Tag Archives: OER

NROC Focus Group

League of Innovations 2011, Mathematics, MathXL, Professional Development, Videos,

I was invited to be part of a focus group of 12 college educators to view and discuss developmental OER math materials being developed by National Repository of Online Courses. They are an arm of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.

The Gates Foundation is providing funding to them to develop developmental math materials specifically for disadvantaged students. NROC has received $5 million from Gates and $1 million from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop online and hybrid materials. The goal is to increase number of financially disadvantaged students that pass developmental math. The target group are is those between 18 and 80 (average age 28) who who have failed math at least once. The project approach is to develop new educational interventions for national distribution and sustainability.

According to their website,

NROC content is distributed free-of-charge to students and teachers at public websites including HippoCampus. Institutions wishing to use NROC content are invited to join a fee-based membership organization, the NROC Network. Organizations serving disadvantaged students can become members of the NROC Network at no cost. http://www.montereyinstitute.org/nroc/nroc.html

Colleges wanting to use the materials in their LMS would need to join the NROC Network. However, we were told the materials will be freely available as standalone modules throught the hippocampus.org website.

The materials I saw demoed were in a Moodle environment, but their plan is support a number of platforms. The materials were presented in multimedia and text formats. The videos were in Flash format and plans are to include closed captioning. The latter has now been mandated for all educational videos available in the state of California and likely soon in the rest of the USA. They have also partnered with the KahnAcademy.org which has tens of thousands of video lessons available in YouTube format. The materials ranging from basic arithmetic through statistics will be released later this year and the next.

I came away favourably impressed. However, the missing piece is linkage to an assessment tool in a pre, post and unit test format that helps create ‘learnable’ moments for students. I like the way Pearson’s MathXL can make resources available to learners for each question and each concept. I don’t find the materials Pearson provides particularly helpful. The best of both worlds would be to link these kind of OER materials to an assessment tool like MathXL.

Washington’s Open Course Library

League of Innovations 2011, Professional Development

Cable Green led a round table discussion on Washington State’s initiative to lower textbook costs. What is driving this initiative? Textbook debt has surpassed credit card debt in the USA with $12 billion dollars a year spent on textbooks in the USA.

The confluence of Creative Commons licenses and the dropping price of computers is behind this initiative to share resources. There is a need for a cultural shift from ‘not invented here’ to ‘what resources can we collaborate on’. A conversation about a cultural change that encourages sharing is critical. Washington State has begun this process with their highest enrolled courses, the general ones.

All of their materials are ADA compliant, including videos. YouTube has a beta that will automatically do the closed captions that will soon be required by all states.. Anyone who receives state grants for curriculum development has to agree to a Creative Commons Attribution license. It is important to think in modules rather than complete courses.

All of the curriculum content has a Creative Commons Attribution only license and then goes into the Connexions repository hosted by Rice. Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, and so on. Anyone may view or contribute. Authors create and collaborate. Instructors rapidly build and share custom collections.
Learners find and explore content.

More information is available in the Washington State Strategic Technology Plan is the product of an 18-month analysis conducted by the Technology Transformation Task Force of the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges for the purpose of creating a roadmap for how our system needs to leverage 21st Century technologies to support student achievement.

See also the http://www.oercommons.org/ and http://opencourselibrary.wikispaces.com/.

Soft Chalk is cool

League of Innovations 2011, Professional Development, , ,

Just came away from a demo of Soft Chalk. What a cool product! It looks like it will facilitate online OER content development and delivery including online testing.

In the demo I saw, it appeared to address all the concerns I have about moving freely available OER content into an online environment. It allows you to copy and paste properly formated text and graphics from your existing Word based curriculum into its enviroment to create a web page or series of web pages you can upload into your LMS or your own website. It also has a quiz tool that can allows you to insert questions in your content or act as a stand alone quiz.

I have a 30 day trial version that I look forward to playing with when I get home.

Smart Math: Redesigned Developmental Mathematics

League of Innovations 2011, Professional Development, ,

This was an update to a session I attended last June. These folks use the Pearson’s MathXL system that I use for my math online and blended sections and use it in a similar competency based approach. They have increased their retention rate by 14% and success rate by 44%. Details at www.Jscc.edu/smart-math.

I am interested in seeing if it is possible to make a link between this concept and OER. It appears that this could be a matter of negotiation with the publisher. These folks have developed their own materials for use with MathXL. They have also negotiated a two year license for each student. The cost odd this is $100 which includes a printed version of the locally developed materials. This has reduced the cost per student. So the next thing to explore is whether the textbook publisher is willing to work with OER materials.

UPDATE: I did talk with a Pearson rep here, but she just referred me to our local textbook rep. I’m now on my third one in as many years, so am not sure how much help I will have there.

So, I’m going to head over to the Soft Chalk booth and talk with them. They may be the folks who can connect the dots between OER and an online environment that includes testing.

Open educational resources: Standards for public, communal, sustainable and systematic change

League of Innovations 2011, Professional Development,

Joanne Munroe from Tacoma Community College presented on technical and educational challenges inherent in developing and sustaining open educational resources (OER) What are these?

These are digitized materials offered freely and openly for Educators and students to use and re-use for teaching learning and research. Cable Green

They are made available under a Creative Commons Share and Share Alike copyright license. The materials can include textbooks, learning objects, library resources, LMS, faculty training, research databases and even free courses.

The idea is that the more we share, the better it will be for students and educators.

Some resources

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. See oerconsortium.org. Also includes Open Courseware Consortium. Another repository is available at opencourselibrary.wikispaces.com which is based in Washington State. British Columbia has a similar repository at solr.bccampus.ca.