I’m reproducing here some conversation between Steve Carson and myself from the UNESCO IIEP forum on open content.
Steve Carson from MIT asked:
David,
In all of the projects discussed so far, there seems to be a tension between the desire to provide rich digital learning materials–which usually demand more complex technologies–and the desire to make learning materials as widely available as possible–which often demands much simpler technologies. The projects presented thus far each address both concerns, but with different levels of emphasis on each. Since your group has been involved in a number of projects, I’m wondering if you might share your experiences with these trade-offs (or if you see this as being a trade-off at all).
I replied:
Great question! This is a key question! In my answer I restrict myself to talking about the domain of open educational resources (that is, not commercial resources.)
There are people who have the desire to produce the rich materials you spoke of. And as you indicate, the richness of these materials is generally inversely proportional to their accessibility by users in the developing world. If our interest is in serving the developing world, should we discourage these people from creating and releasing these rich digital materials? Or should we encourage them to change their approach and start producing some other kind of materials?
As long as we’re relying on people to freely share their materials, I think we have to happily accept whatever they’re willing to share. I don’t think we can possibly afford to discourage anyone from sharing anything at this point.
I believe we must view the vast body of open educational resources as “content infrastructure.” By “content infrastructure” I mean that instead of thinking about open educational resources as being the educational opportunity we are trying to share with people (the end of our work), we should think about them as the basic resources necessary for doing our job (a means to the end of our work). A vast collection of open educational resources is, of course, the first milestone in our work, not the end of our work.
I think an analogy to open source software is useful here (I’ll use the Apache webserver as the example). Eric Raymond said that every good piece of software starts with a programmer “scratching his own itch.” I think what he meant is that what makes OSS great is that it is written by the person with the need. Not written in response to use cases or market data. And if the software meets the developer’s need, it will likely meet someone else’s. Apache is a piece of software that meets the need of its developers (and several other people). Originally it was written to run on Unix. But today, programmers have ported Apache to at least 15 platforms (http://www.mirrormonster.com/apache.org/httpd/binaries/).
I think we have to approach educational materials in this same way (and let others approach it in this way). You can’t create educational materials that function effectively in every single context any more than you can write software that runs on every single platform (no Java comments, please). I think we should focus on solving specific instructional problems, and make sure that our solution at least works for someone. Then other developers can “port” our materials to their “platform,” or in other words, other instructional designers can adapt our materials to solve local instructional problems.
This is why I like projects like OpenCourseWare and Connexions. These are materials designed by their users – faculty at MIT, Rice, USU, or other places - that they use themselves. We know they work somewhere for someone. That gives me confidence that I could “port” those materials to my “platform” and expect some success. It should give others that same confidence. Content is infrastructure, and as the OCWs and Connexions continue to come online, the next great wave of work for those of us interested in bringing educational opportunity to the developing world will focus on building instructional design capacity so that this content infrastructure can be successfully leveraged and utilized locally.
I think. =)