Designing OER for Learning Data

Open Education 2016

Author: Tom Caswell, Learning Objects, United States

As we look to future opportunities for OER, it is clear that we need to start developing more modular content that can be placed into different delivery systems which can interoperate.

Content: Could be in the form of a site, book, or some other material. I think I’m becoming more and more interested in this idea of a content API. Rather than getting the content through an HTML page, we can just get the raw HTML, which can be styled appropriately by whatever LMS CMS that we want to use.

Assessments: I think that there’s a couple of interesting things happening here. One that I can see is services that provide summative assessments for students to certify that they’ve mastered certain competencies. Summative assessments could then be uncoupled from content. These assessments could also be seen as more rigorous because they are not created by the commons, but by a separate organization that would administer them.

Another interesting thing that’s happening in this realm is the idea of crowdsourced formative assessments. Ben Mackley and Bob Bodily are doing a project right now at BYU with the goal of creating a system wherein students can create assessment items to prepare them for assessments in undergraduate chemistry courses. Any student can generate them and then attach them to certain concepts in the class. I think this would be really powerful when combined with the competency idea below.

Competencies: I think that we could really push the idea of openly licensed competency maps for certain skills. This could dovetail with the work the Lumina foundation is doing, but I think it would be really cool if we could work with organizations and industries to develop sets of expectations for employees. By making these competency maps public, we would encourage others to develop materials that would prepare students to master certain components of that competency map. As a student instructional designer, I could even create simulations that may prepare a student for a very specific sub-competency.

Creative Commons License
This work by Tom Caswell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

0 comments… add one

Leave a Comment