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Ted Curran

To Share or Not to Share: Is That the Question? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...209321

share faculty opensource open copyright opencourseware to

shared by Ted Curran on 11 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The use of open materials by faculty is something of a continuum, with those who closely guard their intellectual property and privacy on one end, with faculty who seek out and use open content and technologies in the middle, and with those who actively contribute to open content on the other end.
  • All the faculty I spoke to could think of at least a few contexts in which they would not be willing and/or able to share or participate openly.
  • For example, few faculty are willing to embark on large, time-intensive projects, such as writing textbooks, without some guarantee that they will be compensated for their personal investment (time
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  • Research faculty may need to closely guard patentable research under the terms of their institutional contracts, even if their inclination drives them to share openly
  • Science faculty, for example, often publish their research with multiple authors and may be more used to a collaborative model, whereas humanities faculty write for publications that favor a single-author model.
  • Commonly, faculty will lock down some content (research or texts) under intellectual property laws but feel morally obligated to share in another aspect of their field.
  • Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence.
  • the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing
  • On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.
  • The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community.
  • Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share
  • that everyone in education should share
  • Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.
  • In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.
  • What's the difference between those faculty who share with colleagues locally and those who share on the web? Technology skills.
  • Open faculty are learning some of these technology skills from formal workshops and professional training, but many spoke of learning technology skills from other open faculty (or even students) during on-the-fly informal learning sessions.
  • Many of the faculty I spoke to suggested (strongly) that participation in open digital activities (e.g., blogging, writing open-source software, being a curator of open-source materials) should count toward tenure and promotion.
  • Naturally, administrators worry about open digital faculty. What if they say something the institutional leaders don't agree with? What if their work with students on the web creates a liability? Administrators can do three simple things to minimize these issues: If a faculty member writes or shares content openly on the web, using space provided by the college, the inclusion of a simple disclosure statement can provide some separation between the individual and the institution (for example, "These views/materials are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my institution"). To guard against liability, administrators can make sure that open faculty receive training on copyright issues with materials used, privacy issues with students, and security issues with web technologies. These days, most campus activities involve the potential for liability. All administrators can do is make a good-faith effort to protect the institution by ensuring that faculty have a solid grounding in the potential risks. Today's students live much of their lives in the digital world. Faculty have the potential to model and promote good Internet behavior to future workers and leaders. Administrators can support open digital faculty by making an effort to understand what the faculty do: read some of what they write; take them to lunch and discuss their latest projects; try to understand that these faculty are public ambassadors of the institution and stealth faculty developers on campus. In gaining the trust of open digital faculty, administrators will more likely be seen as advisors than as adversaries.
Ted Curran

Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment - 0 views

mfeldstein.com/-community-colleges-assessment

moodle blackboard lms vs assessment

shared by Ted Curran on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • “The end-of-term student and instructor surveys showed that Blackboard and Moodle are not that different.” All of these systems are pretty good/bad.
  • “The real difference is found in student perception of their teachers’ comfort level with the application. There exists a significant correlation between student survey scores of both Blackboard and Moodle with the perceived comfort level of instructors using either application. Thus, student perceptions of both CMSs were influenced by instructor experience, training, and skills.” The fact that your faculty reviewers are more familiar with your old system than some of the alternatives may bias their evaluations significantly.
  • “Case studies of four exclusively Moodle institutions indicated that while transition to Moodle was challenging, ultimately the case study students and faculty preferred Moodle over Blackboard.”
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  • “The CMS application functionality comparison by online administrators (application and network) and online instructors indicated that Moodle 1.9x has a higher perceived functionality than any version of Blackboard evaluated. The large number of “did not use” responses suggested that neither CMS platform was utilized to full capacity.” Having a system with 39,000 seldom-used features that require a course to learn how to use is not as valuable to you as having a system with 39 features that most people will find useful and can figure out how to use on their own.
  • “The analysis revealed the total pre-transition year cost for all four case study colleges totaled $184,410. There was a 35% increase in total cost in the transition year to $248,300, due to supporting two CMSs simultaneously. Lastly, the post-transition year cost of ownership was $52,296, which accounted for a 72% decrease in total cost compared to that of the pre-transition year. The total cost savings from preto post-transition years for all of the case study colleges was $132,114.” Consider long-run costs as well as short-run costs. Migration may be cheaper than staying put, and the more expensive migration in the short run may be cheaper in the long run.
Ted Curran

Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability | Friesen |... - 0 views

www.irrodl.org/...1388

open learning resources educational education edtech teaching technology

shared by Ted Curran on 07 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The term open educational resources was first adopted at the 2002 UNESCO Forum
  • “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24)
  • he notion of openness, for its part, has been given legal force and definition through the set of copyright licenses released by Creative Commons, also in 2002
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  • A second general difference separating learning objects from their open educational counterparts is indicated by the absence of any explicit reference to the openness or the open and noncommercial character of the resource.
  • What is significant in each definition is precisely what is included and excluded: Each definition highlights (either directly or indirectly) modularity as a technological and design attribute for the object and its content, emphasizing the “self-contained,” “building block” or “object-oriented” nature of the technology.
  • Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)
  • this project recently met its original ambitious goal of placing all of MIT’s course content online by 2007
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • the funding for the operations of many of the projects is either provided by a parent institution
  • by a governmental organization
  • or by a combination of these types of sources.
  • he many projects that have fallen inactive or been discontinued
  • the nature and the enormity of the sustainability challenge online educational resource collections face.  
  • The clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. Online educational resource initiatives of this kind, one can conclude, need to be seen as processes or services rather than as products that persist of their own accord.
  • Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects
  • The issue of sustainability of OER projects, unsurprisingly, was one of the top concerns
  • awareness raising and promotion; communities and networking of creators and users; and capacity development, specifically as it relates to the development and pedagogical application of OERs.
  • The necessary preconditions for viability – awareness, capacity, community, cultural change – are identical with what would be the results of success.
  • a vicious circle of “chicken and egg.
  • the majority of the use of this material not only takes place outside of the USA, it also occurs outside in the context of reuse and adaptation by teachers or instructional designers.
  • it is educationally valuable without detracting from the educational value of the face-to-face activities on which the collected content is based.
  • This finding provides clear evidence of multiple areas of significant benefit accruing to MIT the institution from the open courseware project, and it provides a positive illustration of important possibilities for change.
  • “OCW use is centered on subjects for which MIT is recognized leader
  • 32% of faculty say that putting materials online has improved their teaching
  • 35 percent of freshmen who were aware of OCW prior to deciding to attend MIT indicate the site was a significant or very significant influence on their choice of school” (cited in Wiley, 2006, p. 6).
  • David Wiley presents a conclusion that may be of the utmost significance for OER: “The time will come when an OpenCourseWare or similar collection of open access educational materials will be as fully expected from every higher education institution as an informational website is now” (2006, p. 6).
  • Simply put, this is enlightened institutional self-interest.
  • student recruitment
  • the potential for improving teaching and for better supporting learning
  • a kind of viral marketing of the quality of teaching and learning in areas of strategic institutional interest
  • They need not risk financial and cultural capital on creating yet another collection or repository, but instead can invest it in the quality and accessibility of their course offerings.
  • Open CourseWare Consortium and its OCW finder
  • It only asks of its members a contribution of 12 courses to its growing collection of over 10,000 courses
  • The point, as Wiley explains, is that “this strategy of openness” holds out the promise of “catalyzing further innovations” (2006).
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