Edited by Jonathan Turner, Friday, 11 Apr 2014, 07:06
The advantages and disadvantages of BIG VS LITTLE OER
Before discussing Weller’s ideas on this I will outline my own thoughts, based on my gut feeling and experience as an educator. I will do things this way so as to compare where I am with the ‘expert’ in the field rather than this being a note taking and regurgitating exercise.
My thoughts
- My gut reaction is that bottom up has to be good for creativity and academic freedom.
- It also allows us to become creators as teachers rather than consumers of what the experts feed us.
- I know a lot of educators who don’t really know their onions and the thought of anybody who wants to producing materials means there is a lot of scope for poor work.
Weller says
- He uses the long tail metaphor and this certainly seems valid, we can have a large number of specific courses that suit niche markets. This is particularly relevant to my field of language teaching where the dominant paradigm is for mass published materials to be consumed by a worldwide audience with little consideration for their particular needs.
- Little OER uses public platforms like You Tube which are low cost and available to everyone. I guess by extension they are less elitist because of this as well? Weller also describes the “likelihood of serendipitous encounters with university content” that using platforms like You Tube provides.
- He also points out that in little OER shareable content like Twitter streams can become educational content, as opposed to more formal ‘traditional’ types of content.
- He also talks about the agility of this type of approach quoting what Jonathan Zittrain (2008) refers to as ‘generativity’.
- Also interestingly he says that content production does have to be explicit, but can be a “by-product of normal operations”. By this he means that teachers can work on their course content, making presentations, or can be recording of tutorials they give anyway, or twitter feeds of whatever.
- These small chunks of content can also be more easily incorporated into other courses unlike the institutional MIT type approach where the content is much more rigid and extensive. What I would question about this is the time it would take to cherry pick from different sources and whether this would lead in a somewhat disjointed feel, so for example a 5 unit course where every unit had a different design because it used elements from different OER sources.
Week 9 Activity 11
The advantages and disadvantages of BIG VS LITTLE OER
Before discussing Weller’s ideas on this I will outline my own thoughts, based on my gut feeling and experience as an educator. I will do things this way so as to compare where I am with the ‘expert’ in the field rather than this being a note taking and regurgitating exercise.
My thoughts
- My gut reaction is that bottom up has to be good for creativity and academic freedom.
- It also allows us to become creators as teachers rather than consumers of what the experts feed us.
- I know a lot of educators who don’t really know their onions and the thought of anybody who wants to producing materials means there is a lot of scope for poor work.
Weller says
- He uses the long tail metaphor and this certainly seems valid, we can have a large number of specific courses that suit niche markets. This is particularly relevant to my field of language teaching where the dominant paradigm is for mass published materials to be consumed by a worldwide audience with little consideration for their particular needs.
- Little OER uses public platforms like You Tube which are low cost and available to everyone. I guess by extension they are less elitist because of this as well? Weller also describes the “likelihood of serendipitous encounters with university content” that using platforms like You Tube provides.
- He also points out that in little OER shareable content like Twitter streams can become educational content, as opposed to more formal ‘traditional’ types of content.
- He also talks about the agility of this type of approach quoting what Jonathan Zittrain (2008) refers to as ‘generativity’.
- Also interestingly he says that content production does have to be explicit, but can be a “by-product of normal operations”. By this he means that teachers can work on their course content, making presentations, or can be recording of tutorials they give anyway, or twitter feeds of whatever.
- These small chunks of content can also be more easily incorporated into other courses unlike the institutional MIT type approach where the content is much more rigid and extensive. What I would question about this is the time it would take to cherry pick from different sources and whether this would lead in a somewhat disjointed feel, so for example a 5 unit course where every unit had a different design because it used elements from different OER sources.