Monday, December 02, 2002

Chronicle of HE Article about MIT's OpenCourseWare This article from CofHE's InfoTech section provides a helpful introduction to the OCW project, including some coverage of MIT's parallel dSpace and OKI projects. Mention is also made of predecessors of the OCW project at the Univ. of Texas's World Lecture Hall (http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture) and George Mason University's Syllabus Finder (http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi). No mention is made in the article of the many world-wide developments related to learning object repositories. This is interesting because the learning objects approach and the course materials approach represent different philosophies about providing open course resources; one is organized around small units that are reusable across many courses and the other is organized around one instructors' assemblage of a full course. There is overlap between the two approaches (since learning objects are often discipline-specific and since many full courses in OCW include small, extractable learning objects). In some ways, it's like comparing the components of a textbook with the full text; sometimes it's easier to find what you are looking for by searching for components, at other times it's easier to start with the full textbook and divide it up (of course a single textbook may not include the component that you are looking for and you may want to compare components). Another important consideration is how to organize the larger features of a course--that's something that OCW provides and that learning object repositories may not. Just looking at how an instructor at MIT organizes and presents a Software Engineering course would be of use to instructors teaching similar courses at other universities because many pedagogical questions are answered: how are topics ordered? what is included? what is omitted? what is emphasized? how much time is spent on different topics? what tools are used to facilitate understanding of certain topics? what assignments and tests are used? what are the organizing concepts or schemas of the course? It's also interesting to reflect on the findability/usability issue for instructors. In some ways it's easier to think about looking at a syllabus for a course or a complete set of course resources than it is to consider searching for learning objects. Professors are very familiar with examining syllabi from previous terms and with comparing textbooks; the notion of learning objects is less familiar and requires a different approach to thinking about organizing a course. Part of the value of the MIT OCW project is that it nests learning objects within the familiar context of an individual professor's course. 8:17:07 AM    COMMENT []