Comments on: DIY OpenCourseware Evaluation

By: Chris L

Chris L — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:26:29 +0000

And that’s not the most significant problem by any means. However, I don’t know that we should care about addressing it in the first place. Unlike traditional students, I would maintain that we can accept that motivation as a given. We aren’t in a position to *need* to motivate. If a student is resistant to the challenge, they can stop or find something else– we aren’t losing and neither are they.

An analogy would be publishing sheet music. Many publishers don’t choose to put in tablature or other things of simplified notation that make it easy for a certain kind of player on a certain kind of instrument to use. Their market isn’t that casual player, but someone who wants and needs the full expressiveness and subtlety of the more complete product.

But you don’t see them trying to motivate, entice, coerce, or persuade people to use their system in the way it sounds like you are talking about motivating potential users of an open education course. Those users are simply a different market.

I don’t see what we would lose if unmotivated students don’t use the materials, unlike learners in a classroom, where both parties are, in effect, punished. From a marketing standpoint having too-rich and too-demanding courses would probably be a good thing (in that perverse marketing way).

I suspect there are some ways to work on motivation– and from another angle, support– that might be more or less relevant for different courses. For instance, I haven’t anywhere been talking about the courses designed to comfort and prepare a user for the real thing on campus, in which case support and guidance are more critical…

By: carol

carol — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:06:43 +0000

One of our basic problems–as I see it–is finding a way to motivate community in an open courseware environment. I agree that learning community has potential for providing a better learning experience for independent learners. But as you observe, Chris, many students complain and even resent that type of challenge. In the classroom, we overcome resistance with the motivation of grades. With open courseware, we don’t have that leverage. That’s one element that makes our vision of open courseware so challenging.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:32:57 +0000

Another way of putting this is that CDE is not likely to be making materials that would be targeting Skip, so I don’t see it as a flaw that your research reflects those priorities (if the list of characteristics is useful to others, that’s good, but that’s not the meaty part of what you’ve done).

But that’s OK– almost no one is serving the audience we are thinking about; there are scores making the kind of thing Skip appears to be looking for.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:30:45 +0000

Buried in these questions is a lot of underlying philosophy. There are hundreds– maybe thousands– of places that are creating open ed resources that are not designed to create rich, end-to-end experiences and which do not challenge the learner, reinforce learning, and promote higher-order skills and abilities in ways that being part of a community can. I see nothing particularly interesting in providing resources for the hit-and-run, snatch-and-grab kind of learning/information access. For one thing, that’s a heck of a lot like corporate training, which is profoundly uninteresting to me! More importantly, it’s been done a lot and is being done still more by many others. I’m interested in providing something rich and deep for independent learners just as I provide that in the classroom. Skip’s objection, such as it is, is meaningless to me in this context just as it is irrelevant if a student voices that opinion in the face-to-face classroom.

There’s a lot of philosophy tangled up in here… why should I care if a student doesn’t want to be a part of a learning community any more than I should care if they do or don’t want exams, presentations, tests, or papers? It’s my experience that there is a sizable group of students that complain about– and even resent– being challenged in ways that I believe are fundamental to a quality learning experience and that ultimately benefit them. And what does one feel distinguishes an information resource from an educational one? Open materials are, so far, vastly focused on the former. Which stands to reason since it’s easier and it requires lower expectations all the way around. I was gratified to hear that the winds of change were blowing at the recent Open Ed conference w/r/t these very issues.

By: Skip Via

Skip Via — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:58:10 +0000

This is a terrific idea, Carol. I hope I didn’t create additional work for you, as I thought your original evaluation was thorough and thoughtful. But we don’t all hold the same values. If I felt like I had to be part of a learning community and that that community might hold me back or cause me to investigate questions that didn’t interest me, I’d probably look elsewhere.

I’d love to see a copy of the spreadsheet.