Open development, design and support
More on common issues
Scale is definitely one of the main issues of the day as is the need for access to help and information on any number of subjects. Even more, learners will need a lot of feedback from peers and AVIs in order to gain richer formative feedback than just automatically marked quizzes. This question strikes me as a gap in many of our BPs. Yet over-reliance on AVIs as we know is not sustainable.
The FAQ concept seems good and this idea has come up in a number of BPs. It makes sense (in terms of sustainable design and development - and let's not forget "maintenance") to have a constantly growing single database of FAQs rather than many redundant ones - i.e. for each course. The combined FAQ would grow proportionally to the new content and the issues that emerge with the addition of more courses and tools over time. Ranking could be based not only on how many people found items useful but also how useful they found them. This knowledge base and its underlying data could have tremendous value over time and this also prompts a question that's been on my mind: what analytics do we want to make available in the OERu?The DB could be linked to every course with a "help/search" box or something similar. Maybe OER resources could also be linked to topics as part of the answers (e.g. for how to use spreadsheets, critical thinking, math skills and others as noted in the BPs), as well as learner-generated content that might be instructive for other students in either generic areas such as study skills or technical issues, or discipline related domains.
Alongside the FAQ or maybe within it might be some feature that allows for comments on learners' work (like Flickr or Soundcloud where others comment on submissions but we would do this in a more structured way) and use similar ranking systems (while avoiding popularity contests obviously--this means criteria). Students could contribute content as part of their study assignments (it seems to me we want our learners plowing their best content and our found OERs back into the community for others to use). The ability to subscribe to feeds for specific topics or queries might also be helpful.
Such a tool definitely needs to get a lot of use - success breeds success in such endeavours. In this case it should be a robust, current and expanding body of information and tools for increasingly efficient methods for AVIs to skim off the key pieces and leave the rest to be crowdsourced among OERu learners and other supporters. As part of the project, I would think we want our learners how to be good "open citizens" within the community.
I joined this particular home recording hobbyist community 13 years ago when there were a few hundred users Home Recodingand now it is a vast and very busy site for help, collaboration and information with over 100,000 members, and is well structured for specific topics as well as "Newbie" tools to keep the same questions from being asked ad nauseum in the advanced discussions.
Hi Irwin,
Thanks again for the overall blueprint review and these reflections. Extremely valuable in helping us clarify our designs and understand the constraints.
Copy of responses posted on OERu planning list
Scale
Scalability is a big issue for the future of OERu. From a design perspective designing for scale still gives us the flexibility to cap participation at an institutional level. However, a course which is designed for a small number of students is very hard to scale up for thousands.
There are also technology issues. For example, many learning management systems tend to use considerable computing resources as they are not designed for scale. So for example, if in the future, an OERu webinar was streamed simultaneously to thousands of users and the presenter asks participants to all look at the discussion thread for topic 2, there is a real risk of crashing the servers -- because these technologies are not necessarily designed for scale. So behind the scenes we also need to think about the technology infrastructure and how to distribute the computing resources across the network in an affordable way. Fortunately --administering a large global community like WIkiEducator means we have the benefit of experience have learned what works and likely to be risky.
Hi Irwin,
Thanks again for the overall blueprint review and these reflections. Extremely valuable in helping us clarify our designs and understand the constraints.
Copy of responses posted on OERu planning list
AVI and sustainable feedback
I'm pretty confident that over time we can build a sustainable community of Academic Volunteers. This is largely a scheduling & timing challenge. It takes a few years to build critical mass for a volunteer community. WikiEducator is a global community of 30,000 educators -- but a lot work is required in terms of capability development and community building strategies. Fortunately - -we have lots of experience here :-).
So from an operational management perspective there are two workable solutions for the prototype phase:
- While designing for scale in the future, cap the number of students for the prototype to avoid over reliance on AVIs we don't have at this time.
- Design a few prototypes which can scale as mass courses, but don't require high AVI input.
Hi Irwin, Thanks again for the overall blueprint review and these reflections. Extremely valuable in helping us clarify our designs and understand the constraints.
Copy of responses posted on OERu planning list
FAQ database concept
I think the trick here is to use a community model to build and scale this component which will cover FAQs for both general OERu support and individual courses using tags. Hence my interest to trial systems like OSQA. I think this system will cover many of the aspects you have recommended (eg search capability, managing redundancy etc.). We also need to be realistic in the sense that it is rare to find a 100% fit with any software solution. However, going with an open source solution gives us flexibility to customise for the future. This would be a great area for a large donor bid :-).
