services, stories, ideas etc to help users create as well as consume.

Educational resources can include better ways to use general resources of the Internet, even those that are not free. Resources that help with knowing how to use it effectively can be more valuable in many ways than a good, fancy, multimedia piece of content.

Consider this sketch a possible startup design: 1) Links to OERs (Courses to Micro-Learning Objects) Created by the Users. 2) Links to Learning Communities Using the OERs. 3) Links to Developmental Projects Using the OERs. 4) Links to Software/Hardware Tools with "How To's" about Their Use for Developing OERs. 5) Links to Stories about #1-4.

Then one thing I really like to know is some sort of comparative table that lists the different technology, the skill sets needed to use those technology, the pros and cons of each technology, especially in relation to 1) how the content could be easily replicated/mirrored to remote servers and 2) how easy it is to localize the content (if not to facilitate, at least not to hinder) .

Is accreditation - certifying that the services provided are of reasonably good quality, relevant at this point? It was discussed previously (accreditation bodies, peer evaluation etc.).

• Guides to open content licenses;

One of the things would be information about how to choose a license, and what the different options mean.

• Access to support networks;

Who should be willing to help you, categorized by online volunteering to pro services.

We might also benefit from a centralized list of listserves, research orgs, and other groups of interest through which we can contact the greater learning community and become stimulated and enriched. I personally have benefited greatly by the three or four newsletter and groups in which I participate.

The importance of having links or a global network of willing people to provide support, guidance or are simply willing to answer queries that existing or potential OER users or developers want to know. This way it would be easy for potential users or developers to locate people from their areas (if any). Maybe an interactive global map or simply a text-based A-Z nation list of people with expertise (with a bit of metadata about their expertise) would help to get the ball rolling.

• Resources to facilitate collaboration and partnerships;

Co-development of guiding principles for developing quality, reusable, online content (considering the wide variety of learners and their learning styles, cultures, etc.).

One recommendation we've received and are currently working toward is a request that we help broker the partnerships. I get frequent calls from faculty or developers saying things like, "I want to generate an online course in history. Do you know anyone else at another institution I could partner with who has a similar interest?" Essentially we are being asked to support a matchmaking service.

We should also perhaps have searchable FAQ and forum sections to facilitate all the potential questions people might have. An interactive Chabot would also be great (only text-based and one perhaps with a 3D animation character :)) .

• Stories of user experiences;

Communicating stories of real world use is really important. Speaking of stories, would it be useful to set up a collection of wiki pages for envisioned "user stories"?

Also, a "Best Practices" section could be included in the "Stories" section or by itself would be wonderful.

• Glossary;

Abbreviations and acronyms drive me crazy, so I’m delighted that you mentioned the possibility of a glossary.

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[edit] How should the content be organized/structured?

• Available for offline access;

Therefore the solution that could provide part of the answer may be in the form of a self contained series of CD's that would take the place of the Internet.

Our challenge is less of any socio-cultural hurdles, and more of bandwidth challenge. So we will be looking for resources that can be readily accessed offline.

That is why I think that such education materials could be put not only in CD ROMS but also in audio cassettes as majority of the people in rural areas do not own TVs, videos or computers.

• Incorporate user profiles;

For example, according to Kolb, we should create resources that address different "user profiles": a reflective profile needs some time to work the material and likes to print it; an active profile needs to have a high degree of challenge coming from set activities; an abstract profile needs to know about references, bibliography, standards, theory, etc.; a pragmatic profile needs to know what applications have been successful and what cases he can study... and so on.

For example, a teacher with lots of tech experience might benefit from a different "lens" than a teacher with little tech experience. A teacher without internet access wouldn't want to hear about streaming video classroom lectures, etc. Each of these teachers could answer maybe 4 or 5 questions in a form that would generate a lens that presents the appropriate materials. These "lenses" could also serve as the foundation for print manuals and CDs. This might be an efficient means of organizing the materials - we would only have to create each description/module once and then apply it by profile.

• Offered in multiple languages;

Maybe it is obvious, but it is necessary to have the resources in languages used by future users.

• Organized hierarchically;

I think structuring of content should be done in a series-parallel fashion, perhaps subdividing major themes in a tree-like manner. Later mapping of the themes and of branching is important to establish a context.

Perhaps we want to create a hierarchal, botany-like classification of the materials, softwares, stories, etc.

• Facilitate searching;

Structure to facilitate search (finding distributed resources, people and services). Simplify the structure to facilitate search, and develop some clever search facilities.

In short, don't complicate the structure (simple) and make the search also simple for the beginner and flexible for the metadata search kings with many options (which are only shown if the user wants) .

It would be desirable if all of these categories could be browsed and keyword searched. The browsing categories could evolve as the project develops.

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[edit] How should the DIY resource be housed/supported?

• Connected to established sharing networks/resources;

We are just having a conversation now about hooking it into peer-peer networks. I suspect that we will have a Gnutella hook for it in a little while (couple of weeks). I believe that we need to move away from the centralized approach to one that builds on the freedom to share and uses established technologies to do so.

Automatically connected to all the other "portals" in the world so that you can search them all from your "home portal",
Automatically / easily hooked to other open/free/libre repositories of content (e.g. flickr, ourmedia, BBC).

An alternative approach that is very simple to implement and that supports sharing, is known under OAI-PMH (open archive initiative protocol).

• Easy to deploy and use;

Easy to install, Multi-lingual and easy to translate, Easy to modify.

Firstly, I would imagine that one of the key aspects of a DIY/DIT resource is that it demonstrate what we would consider some good practices. One of those would be that contribution into it and using resources out of it should have as few barriers as possible. This suggests:

1. Open standards and open specifications where there are no standards;
2. Integration as much as possible with work practices so that it does not require something extra to contribute to it
3. Access (in and out) through whatever technologies people are comfortable with
4. A license is a technology as well, so a license that promotes cooperation and inclusion, not one that excludes certain categories of contribution (and incidentally use).

Interface design is pretty critical - any site should allow users to DO THINGS and that doing things should be pretty intuitive.

• Built on existing open source technologies/platforms;

However, in terms of DIY portal and technology, I do recommend that we start with an existing open source technology already out there, and not go down the road where we need to necessarily develop a new tool from scratch to facilitate the DIY concept.

The basic intervention in to this topic would be to build the basic application architecture around Free and Open Source Software Technologies and Platforms. The storage should be flat file based so that dynamic structure can be created and eliminated when and where required, business logic should be built using the LAMP architecture and further enhanced by either AJAX or RUBY-on-Rails with the client supporting as many devices/interfaces as possible.

The solution technology/ies need/s to be a loosely coupled framework, where technical solutions can be hooked in (similar to the Unix system software, or SAKAI for learning http://www.sakaiproject.org). The technology, known to me, which enables us to do so is the Web Service approach (using XML as the formatting/tagging standard).

For non-browser supported content, one would have to find a solution to run within a browser anyway. Here you could use Java applets or wrapping the application output within a browsable way (e.g. wrap special graphical output in form of gif-files or similar). A architecture that I myself see as a favorite is the Fedora solution by Cornell (http://fedora.info).

We are happy to present our FLOSS solution - LeMill - Learning Mill. LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. It is primary designed for basic education but may workout in higher levels of education, as well. The preview site of LeMill -service is here: http://lemill.net/

A repository (the "Knowledge Pool System"): you can either use a repository that we host (http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/) or run your own (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ariadnekps/) - we are currently at version 5 of this software;

In this regard my inclination would be to use an open source CMS - something like Drupal or Jumbla - but to make sure there is very good access to blogging, wikis and other software tools.

I would like to volunteer the Connexions (cnx.org) and Rhaptos (rhaptos.org) tools for community-based authoring and publishing for this project.

• Enable packaging and distribution for offline use;

It would also be nice if we could deliver the software and embedded content as a bundle on a CD or similar to a variety of offline sites.

What I feel is the DIT/Y resource should be available first of all as an open standard for open access education, secondly it should be available just like some distributions of Linux are, you can install them through downloading from the web, or you can install them from the CD, or, you can run it as a live CD before installation.

Possibility to "replicate" the content found from the "global network of portals" in your own "home server" to be used in intranet or off-line.

• Facilitate content creation, searching, and organization;

The learning object repository (kLOR) can also pick up other similarly licensed courseware, and make it available into the learning management system as long as those systems follow standards or expose an easy to implement protocol.

Searching across the distributed content: That's a topic. You can do it by harvesting the meta data for the content, index it and present it through an interface, or a web service, where the latest can be used by other portals.

Meta data is a main part of e-content and we need to support delivery of meta data at the object generation, but also along the lifetime of a given content object. Here http://flickr.org and again a Cornell project “Pathways” could be inspiring to us.

As well as portal type features for finding things we need software which helps people to make things - we need to narrow the gap between producing learning and consuming learning.

Software to automatically generate metadata (http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/amg/), because

1. users don't like doing this
2. our software does as well as users do;

• Support communities;

Learning - especially professional development - tends to take place in (increasingly) distributed communities of practice. Any platform needs to emphasise that community - making it easy to join groups and form groups (in this context see the excellent Learning Landscapes software - www.elgg.org). One of the more difficult things to do on the web at the moment is to find people or to find the right people. It is not so much as who is a friend of my friend but who is interested in what I am interested in and who doing what I want to do. Meta data and micro formats can help us with this.

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