May 2008 — Open Source
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Content, Anyone?
MIT OpenCourseware program, which makes available free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from across MIT's entire curriculum. Even today, the idea is still more accepted in higher education than in the K-12 space, notes Amee Godwin, program director at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)."This concept is still really new," she says. "There has been a lot of excitement among people in higher education, and as more awareness is brought to it, I believe there will be an impact in K-12 as well."
ISKME teamed with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which funds efforts to solve the world's social and environmental problems, to create OER Commons, a wiki whose acronym stands for "Open Educational Resources." The site houses higher education and K-12 materials from educational institutions and partners worldwide. Some of the content isn't suitable for every educational institution in every location, but Godwin says the variety of materials available through OER Commons and wikis like it is astounding.
"There are certainly reasons to have books and pay for people with certain expertise," Godwin says. "But teaching and learning can happen so spontaneously, and educational platforms need to catch up and cater to that type of just-in-time learning."
Good content, she adds, is everywhere. Being able to "localize" the content for their own use is the biggest challenge instructors face. "There is a top-down way of categorizing content and we're looking at categorizing content from the bottom up, which is not how most instructors are used to thinking. If content is aligned to the state standards of one state, we could then empower people to say, 'This might match in my state as well. I could suggest this is appropriate to use.' For us, it's about making something adaptable to other standards, curriculum, learning needs, etc. All these things are being offered to tailor to instructors' needs as we enter this paradigm shift."
Standard textbooks don't have that flexibility, nor can they capture the essence of learning in a social, collaborative context, according to Sanford Forte, director of the California Open Source Textbook Project, which aims to reduce the amount of money spent on textbooks in the state by using open source content and alternative publishing methods.
"I don't see the difference between a content expert hired by a publishing company and one who agrees to work with other experts to create a textbook that meets educational standards and puts it on the web," Forte says. "That's a far more flexible piece of content than something that's put together in a static way and remains between the covers until the next edition comes along.
