Thread:Great example of disruptive innovation! -- A few thoughts (1)

Hi Kevin,

An excellent example of disruptive innovation! College composition is a popular first-year level course and my compliments to SNHU in leading the team on this one.

A good design blueprint and certainly implementable within the OERu delivery context.

A few thoughts and observations:


 * A few of the OERu prototypes are incorporating learning journals, and I agree -- blogs would be an appropriate and scalable technology solution. I think I should have a bash at drafting a straw dog proposal for using blogs as a mechanism for public journal activities. Will get onto this ASAP.
 * With reference to community-based and peer-to-peer support, thinking strategically I think it is wise to promote freedom of choice where institutions and learner can choose from a variety of peer-learning support communities, eg OpenStudy, P2PU, OERu hosted services and others (eg Facebook communities etc.) As a collective -- we should thinking about the implications of recommending one solution above another. For example, I have concern with the OpenStudy solution for two reasons:
 * There is potentially a vendor-lock risk when using services like OpenStudy.com because the technology is proprietary -- The Open Study terms of use states: "All non-educational content on the Site, including but not limited to designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, and other files, and their selection and arrangement (the "Site Content"), are the proprietary property of the Company, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved. No Site Content may be modified, copied, distributed, framed, reproduced, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted, transmitted, or sold in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, without the Company's prior written permission." Consequently it will not be possible to replicate and scale this solution.
 * The OpenStudy terms of usage do not adhere to a free cultural works approved license for user posted content -- they use a CC-BY-NC license (a non-free license :-. There is a tutorial in WikiEducator which covers the issues associated with the "right license" for OER. The NC restriction is hugely problematic, because it is essentially up to the copyright holder to define what they mean by non-commercial. There is a risk that charging assessment fees may be deemed by some copyright holders to be "commercial". Speaking personally -- I don't think its a risk worth taking. Better to stay with free cultural works approved licenses in my view :-).
 * I think its possible to replicate many of the peer-to-peer support technologies using open source alternatives --- this way our network avoids vendo lock-in
 * Are you planning to run the course in parallel-mode (i.e a full tuition version running in parallel with an assessment OERu version)? --- mmmm -- I think we should add this to the course metadata section of the blueprint.

Excellent start - -can't wait to start with the development of our representative samples!