Tag Archive for 'design'

Major Updates to “Intro to Open Ed” RPG Syllabus

Published on December 3, 2008 in open content. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , .

So far the response to the redesign of the Introduction to Open Education course has been great (already coverage in the Chronicle and the syllabus has been online less than a week). There’s been good critical feedback as well; the newly revised syllabus has a completely revamped Grading section based on Lynn Taylor’s comments (for those of you who don’t know Lynn, he’s the Director of the Open High School of Utah and you’ll be getting to know him well in the years to come).

I sincerely wish I could do something with Stephen’s comment about how the early quests are rather dry, but hey – do you remember the training quests in Lineage (attacking a dummy-scarecrow thing until you’d successfully hit it 300 times or something)? Or those early levels in WoW when you spent mind-numbing hours gathering herbs and figuring out which creatures you could and couldn’t really attack? The attentive reader of the syllabus will notice that the Quests are roughly structured around Bloom’s taxonomy, and yes – those early quests do involve a lot of “remember” and “understand” initial skills and knowledge development that a person needs to be able to complete the more difficult tasks.

I’ve pulled out references to “oral exams” and moved all assignments back into the blogs in order to keep more of the content in a written, and more easily shared, format. This should add value both for the on-campus and distance participants.

Some readers have assumed that because the course is modeled after games like WoW that the course will take place in a completely online / virtual world. Not so. The BYU credit-earning crowd will be playing significant portions of the game face-to-face, making their experience more like that of an old-skool RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. However, I’ll work with distance participants in the course to choose a common environment for them to play the game in (play by IM? play by Twitter? play in Second Life?) so that we can all find each other.

I continue to love your feedback. Many thanks for the comments you’ve left and the emails you’ve sent so far… Please keep them coming!

Intro to Open Education – “The Game”

Published on November 26, 2008 in open content. 7 Comments Tags: , , .

Winter semester I’m teaching a new version of the Introduction to Open Education course here at BYU. I’m as excited for this course as I’ve ever been for any – partly because the course has been completely redesigned as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. From the Syllabus:

Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures – for talking the talk but failing to walking the walk. Setting positive examples is important for people in every field to do.

There are two ways to describe the design of this course, and both are equally valid. On the one hand, this course is a mix of direct skills instruction combined with project-based learning and collaborative problem solving. The course employs a progression of increasingly complex problems with supportive information, and requires students to synthesize hundreds of pages of literature, interview data, and their own design intuition to produce meaningful artifacts both individually and as part of highly inter-dependent teams. The idea of teach-reteach (characterized so well in Gong’s description of the Three Person Problem) is at the heart of the students’ day-to-day learning experiences.

On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student possesses.

One need not look very far to find indications that the genre is extremely effective in promoting informal learning – see the work of Constance Steinkuehler and John Seely Brown as examples. Despite the impressive work of Constance, JSB, and others, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever designed and implemented a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. In addition to helping students gain a working knowledge of the field of open education (i.e., knowledge they can actually put to work), this course is a design experiment exploring the effectiveness of running a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game.

Visit the syllabus to learn about the four character classes, the specifics of the quests, and other information. I’m still inserting links to some of the readings, but the course structure is complete and I would love any and all feedback (including negative feedback) on the course design.

The course will be open again this year, meaning anyone, anywhere is welcome to participate. And yes, I will print and mail completion certificates again for those who earn and want them. =)

The “Wiley Wiki Design”

Published on July 18, 2008 in open content. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

I probably would not have named this the ‘Wiley Wiki Design’, but when someone like Leigh names something after you, how do you refuse? =)

I’ve been meaning to write a little about this design I’ve been using for the last several years and how it has evolved, but recent proddings by Leigh, Teemu, and Bron have finally gotten me off the virtual starting line.

Since Fall 2004 I’ve been running my courses in the open via the wiki at OpenContent (course listing). In the theme of this blog, Iterating Toward Openness, these courses started “basically open” and have become more “completely open” (note more completely open, not actually completely open). What I mean is that the original courses had their syllabus and course content out from behind a password with permissions for people to edit. I was disappointed that, even when you put it in a wiki, students still don’t feel empowered to edit your syllabus. They had little trouble editing the online textbook I wrote for the course, though, which was great. And they all wrote their homework assignments on publicly readable blogs. In one of these early classes Stephen ran one of my student’s assignments in OLDaily, which brought the broader community into the conversation those students were having. Strangely enough, the next week all the students’ writing was longer and more thoughtful. Funny what the pressures of peer review will do… So we might say that these first iterations, the 2004-2006 period, were open in terms of their content and discussions, but only students at USU could really participate in the classes.

When I say that my design has evolved toward a more complete kind of openness, I mean that in 2007 I started trying to figure out how to open participation – meaning the assignment of a credit or credential for those who completed the course. The core components of the current design (used for my Fall 2007 Intro to Open Ed course) include:

  • Running everything in the open
  • Using an open wiki as the core delivery method and encouraging learner contribution to the core learning goals / outcomes, reading lists, educational materials, etc.
  • Using open blogs as the core writing outlet for weekly writing and encouraging broad community engagement in the writing, discussion, and feedback processes
  • Only using readings or other course materials that are freely available on the public internet
  • Accepting class members regardless of location or their admission status at my university
  • Offering multiple paths to credit through:
  • – - Normal channels for students at my university
  • – - Backchannels for students at other universities (I had good luck with people signing up for an independent study at their home university with a faculty member who agreed to accept the course grade I awarded at end of term – so students took my open course but received credit at their home university)
  • – - A certificate of completion which did not have any university credit attached (it was a traditional-looking certificate with the person’s name and my signature) but was still highly valued by several participants

So I’ve worked on opening access to the content, opening access to the discussions, opening access to materials used in the course, opening participation, and opening access to credit / certification. Obviously my course design isn’t perfect, but it’s healthy to stop and reflect occasionally, and assess the progress we make.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the core design is that several people seem to be moving in this direction with their designs. A list compiled by Leigh includes:

David: http://www.opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus

Teemu: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Composing_free_and_open_online_educational_resources

Leigh and Bron: http://wikieducator.org/Designing_for_flexible_learning_practice

Bron: http://wikieducator.org/Evaluation_of_eLearning_for_Best_Practice

I recently heard from Javed about a course inspired by the model that uses Ning instead of a wiki: http://infotechtools.ning.com/

And, of course, there is George and Stephen’s course coming up this fall: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/

Obviously, no design occurs in a vacuum, and there is a growing conversation about open education, and specifically ways to open access to participation, credits, or certification to people who are not enrolled in your university. So I wouldn’t take sole credit for any of these ideas, but perhaps their aggregation and actual implementation has been a contribution to the field. I hope it continues to inspire others to further open access to their courses.

After reflecting back somewhat, I find myself thinking more about the course I have coming up this fall, and wondering how I can open it further… What will the next cycle in the iteration toward openness look like?

Study Open Education at USU!

Published on May 3, 2007 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

As part of our recent application to establish a UNESCO Chair in Open Education at Utah State University, we’re creating an emphasis in Open Education in our PhD in Instructional Technology here. The emphasis is simply a sequence of electives that students will be able to choose from that will provide them with a stronger foundation in open education. I believe this will be something really special, and will help us attract even more passion and great talent into the department and the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, as well as enrolling students from outside our department.

This new emphasis applies to *you* as well, however, since we will (of create) these courses as open educational resources that anyone and everyone will be able to use. I’m also extremely excited to say that we will also offer something like a “certificate” program for people who would like to take the courses in a more formal way (at a distance) but don’t want to enroll in the PhD program for whatever reason (I certainly can’t imagine any reasons ;) ).

So my question to all of you is… if you could create a four or five course elective sequence in open education, what topics would you choose to teach? Here are some ideas for possible courses:

Introduction to Open Education
Introduces students to the history of the open education movement; important open education projects around the world; significant NGOs, Foundations, and other organizations involved in the open education movement; the writings of authors associated with open education; and legal issues related to the field. Representative readings include declarations and reports of the United Nations, UNESCO, and the OECD; overviews of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and One Laptop Per Child project, work by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; writings by Paulo Friere, John Dewey, Bekir Gur, Larry Lessig, and Katarina Tomasevski; copyright and licensing issues related to open education.

Overview of Issues in Rural Areas and the Developing World
An interdisciplinary course co-taught by several faculty (both inside and outside Utah State University). Representative topics include nutrition, literacy, agriculture, water, HIV, human trafficking, microfinance, and instructional technology. This is a service-oriented course in which student groups partner with individuals from villages or rural towns to understand specific local problems and perhaps contribute toward the creation of solutions.

Finding and Localizing Open Educational Resources
A hands-on course familiarizing students with ways of finding open educational resources and the software tools and instructional design techniques for adapting resources to meet local needs. Students will adapt and localize several increasingly complex open educational resources as part of the class. Representative topics include using Google; determining the quality of an existing open educational resource; working with HTML, video, and audio; translation; audience analysis.

Creating Open Educational Resources
A hands on course that builds on knowledge of software tools, instructional design techniques, and exemplary content taught in Finding and Localizing to teach students to build their own high quality open educational resources. Students will create and share several increasingly complex open educational resources as part of the class. Representative topics include deciding when education is an appropriate intervention, the systematic design of educational materials, technologies for sharing open educational resources with the world, and how to select an appropriate license.

What have I left out? Over-emphasized? For example, I already know I need a more international flavor to the readings in the first proposed course (I am at the Open University of Catalonia today beginning to work on this part of the problem). What kind of course would *you* want to take?

Educational Remixes

Published on March 8, 2007 in open content. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I recently challenged students in one of my classes to build some educational materials primarily from existing, openly licensed materials. The results are in and the work is crazy / excellent / inspiring:

Enjoy these!