What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?
The OLNet project (www.olnet.org) is assembling a list of the key challenges facing to Open Educational Resources. They ask the question, “What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?” in their blog post at http://olnet.org/node/639
This is my response.
I think that the single largest challenge in OER is the complete lack of a standardized interchange format and free/open software to create, manage, edit, and remix open educational content.
Until we have rich and powerful editing tools in the hands of the people creating the content, we will never reach “escape velocity” in the OER space. We will continue to pay large sums of money to accumulate large repositories of expensively gathered/produced materials that are uneditable.
We need tools that allow teachers to manage their materials in a way that will enhance their teaching as they teach and then as a trivial side effect, produce high-quality reusable and editable content.
Once we accomplish this a repository has a format for its artifacts and many repositories exist (i.e. like YouTube, uStream , Vimeo, etc etc) then we have the ability to actually make OER part of the teaching cycle rather than something we do long after the teaching cycle is complete.
This is a challenging task and will require significant sustained effort. There are four formats that come to mind that might serve as OER exchange: (a) SCORM, (b) IMS Common Cartridge, (c) Connexions CNXML, and (d) PowerPoint.
I add PowerPoint because of the four, it is the only one that does a really good job of remixing. While everyone ridicules PowerPoint, you must admit that it is nice to be able to send a complex, structured content collection to virtually anyone on the planet and know that they can read it, edit it and convert it to a number of useful formats. It is not because PowerPoint is an amazingly elegant file format, it is simply because we all have software to read and edit the format on our computers.
Lets briefly critique the other formats and their shortcomings.
SCORM – This format is aimed at instructional design, not teaching – it is great for training but not so good for teaching. The problem is less the file format and more the ecosystem of products aimed at a training centered market that uses a write-once run without modifications pattern. Also as more advanced features of SCORM are used, the resulting packages are less and less interoperable.
IMS Common Cartridge – IMS CC understands teaching and is designed to allow remixing, but since it is focused on maintaining interoperability of content, it is rather conservative in its scope. It is expanding its scope slowly but it needs to speed up if it is to become a real OER format that teachers would author their original courses in IMS CC. Also there are no good free open source tools that read and write IMS CC. CLosed source tools are better than nothing, but leave innovation in the hands of the software owners.
Connexions CNXML – This is a good start as a format, but it is far too wrapped up in the specialized server code developed by Connexions. Also, the CNXML is a little too focused on book-style resources and sequential ordering. CNXML would need to evolve to be able to represent the wider ranger of interoperable OER materials. I wish Connexions would be funded to start over and build a portable desktop application for authoring and then put a much simpler server infrastructure behind it rather than putting all the rich capabilities in their server software.
PowerPoint – rocks but its pedagogy is a bit limiting.
Software
What would the software look like? Frankly the closest I have seen to the right software is SoftChalk (www.softchalk.com). It is a word-processor like interface, uses its own internal format, but can export to SCORM, IMSCC, HTML and many other formats.
The weakness of SoftChalk is that it is commercial and as such its requirements are driven by what sells. And OER is not a significant enough marketplace yet to cause commercial product roadmaps to bend in the right direction.
So I think we need to write our own.
Conclusion
Building such a format and software to support the format would take an amazing leap of faith. It would take millions of pounds/euros/dollars to jump-start such a project to the point that it worked well enough to build a self-sustaining community of users and developers who could maintain and innovate in the space.
Given that all the funding seems to be going to building another repository or analyzing usage logs, it is not likely this will ever get funded. But that is the nice thing about grand challenges – they stay grand.
P.S. The second biggest problem is the ability to link content together around learning objects like Khan Academy and enable highly dynamic learning paths through content with great tracking. Maybe the other great challenge is an open, extensible version of Khan Academy.
P.P.S. The third biggest challenge is to have a learning management system that allows for the dynamic formation of cohorts of learning around web content. Such a system needs to have a light touch UI-wise and be easy to figure out. My favorite example here is Edmodo – but again, closed, proprietary, and with an intent to make money off its captive customers. So again, we need to write our own open extensible Edmodo.
Hi Chuck – I work on OLnet and wrote the draft list. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed set of reflections… perhaps you’d consider adding them to the OLnet Evidence Hub as claims/solutions/challenges. (The url is http://ci.olnet.org.) If you’d like some tips on using the site, do let me know!
I inadvertently deleted a great comment from Bryan Ollendyke at Penn State.
http://btopro.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/creating-a-distributed-oer-app-store/
He makes a case for a network of Drupal servers for OER content.
I think that a problem with the current OER movements is that they have required repurposing of materials. In ELMS I’m trying to build assets that are somewhat self aware as to where they can be posted. ELMS has a setting for OER or Private course, and the ability to quickly copy and deploy courses. Between these two pieces of functionality one could:
1. Write a course for the classroom up-front
2. Then Duplicate the course after launch, remove a lot of material and mark it OER.
In the future we hope to be able to have assets automatically remove themselves and place a reference to where they came from.
As for the post referenced about the OER app store, I think the solution is a distributed network of systems. Instead of the approaches I’ve seen to date where OER material is silo’ed, allow it to simply be listed at various hub sites (similar to a oer.umich.edu or oer.psu.edu type approach) but the content lives with the content creators. Theses hubs can be fed the location of OER materials daily to keep them fresh, yet not limit the creators of these materials from developing in their local environments (whether at the college or on a home server).
I really like your post and find it funny that we both wrote about similar topics on the same day :). I love what Khan Academy has done and think that a lightweight enough, connected series of systems can create vast learning networks; enabling the individual to have their own {my} Academy type of resource generator similar to Khan.
By building off of Drupal instead of established management systems for learning, we have the best (imho) system development framework and can tap into the development resources of countless other projects on the web instead of just those for education. Everything is excessively framework’ed too from a developer perspective yet simple to use for the end user. The current stable version doesn’t have what’s talked about in my post but I should have a new version out the door in the next few weeks.
Bryan, I love your ideas. But Drupal is the weak link. Drupal represents itself as a “framework” that can be used to build applications. Sadly this is not the case. Drupal is a moving target where bright people like yourself fork off the latest trunk tweaks to create some cool thing that is frankly obsolete before it reaches production. Your comment ends with a direct reference to the flaws of Drupal: ” The current stable version doesn’t have what’s talked about in my post but I should have a new version out the door in the next few weeks.” Sadly that is the story of Drupal (Plone, Joomla, etc etc) writ large. Drupal nerds can handle (and enjoy) the endless hacking in the core but end users cannot. Desktop applications have a lifecycle that end users can handle.
I would love to build an LMS on top of Drupal and take advantage of its built-in capabilities. But Drupal will be forever true to meeting the needs of departmental web sites that are happy with the “fork, freeze, use, feel constrained, complain, throw away and start over three years latter” release pattern that is the Drupal way.
You might be better off starting with Moodle and forking it. Not that I am suggesting it – because the Moodle code base has its own challenges (as does Sakai) – but at least with Moodle, its core purpose is teaching and learning. But then you would look at Moodle and think, “this is way too complex – I want something simple”. And then you would go off and build something simple on Drupal and then your users would start asking you for features so they can compete with Moodle, and then you would add those features, and those features would not be elegantly represented in Drupal’s data model so you would start hacking Drupal more and more and using PHP instead. If you had enough funding / time / friends to meet a set of features that would make your system interesting, by then your code would be an ugly mess and you would want to throw it out and rewrite it from scratch getting rid of Drupal which turned out to only solve about 10% of the real, hard problems your customers demand. It will be ELMS 2.0 and even then you won’t be completely happy – so a few years later, you rewrite it again using AJAX and JQuery and call it ELMS 3.0. Aaargh – it is a vicious circle.
This is why I fall back to interoperability protocols and formats and propose a desktop application rather than yet another server application. We need to create an ecosystem – not create the one true product to unify them all. There are *lots* of server solutions out there and they all come up short after MILLIONS of dollars/pounds/euros of investment.
If you want to see the future of your project if it is successful, take a look at this web site:
http://www.lon-capa.org/
http://www.lon-capa.org/whois.html
http://www.lon-capa.org/conferences.html
http://www.lon-capa.org/presentations/handout.pdf
This is a great architecture and frankly a profound vision of the future of learning management systems from *1999*. I would guess that already it has far more well-thought-out code in production that you have even begun to imagine. But it is so tiny that it hardly has any impact and if you look at the SVN – the last commits are 10 years old and some of the core documents are over ten years old.
What is the reason that this project is on the side-track of the marketplace on a one-way ticket to Palookaville? Because it is a point solution and refused to work with the rest of the marketplace, claiming that it was somehow so much better than everything else that they were going to play their hand as a competitive alternative for teachers. They went for the win-lose because they thought they had the strongest hand.
Think how far we would be if back in 1999 we invested our energy in building interoperable protocols and data formats for distributed learning instead of everyone trying to go for the win. Ah well better twelve years late than never.
I’m not sure you’re using the same Drupal that I use. I don’t hack core or anything else for that matter as that leads to the unsustainability you refer to. By utilizing the APIs (at my level) I can create user experiences (at the ID and instructor and student) level that are of a much higher quality then I felt I could have with Moodle or any other system. There are archetypal notions within Drupal that site builders use on a day to day basis which directly improve the technology that I need to use and understand. In the 4 years that we’ve been using Drupal this abstraction of context (education) from technical framework (build a website) has only increased the rate at which we develop the platform.
“You might be better off starting with Moodle and forking it” — Now I have a forked platform, this serves no one’s interests. The notion that Moodle is complex and I’d want something simple also seems a bit misplaced. I’ve already caught my share of flack from the Moodle community for statements I’ve made in the past so I won’t go there.
“so a few years later, you rewrite it again using AJAX and JQuery” — We have very little code that we have to rewrite upon upgrade thanks to following “the drupal way” and developing in collaboration with a massive community of contributors. I already write using ajax and jquery and all the best practices that can be verified in an automated way as seen here: http://drupal.org/project/coder
Much of Penn State is using either ELMS or Drupal for course content management and have enjoyed being able to manage content in a much simpler manner. Projects that ELMS has contributed back to the Drupal community (such as outline designer — http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer ) have over 500 systems with it installed. This provides more eyes on the code and has lead to many improvements being given back to the education platform in our course creation process that could never have come from a community focused only on the needs of education.
I am creating an ecosystem, (http://elearning.psu.edu/elearning/creating-features-ecosystem-through-kit) it’s just not one that educators need to understand though it will directly impact and improve their learning experiences. Functionality can be shared cross-Drupal platforms using a Features / Kit based development approach. Meaning that
http://elms.psu.edu/
http://openatrium.com/
http://language-corner.org/
http://openscholar.harvard.edu/
http://eduglu.com/
can all share functionality at a configuration level as well as code layer.
I’m also not entirely sure as to why you assume that I haven’t thought out my code / methods well: “I would guess that already it has far more well-thought-out code in production that you have even begun to imagine.” but everyone is entitled to their opinion. I haven’t been at this game as long as others but that’s also probably why I have as much determination to change the world and irrational dedication to doing so.
At the end of the day, ELMS is a platform to meet my unit’s needs, as well as many others at our university. We’re happy with it, others are happy with it and hopefully once the next version comes out more will start to see what the grand-vision is for the platform.
Millions of dollars not required. Massive development cycles not required.
‘The current stable version doesn’t have what’s talked about in my post but I should have a new version out the door in the next few weeks.’ refers to the latest version of Bryan’s eLMS system.. not Drupal.
Eric
Good post.
I’d really like to see a new, lightweight, hacker-friendly interchange format that builds on existing and nascent standards like ActivityStreams and HTML5 (this gives you a generic activity model, as well as all the basic content stuff; from basic text to video, to embedded metadata), and then to in turn build (or more likely adapt) open source editors on top of that foundation.
May I mention the University of Zurich’s project (and IMS Learning Impact Award winner :-) “eLML” (the eLesson Markup Language, see http://www.elml.org)? This XML language is similar to CNXML but its core structure is based on a pedagogical model and the focus of the structure is eLearning. There is a standalone editor, there are converters to create IMS Content Package or SCORM, PDF, ODF and ePub for eBooks and other tools available (everything open source).
What eLML lacks is the “remixing” part you mention. I also think this is a problem since I also haven’t seen any tool that allows easy remixing of content (besides PowerPoint, as you mention, but slides are what is commonly understood as eLearning). There was a project called “Structure Content Editor for OER” where Connections and many others were participating, but unfortunately the project is (to my knowledge) not active anymore since the project author stepped out:
http://wikieducator.org/Funding_proposals/Structured_content_editor_for_OERs
Hopefully someone will soon pick up this idea and start something similar. Why not IMS?
Bryan, Thanks for the comment and I certainly did not mean to criticize your code nor its adoption. My criticism and the use of Lon-CAPA as the example is simply meant to point out the futility of the approach that is, “My product is so great that it will be the one true solution and unify all the approaches in the world and bring about peace and OER interoperability in our time using my super-awesome server software”. Your product may be great and some folks might absolutely love it – that is cool. But you represent 0.001% of the real marketplace and if the way your product solves OER problems is that we all need to adopt it for all teaching and learning and then using the cleverness built into your product, we solve the problems of remixing the OER content that is in your product. It is a long way from a 0.001% market share to a 100% market share. Lon-CAPA has been in the marketplace for well over 10 years with a technically very clever solution and still sits at 0.01% market share.
The problem of Lon-CAPA is not its design, cleverness, implementation, code reliability, architecture elegance, code quality, performance, or any other attribute of the software itself. The problem was Lon-CAPA’s decision to “go it alone” and try to corner market share by keeping all the magic bits to themselves. To access their clever capabilities the only way was to convert to Lon-CAPA.
I know this from experience with a project that was funded with millions of dollars over a long time with lots of staff and at the end we ended up with a 2% market share worldwide. If I look at the long term impact of Sakai in the real world in the real market, its push of the mainstream vendors towards openness and the push of the marketplace towards standards like Tools Interoperability and Common Cartridge will ultimately affect all users regardless of the learning solution they choose. Changing the marketplace will be the long-term impact of Sakai far more than the impact of Sakai as a software product.
Sakai initially had a stated goal of making OER more interoperable and making it easier to publish and interchange OER materials. But that goal simply never got much attention because we simply needed to add features to Sakai to make it a competitive LMS. I am disappointed that we did not improve OER interchange during the Sakai project but given the realities of trying to be a competitive LMS, I am not surprised.
Hi Chuck,
In the early days of IMS, when Mark Resmer was in charge, they were interested in developing working code as a part of their specification development process. At the time, they had contracted with a group of programmer/consultants called “Blackboard” who helped develop the code. However, some dues paying members who were in the business of developing commercial software for higher education were not too happy with this arrangement, so IMS decided to switch to developing XML-based specifications (mostly for data exchange with the exception of a few specs like tools interoperability).
I believe the IMS representatives from higher education were happy to see IMS in the business of developing code (I was the rep from UC Berkeley, and I know I was), but the software vendors were not. When Sakai came into being, my school decided to support Sakai but also decided to drop out of IMS as a dues paying member. This happened back around 2006, which was also the year I retired from UC Berkelely. As I recall, the powers-that-be at the unit I worked for at the time – Educational Technology Services – could more easily see the benefits of getting “free” software (Sakai) which could serve as a substitute for the commerical software we were using at the time (both Blackboard and WebCT). So, the decision was to: (1) drop out of IMS, (2) hire programmers to help develop Sakai, and (3) not buy the high end version of either Blackboard or WebCT and phase out the low end versions we had been using up until that point.
Even though I had been involved with IMS for many years (and co-chair of the IMS tech board for two), I was unable to convince my colleagues at Berkeley that IMS specifications (like Common Cartridge etc.) were of sufficient value to continue supporting the development of these specs. Not only were they unwilling to spend money to continue our membership in IMS, I couldn’t even get the powers-that-be at Berkeley (much less in the UC System as a whole) to commit to any of the specs coming out of IMS on a free-rider basis. Perhaps things have changed since I left Berkeley at the end of 2006. Since Berkeley is still a member of Sakai, it may well be that their Sakai reps advocate for or against various specs and standards, but they don’t work with IMS directly.
Most of my knowledge of how sakai works with respect to specs is second hand, but I do remember a converstion I had with one of programmers working on Sakai at Berkeley. At the time, I believe the programmers at Berkeley were working on a grade book for Sakai (I’m not sure if this ever came to fruition) so I asked him if it would make sense for IMS to come up with a grade book spec (at the time, I was co-chair of the IMS tech board so I thought I might encourage IMS to move in this direction). With a grade book spec, the various programmer teams within Sakai could produce code for a grade book, or sakai could import grade book code from open source developers working outside of Sakai. The programmer I was talking to looked at me like I was crazy. No, he said, the grade book software for Sakai will be “THE” Sakai gradebook. So it looked like Sakai would not develop around specification and standards, but would identify which programmer team would develop a specific piece of code, and then that code would become the defacto standard for Sakai. I should hasten to add that I don’t know if this was “official policy” at Sakai, and I’m making an inference from a sample size of one discussion. So, if I’ve made a mistake here I trust you will set me straight.
Bottom line, I would love to see groups like Sakai develop to IMS specs. And, it would also be great if someone would fund a testing program so IMS could say that a particular open implementation of code built to their specs actually complied with the spec (or, perhaps, some profile of the spec). And, once the specs have been shaken down by programmers to see if they do provide reasonable guides for developers, it would be great if the formal standards bodies (ISO, IEEE) would convert the specs into official standards. I know I’m being very naive and idealistic here, but I’ve always thought that someone should at least try to articulate what the ideal goals even though we all know we’ll have to make compromises to get anything done.
Give my best to the folks back at IMS and Sakai.
Fred
Fred, Great to hear from you. Lots of progress. Berkeley did build the grade book and it has been the Sakai grade book since 2005. After the grade book, Berkeley and Stanford worked closely with IMS and Oracle to develop a standard called IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) that was a follow-on to IMS Enterprise. That standard led to an integration in Sakai called the Course Management API. Sakai’s CM API and IMS LIS were co-engineered. PeopleSoft now supports IMS LIS and PeopleSoft can be connected in to Sakai and Blackboard and other LMS systems through LIS. Sakai was an early leader in the implementation of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability specification. Actually Sakai was late to the IMS Common Cartridge party, being one of the laggards – but now with Sakai 2.9 and its Lesson’s capability from Rutgers, Sakai has a nice IMS Common Cartridge Import.
So the state of standards and the market’s approach to standards is greatly improved over the past five years. My post is complaining not so much about lack of progress (which has been awesome to date), but instead my goal to push even further past where we are and put the right tools *in the hands of teachers* so they can directly manipulate content.
IMS is building a desktop tool to handle IMS Common Cartridge so that is a really good step in the right direction.
Chuck, I did a little googling around and found that the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) became a member of IMS back in 2008, one year after I left UC Berkeley (Jan 2007). Since you work for IMS, this is probably not news to you.
The year before I left Berkelely, I tried to persuade both the powers that be at Berkeley and at UCOP to become a member of IMS, but I found no takers. In fact, that was one of the main reasons I took early retirement. In any event, I see that David Ernst moved from the Cal State University (CSU) system (where he was the CSU rep on the IMS Board) to UCOP, which probably explains their change of heart one year later. It looks like Paul Weiss (also from UCOP) is now on the IMS technical board.
It would be interesting to see the extent to which Ernst and Weiss have been able to persuade the UC campuses to support IMS specs. If so, that would be great. Better late than never.