iTunes U as an OER repository

I’m actually quite a supporter of iTunes U, even though people don’t like that you have to enter it via the iTunes client. iTunes client is free and the resources are downloadable. I watched a fantastic series on Justice, by Michael Sandel through iTunes U. Even though the client is proprietary, it is worth mentioning that the videos or podcasts have open standards, so you don’t even need the client once its downloaded, certainly not necessary to have an iPod or iPhone, as some mistakenly think.

I also worked on one of the Phase 2 OER projects, which had a ‘discoverabiliy’ focus. We recognised that most people want to search through google, so hit the SEO Ninjas sites to raise its Google profile. The problem with this is that unless the resources start to take a life of their own and people independently tweet on etc. then the SEO magic starts to lost some of its capability. Fine, say, if you work in a ‘marketplace’ where constant SEO marketing will maintain your page 1 discoverability, but OERs do not have a ‘hype’ cycle to them in most cases. By this I mean the short termism of ‘retweet’, ‘reblog’, ‘backlink’ that gives such good SEO results to start with (and best in conjunction with other possibly offline marketing campaigns) does not apply to OER in that the availability of the resource needs to be constantly high, regardless whether anyone has ‘backlinked’ to it this week.

And that’s why I perhaps have a soft spot for iTunes U as an OER repository. Its available, most people use it for their media management, its free for those who don’t, EVERYONE has heard of it, and the search will not degrade resources based on this weeks popularity. And as previously said it uses open standards and the content is downloadable, therefore transferrable into areas of little bandwidth via HDDs etc. My feeling is that TOTALLY ONLINE content, like Coursera or EdX, is great for the software developers and those in the centre keeping track of the stats, but not so for the areas of lesser bandwidth, arguably those who need the OER the most.
octel

xMOOCs, cMOOCs and what I might get from #octel

MOOC is a popular word buzzing around universities at the moment, and some people are talking about Udacity, Coursera, FutureLearn like they are going to be the be all and end all for higher education. Much of the content for these platforms is video, and there has been some notable one-off successes in terms of class size and retention rates, mainly in the states, backed up with venture capital.

Just to stop here:

the reduction of education to video clips of content concerns me as it seems like stage 1 in justifying the status quo of further elitism in the current system. "Let them eat cake..." or something like that... ('watch it on catchup')

There doesn't appear to be a lot of new pedagogy, for all the fuss, and the lack of a human teacher to help us understand or curate these 'assets' places more value on the 'asset' itself, which may or may not be good, discoverable, understandable, copyrightable, formatted etc.

So, we have these 'clips/ assets' interweaved with discussion forums, which for a long time has been the mainstay of distance teaching, or informal education. So again nothing new here.

So far.

Going back a little. The video heavy/ 'traditional model' MOOC (xMOOCs) have had the first say (Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity), made the first splash, but we must remember the story is at the beginning. I declared my concern above, not to condemn MOOCs totally as a conspiracy to increase HE elitism, but to make clear that arguments need to be made carefully, lest we drift in this direction.

What of all the discussion though? I have already declared my cynicism that 'there is something new' in the pedagogy of MOOCs, and 'normal' people have been learning skills online (autonomously driven, socially supported) through forums and communities since the 90's. The MOOC in this respect is a 'wrapper' around the informal conversations that were happening anyway, and this is where the ocTEL platform comes in. As an aggregator of hashtags across the web, uniting the monolithic communities that have supported each other for nearly a decade, and all out of a WP installation. Now that seems more like something new.

So this is what I hope to get out of ocTEL. More understanding of what the 'discussion' part of MOOC has to offer (cMOOC) and how the content and discussions are best archived and curated for my future reference.

And with some luck and a bit of magic, this will appear on the ocTEL website now!! :-)

#octel