OER1054 Workshop

Towards a Network of Content and Curriculum: Interoperability of OER

Brandon Muramatsu, Jeff Merriman, Vijay Kumar, MIT

Conference Theme: Open Educational Content, OER Design, OER Communities

Intended audience: OER repository developers, tools and services developers/projects. OER project managers OER content developers.

Background & rationale:
Our vision is to significantly ease the discovery and adoption of the widest range of on-line educational resources by educators and learners. We want to enable faculty and students to access the digital content that they need from any applications they choose. As a step toward realizing this vision we suggest the development of a Network for Content and Curriculum (NCC) to leverage and advance the interest and success around real-world interoperability efforts for achieving true openness across educational content and software in support of teaching and learning. The last fifteen years has witnessed a dramatic change in the ways curricular content is accessed. The Web has provided the potential for access to seemingly unlimited digital content. In the last ten years, there has been a significant increase in the development of organized collections of educational resources and repositories, in both open and proprietary formats. The new challenge is to more efficiently locate this content and use the most appropriate content in the appropriate contexts and curricula.

Main idea(s) to be explored:
Current and past experience with a variety of projects, including repository/collection development (including Connexions, MIT OCW, MERLOT and the U.S. National Science Digital Library), standards and specifications development (including IEEE Learning Technology Standards, IMS Content Packaging, O.K.I. Repository Spec.), as well as tools and services development, leads us to observe that:

• The educational resource landscape comprises numerous, developing and established projects that address different goals and audiences. These projects vary widely in the technical expertise and capabilities available to them.
• In general, interoperability & collaboration are seen as important, but rarely given due consideration or resources: When asked, everyone is “interested” in and understands the value of interoperability—in extending the reach of their projects and collaborating with others. However, very few projects set aside budget or development time to participate in interoperability efforts.
• Culture and language considerations are important. Through working with a wide range of projects, across diverse subject areas, interest levels and from multiple countries, we recognize the importance of being sensitive to cultural (sharing, openness, etc) and language considerations.

We propose a workshop to build upon prior work, with the attendees of OER 2010 (and participants in current JISC OER programmes).

Activities participants will engage in:

• General overview of why interoperability, and a network for content and curriculum can lead to the ability for faculty and students to access the digital content that they need from any applications they choose.
• Short presentations of how OER projects are already collaborating to enable access to content.
• Time to play with existing tools and examples—e.g., OER Commons and Folksemantic.com
• Facilitated discussion leading to the outcomes.

Intended outcomes:

• Discussion of readiness to engage in projects, and what interoperability means for conference attendees.
• Creation of a prioritized of issues and barriers in interoperability.
• Identification of possible approaches to improve interoperability and/or a roadmap to interoperability for attendee projects.
• Identify potential projects to improve the interoperability from pedagogic and/or technical perspectives.

Keywords: Interoperability, OER, Network for Content and Curriculum, NCC

References/URL:
Folksemantic.com: http://www.folksemantic.com/
OER Interoperability Sprint Report: http://www.mura.org/docs/cosl/OER-Sprint-2008-Status-Report.pdf