OpenEd: Week 5 Example Open Education Projects

These projects have in common that they share a big number of online courses to anyone with free use. Inside each site we can find many type materials like lectures notes, videos, demonstrations, etc and are classified by matters. Each one is supported by organizations and partners; the most referenced is The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. I think that all sites have a collaborative content production, between users, between teachers, and others, for example the MIT OCW has a workflow where some people modified the resource and other sites also have options to reuse their items to create a new item. Also all sites make a reference about free licenses like Creative Commons License and others. In addition, we can observe that the English language is the native language.

The things that differentiate them are:

• The topics of courses.
• The MIT translate their courses to other languages like Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese.
• The people who develop and publish the courses are different. For example, the final users from OpenLearn in LabSpace and Connexions can develop and publish a resource, but in the MIT the course or resources are developed by teachers and publish by core team (Production manager, Publication Manager, specialist, liaison).
• The Sustainability model. For example, the OpenLearn and MIT accept donations and others accept funds of sponsors, organizations and foundations (foundation, donation or endowment model), but other sites also uses segmentation model like NROC Network.

The “quality” could define in wide manner like how much a resource is good and correct. In the current time a debate exists about the quality of a resource because many people produce contents and publish them like teacher or alums, and others, now isn’t limited by only experts, therefore some contents could be erroneous. Some people say that the quality evaluation absence is a challenge for a wide acceptation in the future. For me, the quality is an important question for the open education projects survive, what happens whether doesn’t exist a quality minimums, how do we recognize a good and correct resource, all that would be very difficult. There are many projects witch experiment with different strategies to evaluate the quality, for example, the Wikipedia sometimes only permits the entry modification who are registered with a minimum of four days.

To finalize, I think that the “quality” makes the difference between “learning” resource (non-formal and informal learning) and “educational” resource (formal learning).

See this other weblog for more ideas, especially in “quality” definition. In Spain “quality” word has two words: “Calidad” y “Cualidad”

I do reference to “Calidad”, the high value of a resource and Emanuela Zibordi do reference to “Cualidad”, the characteristics of a good resource.

“Calidad”: Is the value of something.

“Cualidad”: Is the characteristics of something.