Living the Dream: Best Practices in OER Publication

Session Title: Living the Dream:  Best Practices in OER Publication

Presenter: Joel Thierstein, Executive Director, Connexions

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Time & Date: 2:30 P.M. - 3:15 P.M., Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Location: Rm. C150

Session Description: Developing a truly open education resource takes a tremendous amount of courage and discipline.  It takes courage to start.  It takes discipline to stay the course and see it through to success.  Over the past 10 years, OER has developed a series of best practices.  For those who are entering the OER community for the first time, these best practices can help ease the anxiety at the start and lead more quickly to success.

There are many ways of distributing content.  The reality is that if content is being shared to the greatest extent, the distribution architecture must maximize the number of distribution channels.  The following list of factors should be considered when selecting an educational distribution architecture for OER publication.

A.  Repurposable content
Making the content available to all, both technologically and legally, allows the entire universe of potential partners to engage. Content structure will also be addressed in this section.

B.  Capitalize on power of the community… both for vetting and adapting
Harnessing the power of the community has arguably been the most exciting phenomenon of the 21st century.  This section will discuss community based revision and customization and the use of low cost crowd sourcing for revision and updating content.

C.  Dynamic Endorsement capability
Because the system needs to be open to all in order to capitalize on the power of the community, a dynamic endorsement system needs to be in place.  If content can be vetted and endorsed by different individuals, groups and institutions, a system can be open and still function efficiently.

D.  Dynamic versioning system.
For the endorsement system to be truly dynamic, the version control system must allow the endorsement entity to have its endorsement track the content in multiple ways.  This section will discuss keeping track of updates and permanent versioning.

E.  Multiple distribution paths
Content should be available online, in a downloadable offline format, in a print format, and on mobile devices in order to fully service all possible users of the content.

F. Accessibility
The distribution platform should support, at minimum, the W3C accessibility standards.

G. Authoring and Collaboration
Authors should be able to upload documents from traditional content authoring tools like Word, Open Office, and LaTeX.  The distribution platform should provide authors with usage statistics and an offline space for authors to work collaboratively.

H.  Open Source
The platform should be open source.  Institutions participating in OER should be able to participate in a consortium and influence the direction of the platform?s development.

I.  Mature and Scalable
The platform should have a mature, stable software base and be scalable to support growing levels of content and user traffic.

J.  Institutional and/or Institutional System Customization
Institutions should be able to give their users a customized experience by allowing them to access the content through a unique institutional portal.

K.  Integration of Institutional Content
Institutions should be able to integrate proprietary institutional content with the open access content provided by this initiative.  One of the easiest ways to do that is to run the same platform at their institution.  This would allow information flow easily back and forth.  Thus, the platform must come in with the ability to run an instance separate from the more widely used version of the platform serving the main repository.

This paper/presentation will explore the theoretical basis for these considerations.  Along with the conceptual discussion, the paper/presentation will also explore practical examples of how these considerations can be addressed when starting an OER.