Community Council/Meetings/Third/Workgroup for WE Ready Mix OERs

Background

 * 1) Valerie Taylor proposed an agenda item: WE Ready Mix OERs
 * 2) Valerie Taylor has started drafting thoughts and ideas for Concept: for WE Ready Mix OERs.
 * 3) Please read Valerie's introduction and request to Council below.

Valerie's introduction and request to Council
This doesn't technically need WCC support or approval. However, it is an important core functionality of WE that needs to be built, if WE are to move to the next level of relevance as a global OER repository. Otherwise WE will continue to be viewed as a sandbox by many potential beneficiaries.

Is there any interest in promoting WE by providing a directory and/or search mechanism to allow interested OER adopters to find WE content that is complete and "adoptable"? Most colleagues who have searched WE are frankly put-off by all the sandboxes, broken bits and empty pages. There is no way to reliably find the "good stuff" which WE all know is there.

If this is something WE think is important, how can WE address the problem? What are WE prepared to do to be proactive about ensuring a good experience for educators visiting WE to located OERs for reuse and remixing? If there is sufficient interest, should a Workgroup be formed to investigate and propose some actions?

WikiEducator:Community_Council/Meetings/Third : Workgroup for WE Ready Mix OERs

Very preliminary but this seems like the right time and place to initiate the conversation. Please join in. I am hoping that there is enough interest generated during this meeting to get rolling on a Workgroup and project.

WE Ready Mix OERs - stuff in WE that is at a stage that can be adopted by other WikiEducators


 * fairly complete - not just an outline or sandbox


 * cataloged - some way to find these easily without having to access 1000s of WE pages that are not "ready to use"


 * feedback / rating / following - opportunity to discover these in some systematic way

Opportunities
 * provide easy way for "visitors" to browser potentially ready-to-use OERs
 * way to point to collection that represents depth and breadth of WE OERs
 * nice to have communication beyond WE to community of practice, encourage sharing through network connections
 * means for WE trusted reviewers develop a "following" - eg. User:*** always reviews and promotes great new K-6 science activities.

Workgroup
 * to make this work, there will need to be some technical support - feasibility, collaborative design, implementation ie. technical resources, possibly some actual cost
 * community wide - needs to be implemented and coordinated as a community function / resource although a proof-of-concept / prototype could be developed as an ad hoc project.

Questions
 * Who benefits from WikiEducator today? How?
 * Who would WE like to benefit? What do they need? Do WE provide that now? If not, what do WE need to provide - content, processes, tools?

Scenarios Great opportunity to showcase WikiEducator resources by providing a script that is a summary of a topic and discussion questions for studio guests and audience phone in. Find and review 2-3 WE OERs on appropriate topics for each weekly broadcast.
 * Teachers Without Borders - Nigeria provides a weekly radio broadcast Voices of Teachers and they need material for discussing contemporary issues affecting teachers and education as well as the practices of teaching and learning. There is a special segment in the show called "suggestions by teachers for teachers" and likely topics will include tips on classroom management, student diversity, community empowerment, peace and conflict resolution, assessment practices, multicultural education and even global issues like climate change and the Millennium Development Goals.
 * Teachers Without Borders
 * Voices of Teachers


 * A community college instructor is interested in open education and is looking for OERs that can be incorporated into an ESL class. She hears about WikiEducator from a colleague and comes to explore. She looks through main page for some catalog or areas of interest and searches keywords "ESL activities".

== Some ideas==


 * Wikibooks - revision review, development stages, lists books or pages uses Mediawiki Flagged Revs extension info


 * WEreadiMix catalog builder / finder tool - link / form to generate entry - fill in form > saves information to page discussion, adds to a searchable catalog generated from harvesting entry information
 * Stephen Downes periodically references a "harvester" based on RSS feeds. It is technically beyond me, but I really like the idea that content is tagged / flagged where it is hosted and a selective harvester finds it and includes the content appropriate catalog.--Valerie Taylor 13:50, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I think it would also be useful to create tutorials and free online workshops to build capacity and support educators in how to remix OER in WE --Wayne Mackintosh 04:42, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yup - great idea. How does that get started? --Valerie Taylor 13:50, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Easy -- start brainstorming a syllabus for the prospective tutorial(s) -- the OERF has a little grant funding to help with the development of tutorials like this -- ideally we can think of an next level course for the L4C initiative which covers these training needs. --Wayne Mackintosh 22:48, 10 May 2010 (UTC)


 * How if we put up a page named something like "Content, that is fairly ready for use"? WEs who are inclined to do this, could link their work there, additionally to the already existing content page.--GünOss 09:33, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Great idea --Valerie Taylor 13:45, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Why does it have to be simply WE content that is adoptable? For example, in California, there has been the development of OER texts that are complete, or in the case of Cable Green's Washington State initiative to focus on 50 / 80 of the most popular courses? Randy Fisher 09:44, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * That's why we need the discussion :o) How far down this path should WE go? --Valerie Taylor 13:50, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Resources
 * Don't forget the ideas on this page (click and scroll down). - Kim Tucker 22:35, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Help:Workgroup_charter - boilerplate

Draft concept for motion

 * Shall we motion for the Council to form a Workgroup to investigate options for making WE content easy to find by WE users and beyond, and also to promote WE through various OER and OCW distribution channels? --Christine Geith 13:45, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, something like that would be great. Technically it doesn't need WCC approval to set this up. But this is an important aspect of the WE mission, and should have WCC backing IMHO.--Valerie Taylor 13:43, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Discussion on draft motion

 * Let's not move this forward at this time. --Valerie Taylor 23:35, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

THANKS for the feedback and suggestions. WE have so much going resulting from other agenda items, that I think we should hold off on this until another time. If you are interested in working on this, we can stay in touch and exchange ideas. At some point, I hope that this will become a priority item. Then we can move ahead with the formal Workgroup with a plan, a schedule and WCC approval. Until then... thanks much to you all. --Valerie Taylor 23:33, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

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