OERNZ/Planning/First planning meeting/Guidelines for determining the scope of an OER for the honorarium payment

Revised draft for the motion
''This draft motion has been formulated based on the discussion contributions below -- Technically the chair may not table any motions. Any member of the OERNZ planning team who is of the opinion that the draft motion represents a general consensus, should formally table the motion under the relevant heading below.'' --Wayne Mackintosh 02:25, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Honorarium guidelines for a reusable and portable content resource for OERNZ


 * The honorarium payment of NZ$300 is based on the equivalent of 10 hours of development time.
 * The honorarium is intended for the development of reusable and portable content materials in support of teaching and learning.
 * We encourage teachers to develop OER for use with the new curriculum, including for instance, links to the relevant values and key competencies.
 * We encourage team work where a group of teachers may collaboratively bid to develop a number of resources and decide among themselves how to share the honorarium accordingly.
 * We will not fund duplicate OER resources -- allocations for curriculum area and level will be made on a first-come, first-serve basis.
 * The following benchmarks for determining the scope of work for the NZ$300 honorarium will be used as a guideline:
 * Basic lesson plan, without support materials for students: Required output is 5 lesson plans
 * Lesson with supporting resources for students: Required output is 2 lesson plans
 * Comprehensive lesson and/or online tutorial for students including supporting resources, assessment activities and assessment rubrics: Required output is 1 lesson / resource.
 * We subscribe to the honesty box principle regarding a fair and reasonable output for the honorarium.

Notes


 * 1) This motion is not intended to deal with the contractual arrangements with reference to the recipient of the honorarium which may be the school, individual teacher and/or consultant. In each case different taxation and/or legal requirements may apply with regard to copyright waivers by the Board of Trustees or Contractual agreement to release materials under a free content license in the case of an independent consultant. These are contractual matters between the OER Resource Foundation and the contractor
 * 2) These estimates are intended as broad guidelines, and in each case we will need to exercise professional discretion regarding the scope of the individual bounty
 * 3) This motion is not intended to cover the establishment of a bureaux support service to assist teachers in converting content donations into wiki format for the OER Commons.

Original draft and discussion
Background: The purpose of this draft motion is to scope and estimate the output requirements for an OER honorarium payment, based on the types of OER for our project.

We envisage an OER honorarium payment of NZ$300 per "bounty" or approximately 10 hours of development time. WE are attempting to equate the honorarium payment to a rough cost-equivalent of a relief teacher. This is not an exact science, but we aim to achieve a fair and reasonable solution for the investment in time by the the teacher or content developers. We propose the following output guidelines for a NZ$300 honorarium:


 * Six completed lesson plans including, resource links, assessment guidelines and relevant metadata
 * Three integrated lesson plans that include self-contained handouts for the students, assessment guidelines and relevant metadata.
 * One self contained, self-study online resource or multimedia simulation lesson designed for 1 - 2 hours worth of student learning time including: content, images and diagrams, all related learning activities and feedback, layout and navigation of the lesson and corresponding metadata.
 * One professional development workshop materials for the equivalent of a one-day workshop including, agenda, content resources, facilitator's guidelines and corresponding metadata.
 * Two substantive school policy and/or guideline documents incorporating review and refinements by three participating schools.

Note that:


 * 1) this motion is not intended to deal with the contractual arrangements with reference to the recipient of the honorarium which may be the school, individual teacher and/or consultant. In each case different taxation and/or legal requirements may apply with regard to copyright waivers by the Board of Trustees or Contractual agreement to release materials under a free content license in the case of an independent consultant. These are contractual matters between the OER Resource Foundation and the contractor
 * 2) These estimates are intended as broad guidelines, and in each case we will need to exercise our discretion regarding the scope of the individual bounty
 * 3) This motion is not intended to cover the establishment and or honorarium payment of a bureaux support service to assist teachers in converting content donations into wiki format for the OER Commons.  --Wayne Mackintosh 00:59, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Comment on duplication

 * I wonder if duplication or near duplication will be an issue? Would it be a good idea to have a coordinator for each area who has some kind of approval process in place such that you are not swamped with 10 dinosaur projects for example.  I realize this might be marginal to the current motion but thought it worth raising.  There will inevitably be issues around quality and/or relevance but I guess this is getting too far ahead? Richardnz 04:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi Richard, both very good points that we will need to think about as we progress. I think the metadata template solution will help us identify duplication. Having a team of co-ordinators will also help considerably in addressing the duplication challenge. Quality and/or relevance are both very important issues for teaching professionals. That said, quality is a complex topic -- quality is like beauty, it's in the eyes of the beholder ;-). Speaking personally, I see quality as a process and an opportunity for continuous improvement. I don't see quality as a product -- developing the "perfect" lesson is an iterative process -- every time we present a lesson, we learn from our experience and can refine and improve our product. I'm concerned that the "quality" issue could become a barrier to participation -- for e.g. the fear to develop and participate in OERNZ because of what others might say about the "quality" of a resource. I would far rather cultivate a spirit of collaboration and a culture of continuous improvement. I think we should reward and congratulate educators who are willing to risk developing OER collaboratively in support of our community motto: Just try it, our community will support you!. I have a simple challenge for any educator that comments on the quality of an OER -- namely, if we create something that is not up to "standard", show us how you can improve it! Fortunately with open content licensing derivative works are possible :-) --Wayne Mackintosh 04:28, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Reflections on OER admin and policy documents

 * I would like to know how others members feel about payments for policies/process documents. The Ministry's involvement in this space stems from the duplication of effort in teacher created resources, especially those created in/for learning management systems. I understand how WE can assist in the administrative/management domain, am supportive of this as representing value but am less comfortable funding this in our first year. What do others think? Paul Seiler 18:55, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi Paul -- With regards to the honorarium payments which are funded by the Ministry, I believe that we should stay within the primary intent of the project in reducing duplication of effort around teaching materials. Given the value that open policies and administration related documents could provide, especially for small rural schools -- I propose that we keep this type of OER on the list of reusable and portable content under the OERNZ project, but do not list this as an alternative that would qualify for an honorarium payment. This way administrators can still gift their time, and OERF could pursue other funding sources to help support this. How does this work for you? --Wayne Mackintosh 21:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Fine by me. I appreciate the creativity of members in listing so many different types of output, am keen to see WE work for anybody for any/all needs but also keen to keep the money focused on what it was provided for. If these first steps work well then we can think on how to support the next phase. Paul Seiler 08:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I think having as many examples of work from both teaching and administration would be an initiative to get a wider variety of users involved - yes us smaller schools would love to be able to access and share each other work. Also payment for lesson plans etc - for those who can cut and paste from their own resources this could be very quick - a new wikier could spend hours making a new resource - not sure how this will be overcome?
 * I also worry about lesson plans - I am yet to see any I can use without large amounts of changing - especially in light of child centred learning? NathanP 22:45, 9 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Nathan, from OERF's perspective, I'm very keen to support and promote a couple of pilots on the use of administration-type documents -- I think that its a brilliant concept, and I suspect that there is considerable duplication across the sector -- but its hard to leverage collective wisdom if policies are locked behind copyright. Lets be creative and try this out -- grass-roots and bottom-up. I'm willing to pursue funding opportunities to try and make this happen. Very good point about the time differentials between a newbie and more experienced wiki user. We'll certainly be able to close the gap with WYSIWYG editing, and setting up preloaded templates. I based the time assessment on an average wiki user developing lesson plans with preloaded templates. I estimated that an average teacher would be able to create 6 lesson plans in a day -- for example using the templates we've created so far. So that's about 1.5 hours work for completing one lesson plan. Is this realistic? In the beginning it may take newbies longer, but as they pick up experience, it will go faster. Excellent point about reuse of lesson plans in the light of child centred learning. I think that this is partly a question of design -- that is developing lesson plans that are sufficiently modular and identify learning activities as discrete components. It's the learning activities that will differ from one learning context to another. I think the real value of lesson plans in an OER environment will be the discussions and community that can evolve around lesson plans and discussions on what works and what doesn't. Also being able to see different lesson plan examples may trigger ideas for new approaches and things to try out in the classroom. In many respects -- this will be a pioneering projectc and using an open-learn-by-doing approach will help us improve with more experience. Thoughts? --Wayne Mackintosh 01:04, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Refining the scope of an OER

 * I am not sure that it is clear whether the $300 is for all of the list or for each bullet point. As has been pointed out earlier, it is hard to put a time on some of them. I have some resources that I could adapt that I may be able to put up several lessons in a day, but if I am starting from scratch it would take me a whole day to produce one lesson. I think, however, that we should be encouraging new lessons that embrace the new technology and the new curriculum. I would rather see some new an innovative ideas and lessons rather than someone who has just uploaded their 'same old' lessons, although these can still have a place and will have a familiar feel to some, which may encourage their use. With regard to the policy/process material, again this has a place and may help to persuade management in schools that it is a good idea to use WE, as this may have more of a direct effect on them, but I agree our main focus should be on teaching and learning. If we want this to take off and be sustainable then we need to engage the classroom teachers as these are likely to be our main providers and users of material and the people most likely to volunteer to be facilitators and so keep the process alive. --Jacqui land 19:17, 10 November 2009


 * Hi Jacqui -- good feedback as always. Thanks for that. For clarification purposes the $300 is for each bullet point. I agree its not easy to put a time on each of these bullets -- but we need to give this our best shot in achieving reasonable consensus. I will need to contract potential contributors in accordance with specified outputs. I agree that we should encourage new lessons for the new curriculum -- in this scenario, what time estimate would you place on a new lesson created from scratch. Similarly, converting existing lessons -- how many do you think is reasonable for a day's work? Perhaps we need another bullet -- new lesson from scratch? Would it be possible to create 2 new lessons in 10 hours, i.e 1.25 days work? When you suggest several lessons in a day from existing lesson plans -- how many is several? Its easy to tweak the output statements for the motion -- and this feedback is extremely valuable in specifying the generic output targets for a $300 honorarium. --Wayne Mackintosh 06:30, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the clarification over the bullet points. I think these are reasonable for $300. I think if we specified that the lessons had to meet the new curriculum that would direct people to produce or adapt their existing material. For instance if we recommended that they include a link to a value or key competency then this would encourage new thinking. It also depends on what the lesson has to include. If it is just a plan, you could probably do 4/5 in 10 hours, if you were including resources and assessment tasks then you would get no more that 2 done in 10 hours. At the end of the day I think we need to just go for it and hope that people will be honest with their time and output. I think there are very few teachers out there who would say I will produce 6 lessons, take the $300 and it only take them 1 hour. In reality, teachers will more likely commit to producing 2 lessons and take 20 hours and still be happy with their $300. This is really a means to get us going...am I right? Ideally we want teachers producing these resources for free in the knowledge and hope that they will get access to hundreds of equally good and useful resources in return. Jacqui land 20:04, 10 November 20
 * I agree Jacqui, and look forward to the day when OERNZ operates on a reciprocity basis. We all share this ideal. Paul Seiler 08:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi Jacqui -- these "estimated" time benchmarks are very useful for me -- its more than twenty years since I've been teaching in a classroom, and must be getting old because I don't remember how long it took to prepare a lesson :-). I think we can produce generic guidelines for the bounty in terms of expected outputs and then leave it up to teachers to decide how they want to allocate their time, for example:
 * WE encourage lesson plans for the new curriculum and expect these to include the values and / or key competencies.
 * If you're developing a basic lesson plan -- we expect an output of 5 lesson plans
 * If you decided to develop a lesson with supporting resources we expect an output of 2 lesson plans
 * If you are developing a comprehensive lesson with supporting resources, assessment activities and assessment rubrics, we expect and output of 1 lesson plan.
 * WikiEducator is based on a trust model -- and in my experience contributors are honest. One advantage of working openly and transparently in a wiki --- if you "cheat" the system, everyone will see this and you will loose credibility in the community. In the 3+ years of running WE, a website that now generates more the 10million hits per month and having used hundreds of consultants, I've only had one instance of a commissioned project not happening as it should have. Being a wiki -- I picked up on this very quickly and was able to rectify the problem. Needless to say -- the consultant involved will never get paid work again from our community. --Wayne Mackintosh 22:35, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Process issues -- request system, promoting collaboration etc

 * I wonder if it would be interesting to have a "request system", even a voting mechanism that floats popular requests to the top of some kind of list. I don't know if it could be made to work but producing a resource that 100 NZ teachers want should be more cost and time effective than producing for 1. From both sides. Richardnz 07:25, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Richard, in time I think a community request and voting system will certainly help focus OER development in addressing the most important needs. I would love to see a system like this in place for OERNZ :-). At this stage, we don't have the money or the time to get this operational. But lets think of creative ways to make this happen for OERNZ in the future. --Wayne Mackintosh 07:43, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Richard, I also like your system, would like to see it work but am not wedded to it being there from Day 1. Another alternative is to aim for areas currently important nationally or where teachers know good resources are scarce. Does anyone have ideas along this line? Paul Seiler 08:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * What about a collaboration bullet point? Not sure how it would be worded (or if it is within scope) but I am thinking it might draw more wiki newbies into the process and push the enevelope with regards to what the wiki can do. For example, a new user might be thinking, "I would love to add this lesson to WE but I don't know how to do ____ or it would take me forever to do ____." Where an advanced user might be thinking, "I can make the wiki do ____ which I think is pretty cool but it would take me forever to create a lesson plan from scratch around it."  I can see scenarios where the newbie would contribute the majority of time, vice versa, and some where it would be close to a 50/50 split so may note be very easy to pin down. Rob Kruhlak 21:38, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi Rob -- that's a very good idea. A community colloquium to facilitate ideas and partnerships for NZ OER bounties. Perhaps a trademe wiki hack on I have an OER idea -- any takers, supporters. mmmmm any thoughts on how we could implement this? --Wayne Mackintosh 05:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm trying to think how the proposed honoraria might apply to a group of teachers who collaborate to produce resources. In particular consider 2 or 3 teachers who work together to make a scheme of work including resources etc.  From my perspective, the willingness to collaborate together and then commit to WE for a wider audience is great for quality control, but also ( and I've no evidence here) makes the individual honorarium less important to the individual.  It would be neat if groups of teachers could develop resources and donate the payment to a charity.  This could be a hook for more teachers to be involved. --Tstorr 07:38, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I Trevor --- the wiki works best when we collaborate, confer and ask for feedback from our peers. I think that we should use the honesty model -- teachers are free to decide how they want to collaborate and can figure among themselves how they want to share an honorium. For example a team of 5 may agree to request one bounty each and then agree to collaborate as a team in completing the 5 outputs. I suggest that we leave scope for creativity in decidsing how this works -- I'm concerned that we may end up with a bureaucracy and admin nightmare in trying to cater for all eventualities. That said -- very good point about encouraging collaboration -- its the wiki way :-)--Wayne Mackintosh 22:42, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Did I miss something (quite likely! I hear you say). Are we talking about forever here, or was this just for the first 70 or so examples? Maybe if there is any doubt over the originality/duplication/value of the contribution, then the community can decide via a voting mechanism? Or is this just too hard?? If we are just talking of bounty for the first take then maybe we look at geographical breakdowns - structure the first series based on the new NZC, incorporating links to values etc, base them on the learning areas, then by levels (eg primary, middle, senior) - add in a few examples of policies - then we only need around 3 examples from each learning area and level to meet the target? Does this make life any easier? ... or, did I miss something!? --Rob McCrae 20:24, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Rob -- good suggestions and summary. Its how I saw this bounty model working. It will self-organise as the project matures. We set up an aim or target, that initially OERNZ will work towards getting 3 exemplars from each learning area, and intially we will set up a page in the wiki to list and categorise contributions between primary, middle and senior. As the the OERNZ project matures, then we can refine our approaches. Looks like we have a plan :-) --Wayne Mackintosh 22:47, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Reward and incentive models

 * "Amways" had an amazing system of using family, friends and contacts for personal monetary gain (apologies to any budding or failed Amways salespeople). Could we not pay apples to people who can get others using WikiEducator(ambassadors) therefore not actually creating content themselves. I have 10 colleagues who I get up and running to create one resource - I receive my apple and then any of these 10 who get 10 new people creating a resource get an apple too. Meanwhile I am on to my next 10 people? Unlike Amways - WikiEducator is about humanity rather than personal gain so selling (sharing/encouraging) WE to family friends and colleagues is something that as an educationalist is a must do i.e no sellout of principles (apologies once again). WE - possibly the enlightened pathway for educationalists. NathanP 21:32, 11 November 2009 (UTC)  I like apples.
 * Hi Nathan -- Very important reflection and my experience with open communities and wiki's will attest that it's the values underpinning open education that makes this all work. Not honoraria. In fact, historically WikiEducator has not adopted a standard model of paying people to do things, rather we have focused on "strategic" investments to seed and get things moving, for example the development of WikiEducators tutorials which have now helped more than 9000 educators! I see the OER honarium as a basis for seeding exemplars as a means to introduce our education community to the amazing world of sharing and collaboration online. Speaking candidly -- the actual OER outputs are secondary to the real objective. Namely for educators to experience what this is all about and to tell their friends and family to join us in making the world a better place. Best keep this a secret --- Wiki's are addictive :-) --Wayne Mackintosh 22:56, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Discussion to prepare concept motion
Please add discussion points and sign your contribution

Tabled motion
Honorarium guidelines for a reusable and portable content resource for OERNZ


 * The honorarium payment of NZ$300 is based on the equivalent of 10 hours of development time.
 * The honorarium is intended for the development of reusable and portable content materials in support of teaching and learning.
 * We encourage teachers to develop OER for use with the new curriculum, including for instance, links to the relevant values and key competencies.
 * We encourage team work where a group of teachers may collaboratively bid to develop a number of resources and decide among themselves how to share the honorarium accordingly.
 * We will not fund duplicate OER resources -- allocations for curriculum area and level will be made on a first-come, first-serve basis.
 * The following benchmarks for determining the scope of work for the NZ$300 honorarium will be used as a guideline:
 * Basic lesson plan, without support materials for students: Required output is 5 lesson plans
 * Lesson with supporting resources for students: Required output is 2 lesson plans
 * Comprehensive lesson and/or online tutorial for students including supporting resources, assessment activities and assessment rubrics: Required output is 1 lesson / resource.
 * We subscribe to the honesty box principle regarding a fair and reasonable output for the honorarium.

Notes --Mosborne01 07:58, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) This motion is not intended to deal with the contractual arrangements with reference to the recipient of the honorarium which may be the school, individual teacher and/or consultant. In each case different taxation and/or legal requirements may apply with regard to copyright waivers by the Board of Trustees or Contractual agreement to release materials under a free content license in the case of an independent consultant. These are contractual matters between the OER Resource Foundation and the contractor
 * 2) These estimates are intended as broad guidelines, and in each case we will need to exercise professional discretion regarding the scope of the individual bounty
 * 3) This motion is not intended to cover the establishment of a bureaux support service to assist teachers in converting content donations into wiki format for the OER Commons.

Second

 * Jim Tittsler 08:17, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Any further discussion points on a tabled motion are added here

Approval

 * Jim Tittsler 08:18, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * --Rob McCrae 08:22, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Richardnz 09:47, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Paul Seiler 19:37, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * IanM 21:33, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * --Jland 04:33, 29 November 2009 (UTC)