Designing for innovation around OER
Published | March 2010 |
Journal | Journal of Interactive Media in Education |
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that designing collections of ‘closed’ educational resources (content and technologies) for use by specific student cohorts and collections of open educational resources for use by any ‘learner’ require different design approaches. Learning design for formal courses has been a research topic for over 10 years as the ever growing range of digital content and technologies has potentially offered new opportunities for constructing effective learning experiences, primarily through greater sharing and re-use of such content and technologies. While progress in adopting learning design by teaching practitioners has appeared slow so far, the advent of open educational resources (OER) has provided a substantive boost to such sharing activity and a subsequent need for employing learning design in practice. Nevertheless there appears to be a paradox in that learning design assumes a reasonably well known and well defined student audience with presumed learning needs and mediating technologies while OER are exposed to a multitude of potential learners, both formal and informal, with unknown learning needs and using diverse technologies. It can be argued that innovative designs for formal courses involve creating structured pathways through a mixture of existing and new content and activities using a mixture of media and technologies in the process. This type of ‘configurational’ design that blends together given items to meet a particular need, rather than designing something fully de novo is typical in many areas of work and not just teaching. Such designs work very well when there is a small set of users of the innovation or their use of the innovation is narrow. However many innovations in information, communication and computing technologies often have multiple types of users and many more layers of complexity. In these cases, rather than heavily pre-define an innovative solution just to meet certain user requirements, it is necessary to design for greater flexibility so as to allow the users to adapt their use of the innovative solution for their own requirements once it has been deployed. The use of such an ‘innofusion’ approach for OER is highlighted using the case study of OpenLearn (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn).Keywords | diffusion · innovation · learning design · Open Educational Resources · user requirements |
Language | en |
ISSN | 1365-893X |
Rights | by/3.0 |
URL | http://jime.open.ac.uk/article/2010-2/pdf |
Export options | BibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar |
AVAILABLE FILES
Viewed by 95 distinct readers
CLOUD COMMUNITY REVIEWS
The evaluations below represent the judgements of our readers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Cloud editors.
Click a star to be the first to rate this document
▶ POST A COMMENT
SIMILAR RECORDS
Diffusion and adoption of Open Educational Resources
Lane, Andy; van Dorp, Cornelis Adrianus
This paper reviews and reflects on institutional OER development practices along the dimensions and models of collaboration and innovation within communities and networks of practice, and provides insights as how to ...
Match: Lane, Andy; diffusion; Open Educational Resources
Squaring the open circle: resolving the iron triangle and the interaction equivalence theorem
Lane, Andy
A number of visual models have been proposed to help explain the interplay and interactions between specified components of higher education systems at different levels and to take account of emerging trends towards ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
Reflections on sustaining Open Educational Resources: an institutional case study
Lane, Andy
This paper reviews some of the literature on the sustainability of Open Educational Resources (OER) and what it has to say about successful or sustainable open content projects on the internet.
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
OpenLearn research report 2006-2008
McAndrew, Patrick; Santos, A.; Lane, Andy; Godwin, Stephen; et al.
This report takes the experience of OpenLearn over its two-years of operation to reflect on what it means to offer free resources and the issues that we have been able to explore and learn from. The structure of the ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
Re-invigorating openness at The Open University: The role of Open Educational Resources
Gourley, Brenda; Lane, Andy
This paper describes the internal motivations and external drivers that led The Open University UK to enter the field of Open Educational Resources through its institution‐wide OpenLearn initiative ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
Out of Africa: A typology for analysing open educational resources initiatives
Bateman, Peter; Lane, Andy; Moon, Bob
This paper describes how a typology was developed and used between 2008 and 2010 to investigate three different open educational resources (OER) initiatives in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The typology was first developed ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
Production of OER, a quest for efficiency
Schuwer, Robert; Wilson, Tina; van Valkenburg, Willem; Lane, Andy
In most initiatives to publish Open Educational Resources (OER), the production of OER is the activity with the highest costs. Based on literature and personal experiences a list of relevant characteristics of ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
Developing innovative systems for supportive open teaching practices in higher education
Lane, Andy
Openness has become a key feature in the discourse and practice of higher education in recent years as has its potential to drive innovation in teaching and learning practices. More often this discourse refers to the ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
A review of the role of national policy and institutional mission in European distance teaching universities with respect to widening participation in higher education study through open educational resources
Lane, Andy
The open educational resources (OER) movement is relatively new with few higher education institutions (HEIs) publishing or using them, and even fewer using them to widen engagement or participation in HE study. ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources
An emerging typology for analysing OER initiatives
Bateman, Peter; Lane, Andy; Moon, Robert
The investigation of OER initiatives requires rigorous appraisal based on theory as well as descriptions based on practice if we are to understand them and how they might be sustained. A robust typology or flexible ...
Match: Lane, Andy; Open Educational Resources