Open Educational Resources (OER) – Rant-Fest
OER has been bugging me for a while. This 2 billion Federal Investment in OER is just the thing to get me up fired up on a SoapBox about OER.
Here is the first Michael Feldstein post
And the second post from Michael Feldstein
Here is a Post from Rob Abel of IMS (disclosure – I do work as a consultant for IMS)
And here is my rant that is a combination of my reaction to Michael’s post plus my reaction to Rob’s post. If you want a more balanced view – see Michael’s posts above. If you are here reading my blog – it must mean you are lookin’ for a rant. I hope not to disappoint.
RANT
As a teacher, there is little value in learning content that I cannot alter (Remix). SCORM, Flash and PDF are effectively write-only formats designed for a model where content publishers make and distribute content and we teachers simply consume and/or point to the content.
This obsession with “making and publishing” OER artifacts that are unsuitable for editing is why nearly all of this kind of work ends up dead and obsolete. We end up with piles and piles of highly financed but un-editable artifacts that are usually obsolete the day they are created. The job of teaching is to *contextualize* materials – not just point at them. Most OER activities completely miss this point – they make some slick web site and then try to drive people to their site – virtually none of these efforts can demonstrate any real learning impact – all they can show is that they have a lot of viewing traffic. I would think that most current OER efforts traffic levels are directly correlated with the branding and marketing of the organizations hosting the sites – rather than the educational value or impact of those materials.
There are rare examples of OER materials impacting education – but they key to the ones that work is that the value is when there is a *teacher* teaching the materials rather than a bunch of highly polished PDF files that can be viewed. And the very fact that there is a teacher involved in the useful OER materials means that they quickly become stale and unless that same teacher keeps redoing the materials over and over, the materials lose their relevance and their value and since they are not in a reusable/remixable format (i.e. Flash, PDF or SCORM) – those materials are dead to the world.
On the other hand if the materials are published in a remixable format with a creative commons license – then when the OER from one teacher or publisher loses relevance – some other teacher or publisher can pick them up and move them forward.
As an example, I am writing a book called “Python for Informatics” (www.py4inf.com) – but this is a book that is over 10 years old and has four major authors and has been updated, refreshed, and published many times in the past 10 years by a different author each time. This is because the book (now) has a Creative Commons Share-Alike License (formerly GFDL) *and* more importantly it is distributed in a re-mixable format. That re-mixable format is LaTeX – which is a painful format to use – but at least it is the source materials and not some PDF that is dead the moment it is produced. This book that has a 10-year lifecycle and will be here 10 years from now in yet some other form *is* the motivating example – not the current OER web sites that are mostly marketing tools.
As I have said elsewhere, “This reminds me of the late 1990’s where the sexy foundation grant of the day was to give $250,000 to some graphic artists to make a really cool CD-ROM about bugs as if that would transform teaching somehow. By the time the CD-ROMs were ready, they were obsolete – both technologically and content-wise – and they were so narrow and limited as to be a completely pointless exercise. But the foundations that paid for them felt like they had made the world a better place. At the same time while the dinosaurs of the marketplace in the late 1990?s were in a feeding frenzy on well-intentioned grant money, smart clever folks were building a whole new industry – that was sadly under-financed and took years to develop and only found its stride when the technologies were commercialized and we had to buy them back from those innovators.”
REFLECTION
While I am completely ranting here – the problem is difficult to solve. There has been almost no investment in the building of a re-mixable format for OER materials. IMS Common Cartridge is the best we have but it needs a lot more investment in both the specification and tools to support the specification fully.
The Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Sakai, Jenzabar, etc) are doing real investment and that is great and it will lead to real progress in time – but I wish that we could see some grant/foundation investment into building a real remixable learning content ecosystem that empowers teachers instead of just pre-buying a lot of useless material for them using government money.
But it is hard. And if there is a desire to spend 2 billion dollars in a hurry, then the only easy strategy is to give it to well-established organizations with large staffs and accept what you get back from them. I just wish that a tiny bit of the money would go to actually solving the problem that needs solving instead of just blowing the money on ighly-publicized projects to show that “our hearts are in the right place”.
I might wonder out loud whether 2 billion dollars of investment in the wrong thing is “better than no investment at all”. If the goal is to make more jobs – then poorly directed spending is better than no spending at all. But a sad downside of giving the money to the wrong folks is that it “blesses” the wrong approach and it makes it even harder for the folks who know what to do and how to do it to get their work done. Because of so much money flowing in the “conventional but wrong-headed” direction, it sends a message that anyone who might think counter to that direction is “wrong”. So innovation is squashed by conformity.
Oops – I am ranting again. I will stop now – and please don’t mention the “alles uber analytics” craze that is sweeping the misguided funding agencies right now. I have some work to get done this morning…
Chuck.
Serious question for you… In what way is SCORM based stuff less editable than CC based stuff? I get that Flash based content lacks the underlying .fla’s. I get that PDFs are generally uneditable. But SCORM stuff? The SCORM piece is always javascript based. The packaging? XML, just like IMSCC.
True, many of the tools that publish to SCORM due so using technologies that are uneditable (Flash), but that can’t be pinned to SCORM itself, can it?
There’s plenty of good discussion about whether a single standard should be specified, I get that piece. But I think the attacks on SCORM are actually unfounded. We can argue the minutiae of the differences between IMSCC, SCORM, AICC, and others, but I don’t think they’re the real story here.
Tim Martin
Tim, I take your point. And in a sense that is why I say at a high level, there is no good solution.
Most SCORM tools and SCORM authors do not build SCORM objects to be editable. Usually there are in some XML or other format inside of an editing tool (like SoftChalk) and then they do a “Save As SCORM”. These “Save As SCORM” objects are highly specialized, deeply interlinked with tons of Javascript that is not a standard, not interoperable, very brittle, and impossible for the end-user to edit – they are a SCO even though they are a ZIP.
On the other hand, IMS Common Cartridge support in Blackboard makes it so you import an IMS Common Cartridge, use it, hack on it, teach with it and when you are done you re-save your modified information as a cartridge that can be imported into Desire2Learn or Moodle. That is damn sweet. (Thanks Ray H. and John B. for that awesome example).
So while I take your point that this is not about the standards, it is more about the software and the way that software chooses to interpret the standards, it is undeniable that IMS Common Cartridge was designed from the ground up as a re-mixable format an the first products in the marketplace that implement IMS CC deliver on the “teacher-remixable” use case whereas SCORM has been around forever and there are no products that demonstrate the “teacher-remix” use case.
We are seeing LMS systems slowly adopting IMS CC as a solid format for import, export and exchange of *courses*. Why is it while SCORM has been around for a very long time and LMS systems have never seen SCORM as the natural exchange format for courses? Because SCORM was designed for a marketplace where publishers and instructional designers *make content* and teachers use that content as a solid unit. And SCORM is *very successful* in that space and has reached near universal adoption in the publish/play space.
I am ranting less about SCORM technically than I am against technologies that do not empower teachers to be part of the creative process of teaching. I am ranting about the government and foundations giving money to “professional content makers”, because they are not creative enough to think about ways to actually empower teachers to help themselves make, use, and adapt OER.
I am not suggesting that IMS CC in its current form is 100% ready for this task – but at least it has shown flashes of brilliance in this space in the short time it has been around. There is a *ton* of work yet to do. I would rather see investments into a technology ecosystem that make OER production and movement feel natural to teachers. If I had the money, I would invest it in making LMS’s better able to consume and produce interoperable content and I would build open source desktop applications to consume and produce interoperable content and I would build giant server farms to let teachers exchange their content artifacts. That is what it will take to build an “ecology of teacher empowerment”. We need a YouTube for courses. We need something that the end-users can participate in – like Wikipedia instead of trying to pay the experts to be more responsive when building yet another closed “Encyclopedia Britannia” – except this time on the web.
By the way, I have no issue with scorm.com – what you are doing is wonderful – you are making it so everyone can get SCORM to work with their LMS systems – you are doing good work to make sure that whatever valuable SCORM content is laying around can at least be played – even though it took taking the SCORM player out of LMS systems to accomplish real interoperability. I was very happy to see the relationship with Blackboard because that will make SCORM better for teachers. And I think that there is a scenario where IMS CC + IMS LTI + SCORM are a magnificent combination.
So this is not about one standard versus another. It is about moving to a model where teachers are empowered.
Thanks for taking the time to lay out the details. I read your reply just as I was posting this: http://scorm.com/blog/2011/01/obamas-award-and-misplaced-vitriol/ in which you and I sound more similar than different.
The standards we both work with regularly need to serve the people (learners, teachers, administrators) rather than being the story themselves. In my ideal world, we could move past the political competition between the standards to a place where they function well together and support each other. Given that the standards themselves aren’t here to make money, that should be an attainable goal, right?
Jano, cnx.org is one of the best examples we have of remixable content. It gets a lot of it right – but it is simply too hard to use for the average teacher. I wish that some foundation or other funding source would see fit to make additional investments in cnx.org to allow them to invest in making it easier to use. I think that what the world needs is an open source SoftChalk-like platform that allows desktop editing of content with something like cnx.org to serve it up, and do revision tracking, format conversation, on-demand printing, etc. Editing content on the web is simply too painful to scale beyond the truly dedicated.