5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 14/21)

I’m very interested in your experiences and suggestion that if you were to do this again, you might do things differently. What would you do differently? I know that you are hectically busy but if you could summarise this in a few bullets - we could avoid any mistakes you made - thus your contribution back to the community.

I take your point that typical LMS users want quizzes and forums. This harks back to my point about the unique differences between f-t-f and DE pedagogy. If we are smart we separate out those interactions that are typically facilitated by the LMS and other web-server technologies. However the monolithic attitude of LMSs is to control and divide. I can illustrate this with a practical example.

About halfway through the eXe project we came up with this neat idea to set up the parameters for a Discussion iDevice in eXe. The idea was that you could author the “content” for a discussion forum external to the LMS. With some neat XML, when you imported this external content into your LMS it would automatically instantiate a discussion forum, see eXe Discussion Forum iDevice . At the time, interoperability specifications did not drill down to this level of functionality. We hacked our own Moodle patch to demonstrate the utility of this approach. In our excitement we communicated with the lead developer of Moodle. My response from Martin was “I don’t like it” - nothing more. I responded - Martin - why don’t you like it? Was it because of security concerns that we can write a patch that instantiates a forum externally from the LMS or because this was a nail in the coffin of the LMS control over eLearning. I never got a response.

Regarding the requirement for formative quizzes, close activities, case studies etc. We can achieve these without a database or requirements to be connected to an LMS. We proved this with the eXe project. Therefore - there is a lot we can do outside of the LMS in terms of free content design and development. Lets use the LMS for the interactions that require student-lecture interaction - but keep free content development outside the LMS. If we don’t - we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

LMSs are organizational based installations - exponential growth in free content will come from individuals. If we embed our OER initiatives in organisational-based technologies, we will not be able to scale up free content production or reuse across institutional boundaries.

The issue is that the overwhelming majority of institutions and educators don’t buy into the free content model. However, at a global level we don’t need 95% of the educators to build the free curriculum - we only need 5%. Lets give the 5% the freedom to help us build free content - the rest will follow.

In this world we have two choices - to lead or to follow.

I know what side you’re on.

Cheers

9. richardwyles - april 6th, 2007 at 6:17 am

What would I do differently? What we’ve done is the model I discussed further up. We’ve developed 10 courses for about 800 hours of learning. It’s not a huge amount but it’s enough to explore an OER model. Done again with the same limitations on resources I’d explore, say 3, significantly different models concurrently and then build on the findings combining the best of each.