Selecting content for OpenLearn - an insider account

Guest Contribution from Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn

Note. This post arrived as a comment on Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?, but is published with Andy's agreement as a Guest Contribution.

Seb recently added to the debate as to whether the OU was publishing the right content on OpenLearn. In particular Seb said:

"I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be a major missed opportunity."

On my part I an unclear as to what he thinks the 'best stuff' is or should be and what is the 'missed opportunity'. As Director of OpenLearn I can take full responsibility for what we have published and explain why we have done so, and make some comments on what I think he might be getting at.

It was always part of the plan that we would publish material from our existing courses and not write new stuff nor significantly rework the existing stuff. It was about opening up some of the wares from across the breadth and depth of what we have that our students study and generally find very satifactory giving the OU's results in the National Student Satisfaction surveys. And it is about exposing such material to both learners and teachers to make what they want of it.

It was always recognised that this meant the selection of material would be variable and that taking it out of the full course context may not always make it as relevant to potential users. Having said that it is representative of what you get as a registered student although the delivery mode (mainly printed text) has been shifted (mainly print on screen). Ok it is not awash with whizzy animations or sexy video clips and on screen presentation could be better in some cases given that the original stuff was not designed for online presentation but users of OpenLearn are learning from it and finding it useful and are able to print it out in a nice format to recreate the print on text mode.

The first point here is that it is assumed that online teaching material should not be like boring and 'pedestrian' print and should be snazzy, but this offers an opportunity to test that assumption out (and we are researching that issue).

The second point, is that if we had only gone for the snazzy stuff there are two implications: 1) it is not representative of OU material as they are now (though things may change) and 2) such snazzy stuff can be much harder for other teachers to reuse because it took so much specialist effort to produce in the first place and we also want to know how well people can reuse, rework and remix our stuff, and text is something more people can readily handle (this is another research area).

So there were compromises in the choice of content and our decisions veered towards selecting stuff to answer some basic questions about where we are at with what we provide students and how does that fare in an open environment. And in taking such an experimental perpetual beta approach rather than grand showcasing or vanity publishing of only our finest (whatever that may be) the bigger issues are not the choice of content but the open licensing and multiple formats we offer to enable as many people as possible to do things with it we had never thought about and it is great to see that is happening more and more and not just by the geeks amongst us.

So for me the choice of content is a side issue. Unless we grow a culture of sharing and reusing content, good, bad and indifferent then we will remain in our ivory towers doing our own thing, thinking ours is the best or better than someone else's and we are not looking at what works for learners. Current OpenLearn study units may not work with enough informal learners but a big part of this is finding out why if that is the case and what are the new or rediscovered pedagogies that we need to meet those needs.

Lastly, we do have material on OpenLearn from most of our top sellers as Seb put it but what we do not have yet (except for discontinued courses in the LabSpace) is the complete set of teaching materials from a course. Again, this was done for the reason that complete courses represent 100, 150, 300 or 600 study hours and so we decided that smaller samples would be better to try out first, but again we have them varying from 4 to 50 study hours so that we can evaluate the effects of the size of the Units with users.

So, I am still left wondering what Seb's comments really mean. We made some particular decisions and have to live with the consequences, but it is done in the spirit of active inqiry or action research and who knows, we may have to change tack and his comments may be proved right, but it will be on the basis of evidence gathered not a belief in knowing beforehand what will work best.

PS And I don't believe that what we are doing is sufficient to create that sharing and reuse culture I mention - that, rather than developing a website or choosing content, is the really tough stuff.

Andy Lane
Director of OpenLearn
a . b . lane AT open . ac . uk

Comments

[martin lindner]

An outsider's 2 cents:

An open environment/ecosystem should really be based on "content 2.0", that is microcontent designed for quick circulation, aggregation etc. This does not work well with old content heavy from Gutenberg, hierarchy, courses, education-as-social-gatekeeping, etc.

I recognize that we do not know yet how to transform "learning matter" into this different aggregate state, and that indeed is a question of creating a new sharing and reusing culture (McLuhan wrote about this in the 60's, by the way). But what could be done, is creating a layer of Web 2.0 microcontent items on top of traditional material. Lke having, for example, a Twitter post attached to some material, or some paragraph (or any other here and now Web 2.0 statement-event). So people could share and reuse metadata (including "memes" extracted from the "learning matter"), and the more heavy, pedestrian stuff is linked to it.

The Web works that way anyway, blogging works that way; this is the real background of the whole all-students-using-Wikipedia-not-reliable-sources discussion. You will not be able to change this (this *is* a cultural revolution already). So embrace it and make use of it.