How Web 2.0 and Open APIs made it easy to create and share Open Educational Resources
Another post on Open Educational Resources. Last week I talked about the early days with the SIGOSEE project, seeking to build awareness of the possibilities of Open Educational Resources and Open Source in education and to start to change policy directions, especially at European Commission level.
In these early projects, we had three main lines of activity. The first was awareness about changing what Open educational Resources were and especially about Creative Commons Licenses. The second was talking with all manner of different stakeholders, including educational organisations and administration, developers and even the more enlightened publishers about the advantage of OERs and pushing for policy changes. But by far the most time consuming work was with practitioners, organising workshops to show them how they could produce Open Educational resources themselves.
And whilst primary school teachers were long used to developing their own learning materials, with the help of sticky back paper, glue, paint and the like, teachers in secondary schools and higher education were much more used to using bought in materials. True, the photocopier had replaced the Banda machines, and data projectors were well on the way to spelling redundancy for overhead projectors. But teachers had little or no experience in producing ICT based learning materials themselves.
With the value of hindsight is was the development of reasonably easy to use content creation applications and even more the advent of Web 2.0 which changed this situation. I can’t quite remember the different work flows we originally created but I think most involved using Open Office to make materials and then using various work arounds to somehow get them into the different VLEs in use at that time (I also seem to remember considerable debates about whether we should allow the use of proprietary software in our workflows).
Interestingly at that time we say standards and metadata as the key answer, especially to allow materials to be played in any Virtual Learning Environment. But it was Web 2.0 and Open APIs allowed not only easy content creation but provided easy means of distribution. Video was expensive and difficult even 10 or so years ago. Even if you had a powerful enough computer to edit and render raw video (I used to leave my computer running overnight to render 30 minutes videos) the issue was how to distribute it. Now with YouTube and a basic WordPress site anyone can make an distribute their own videos (and add a Creative Commons License). Ditto for photos, audio cartoons etc.
Over the last few years the emphasis has shifted from how to create and share Open Educational Resources to how to use them for teaching and learning. And whist there seems to be progress that issue is not yet overcome.
