In fall of 2011, I took a new approach to the Project Management course I teach each year. I wanted my students to gain hands on experience managing a project, I wanted them to feel the pressure of hitting deliverables, I wanted them to feel the nausea of having things fall through, I wanted them to learn to navigate managing people, and most of all I wanted them to feel the joy of completing a piece of work that blesses people lives. So I asked my students to engage in a very large scale revise / remix project that would benefit them and many others.
We started with Project Management from Simple to Complex, originally written by Russell Darnall and John Preston and originally published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license by Flat World Knowledge. For the last two years now we’ve been revising and remixing away on Project Management for Instructional Designers (PM4ID). Here’s what we’ve done:
- Aligned each chapter with the relevant portions of the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) certification exam and the Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification exam, so that you can now use PM4ID to study for these exams,
- Removed generic examples like ‘You have to get 13,000 tons of concrete to Singapore by December 1’ and replaced these with examples from the instructional design field,
- Shot comprehensive video interviews with three experienced instructional design project managers that include stories and bits of wisdom on each of the book’s chapter topics and compiled text transcripts of each of the videos,
- Completed a word-for-word re-editing that improved the readability of the book,
- Created text-to-speech audio recordings of each chapter section,
- Replaced (c) photos throughout the book with CC licensed photos,
- Added a Glossary of key terms,
- Updated and modernized the ‘Technology Tools for Project Management’ portion of the book, and
- Created an automated process for scraping content from the live PM4ID site and converting the entire book into ePub, Kindle, PDF, and downloadable HTML formats nightly.
If this new textbook isn’t the best OER revise/remix ever, I’d like to know what is! Really. Leave links in the comments below.
In the same way that faculty around the world give students assignments to contribute to Wikipedia, I think it would be awesome if more faculty assigned students to localize /revise / remix CC licensed materials from Flat World Knowledge, CK12, OpenStax, and other OER authors and publishers. Each time I give this kind of assignment, I find that my students invest in their work at a completely different level and go far above and beyond what I ever imagined they could do. Now these students are co-authors on a book that is being used in programs across the US (and world? let me know if you’re using PM4ID in your class!) and have an incredible portfolio piece to showcase to future potential employers and their moms.
Congratulations to my IPT 682 students. You guys hit it out of the park!
Mom’s should be proud (and professors too). This is tremendous, both for what the students have created, the design+function+ usefulness of the site/book, and the model for open content and remixing.
A+
Despite all the talk around 21st Century learning skills, these kinds of projects will do more to help students succeed than any collection of learning outcome statements. Again Prof Wiley creates opportunities for students to learn, create/remix and share back. Awesome.