The Brave New World of the Inauspiciously Named MOOC's

First off, my favorite video was this one:




It's classy, informative, and doesn't miss any key points (or at least as few possible in 3 minutes) about what OER is all about.

Now to the articles. Open Education Resources by Wiley et al. does a great job of summarizing OER. First, they explain the relative ambiguity of the term "open" and go on to discuss it's various incarnations, mostly hinging on the degree of "openness" a resource can be said to exhibit. The main three criteria acorss several researchers appeared to be 1. Freedom to access the materials, 2. Freedom to do what you will with the resource, such as revising, remixing, or redistributing the materials.

To some extent, these questions are determined by the mode of production of the OER, which range from the extremely loosely organized volunteer "peer production" such as wikipedia all the way to prestigious institutions such as MIT spending millions of dollars every year on carefully managed OER outreach initiatives.


The next big thing talked about is the 4 problems currently facing the OER community. This is the part I found most interesting. 


1. The discovery problem. Sure tons of great resources may exist out there, but the cost of any resource is not just the monetary price you pay to get it, it's the cost in time and effort as well. OER resources have relatively little marketing clout (since the content creators aren't directly receiving benefit for each extra OER distributed). Moreover, it is my opinion that a large quantity of low-quality OER material is out there, making it even more difficult to sift through the morass of information. Also, when people type in google key words for some content area they want information about, they're typically not looking for a 4 month class on the subject, further exacerbating the subject. The places that are into the whole 4 month class thing on the other hand have little incentive to begin using these resources, since by their very design many OER's are currently more a substitute rather than a complement to instructors.


2. The Sustainability Problem. Who the heck is going to pay for all this awesome, and free, content? Chances are, it's not going to be the content consumer, because most people if given the option between free and not free will choose the free option all the time as the quality is somewhat decent. Although some effort has been made in discvering new open busines models this is still a huge question to be decided. The millions of dollars MIT spends on it's open education resources each year highlights this issue.

3. The Quality problem. It boils down to this: would you rather watch a commercial produced for the superbowl or a commercial produced for the 3 a.m. cooking channel? If you're a sane individual, you would choose the Super Bowl. The point is though that the amount of resources poured into producing something is directly related to the quality of that something. However, the amount of money poured into something depends crucially on the return on investment and the potential size of the gains. OER suffers in both respects from the perspective of most content producers.

4. Localiszation (or recontexualisation of content)
OER is in it's infancy, as are "learning objects". Knowledge and instructional materials have yet to become an interchangeable commodity in the same way that memory sticks in the camera industry are. Each resource is typically optimized for a particular purpose, and unless a content producer shares that purpose, chances are that it may actually be more work to create the resource from scratch rather than spending time and effort to patch together an inferior solution from existing solutions.

5. Remix Problem. This isn't so much a problem as it is a disappointment to the chief proponents of OER. Here we have these free educational resources, with no restrictive copyrights. It seems logical that we should be able to do some awesome remixing - creating a patchwork  out of these vartious ieces to make an awesome instructional resource. Sadly, such is not always the case. This issues hinges on the localizsation and the discovery problems. If these costs are prohibitively high, it doesn't make any sense to remix content (except for the occasional copy and paste)


Online Self Organizing Systems
This article could be summarized in one question and answer. Q: Who's in charge of Wikipedia? A: Essentially no one. Despite this, Wikipedia manages to produce material of quality at least comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One of the central problems of online education is the "teacher-bandwidth" problem. Although raw content may now have an almost infinitely scalable distribution, the student-teacher relationships still exhibit the same limiations of the pre-digital era. Two main solutions have been proposed to solve this problem:

1. Automated "smart" learning systems, which adaptively respond to learners needs. 
2. Student's supporting students

This paper mostly deals with the second option. By leveraging internt capabilities, students can collaborate on a scale never before seen. Although any one given student may be quite unable to help you with your particular learning problem (speaking as a student), it is quite likely that in a class of 10000, some student out there could help you. 

The trick then is to put the right conditions and software infrastructure in place such that these type of useful and mutually beneficial interactions can naturally arise. Several solutions have been developed: 

• Meta moderation, such as seen at Slashdot.org
• Blog like ecosystems of learners collaboratively building and critiquing. 
• Q&A forums, such as stackoverflow, which rely on either altruism or a skillful design to appeal to the natural competitive instinct. ]
• Let the people figure out how to use the commons. We don't need no instructional designers to tell us how to do it. 
• Collaborative problem solving
• Scenario based instruction

The main takeaway point of the article is this: Maybe the new brave era of instructional design isn't figuring out how to make the perfect textbook or college course. Maybe it's in knowing how to create these scalable and learning heavy educational environments. 


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