OCWtool and dScribes – Pedagogy, Social Practices, and

Tools

What a long, strange trip it’s being

OCW and Sakai

Simple Assumptions –OCW is a good idea – see Hal’s talk and JSB

slides belowSakai installations can/should become generators

of OCW content on a very large scale – mutually beneficial to the academy and the OCW community

How would we do that?

Sakai

UMOCW

Web Siteor

other InstitutionalRepository

Publication PipelineDigital Course Materials:(1) IP Management (2) Tagging OCW Categories(3) Exporting from CTools(4) QA and Review

eduCommons tools

RawCourseContent

VettedOCW

Content

Teaching

Research

Putting an OCW Pipeline in the LMS -OCW Publishing from Sakai

Initial MIT OCW process has difficulty scaling.How can we support this process?

Sakai Resources Area – unorganized vis a vis OCW

Overall Goals (Vancouver)

• Make Sakai an Open Educational Resources engine; a generator of OERs as OpenCourseWare sites

• Make the process of OCW site generation economically feasible

• Make it simple for faculty to tag and export their class materials to an OCW site

• Couple Sakai and eduCommons (OCW site creation tool) to automate the process

Current Problems• Too expensive to create OCW sites• Little or no automation• No connection to CLE (eg, Sakai)• Only large institutional commitment

can get an OCW site off the ground• Roadblock to growing the OCW

community

Sakai in ProductionOpen Educational Resource Engines

Text

4000 courses each year at U Michigan alone; more at UNISA (U South Africa)

Overview of ProcessBased on Hybrid Publishing Model

Integrated with MIT Teaching Process

Plan Build Teach/Manage Publish

Upstream foundational prep

• Recruit faculty• Plan TEACHING version of

course• Plan OCW version of course• Review existing content• Identify & resolve IP (except

permissions)• Track IP by object in system

Content development

• Collect/capture existing content

• Build content into LMS sections/templates

• Enter metadata• Create commissioned works• Process permission requests

& make IP edits

Live teaching and course administration

• Update/supplement materials

• Post announcements• Assign, track, grade

student work• Interact (faculty-student

and student-student)

Open publication

• Perform course QA• Obtain faculty approval• Export to OCW site

Support

Renewal, archiving, and preservation

• Update course content• Archive course content

Color legendBLACK Normal teaching processBLUE Required for open publishingORANGE Former OCW steps eliminated

HY

BR

ID I

NT

EG

RA

TE

D

PR

OC

ES

SA

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

O

VE

RV

IEW

• Spec course/map content • Reformat/clean up/ restructure/contextualize

• Enter content into CMS• Perform authoring QA

• Perform final edit• Perform production QA

• Respond to user feedback• Review/refine metadata

(MIT Library)• Edit course for errors

EL

IMIN

AT

ED

S

TE

PS

ExternalOCW

AudiencesMIT Faculty & Teaching Assistants

Individual Teaching Web Sites

MIT-Supported LMS

OCW External Web

Site

Dspace Archive

MIT-supported option

Assume 80% participation

Publish

- O

R -

Individual/local supported option

Assume 20% participation

• Robust authoring– Easy capture– Easy update

• Document managemt– Restricted teaching matls– Open teaching matls

• Import/export– Offline authoring– Self-publishing

• Multiple views• Course admin

Teach MITStudents

• Publishing tools– Embedded tracking code– Embedded license terms– IP tracking– Metadata tagging– Hi-design display templates– Preview capability– Downloadable ZIP files– Discussion group suppt– Archiving

• Workflow

Archive

Harvest for archi ving or publishing

OCW Tool

OCW Tool – Support for the Hybrid Process

Support for Tagging in Sakai –Helping faculty, students create

tags (metadata) for:

• IP status – Creative Commons+• OCW Navigation – MIT Categories• Export – Choose what to put on

OCW site

Plan Build Teach/Manage Publish

Upstream foundational prep•Recruit faculty•Plan TEACHING version of course

•Plan OCW version of course•Review existing content•Identify & resolve IP (except permissions)

•Track IP by object in system

Content development

•Collect existing content•Build content into LMS sections or templates

•Enter metadata•Create commissioned works•Process permission requests & make IP edits

Live teaching and course administration

•Update and supplement materials•Post to email, wikis, blogs, announcements, discussions, forums, IM

•Assign, track, grade student work•Interact (faculty-student and student-student) through all channels above

Open publication

•Perform course Quality Assurance

•Obtain faculty approval

•Export to OCW site

BLACK Normal teaching process

BLUE Required for open publishing

We Like MIT’s Hybrid Model a Lot (Atlanta)

Planning

&

Training

Upstream foundational preparation

•Recruit faculty•Plan TEACHING version of course•Plan OCW version of course•Review existing content•Identify & resolve IP (except permissions)•Track IP by object in system

Build Teach/Manage Publish

Planning Phase Includes “Training” for Faculty and Support Staff in Colleges and Departments

All done within LMS faculty are already familiar with

IP Object tracking comes along with the use of the system

Training has additional benefits in educating faculty on IP

Support staff distributed throughout university

Build Teach/Manage Publish

Teaching and Managing Course Materials

All done within LMS faculty are already familiar with

IP Object tracking can proceed throughout course

Materials/Objects can be tagged with OCW categories (Syllabus,

Lecture Notes, Assignments, etc.) wherever they come from,

wiki, blog…

Increasingly, objects tagged by system, eg, Assignments

•Collect existing content•Build content into LMS sections or templates

•Enter metadata•Create commissioned works•Process permission requests & make IP edits

•Update and supplement materials•Post to email, wikis, blogs, announcements, discussions, forums, IM

•Assign, track, grade student work•Interact (faculty-student and student-student) through all channels above

RDF tagging in the future

Tagging Course Resources

Add or remove tags within specific site

User can modify tags to fit their

needs –But start with MIT

tag set to encourage standard

approach to navigation of resulting OCW

site

Content Development and Teaching Proceed Throughout Course Period

•Take advantage of that – OCW Tool is available to add tags anytime in development or teaching

•Capture IP and OCW category metadata as class proceeds, as new material is developed

•Perhaps have a student ‘scribe’ who has permissions set to add metadata – when new document appears, they tag it – perhaps make this a class activity, develop student incentives (e.g., better future access)

•Have system flag incomplete data on objects – direct faculty or students to places of needed metadata

Build Teach/ManageThis is a dynamic,

emergent, iterative process

How Do We Get This Done?

•This currently costs MIT ~$10-20,000 per course

•We can get some faculty to do it

•But we need to get adoption supported by the administration, at first or eventually – top-down and/or bottom-up

•And we need to support the faculty

•How do we do all this?

3 Incentive Structures

AdministrationFaculty

Students

3 Incentive Structures for Adoption

•Administration – why Chuck Vest adopted OCW, modified for non-first-movers, with local context added… why department heads…

•Faculty – why your faculty would adopt, for exposure, then student demand…

•Students – all the reasons on the following slide

All 3 have initial, then self- and mutually-reinforcing aspects as the system becomes embedded, woven into fabric of university - similar to adoption of Sakai/CLE in the first place

Can we build any of these, or other, incentives into the software?

Digital ScribesBasic idea – get students to help the faculty in courses they are

taking – students become digital scribes – DScribes – and get access rights to OCW tool area, taking part of load off faculty

Leveraging the students’ interests, creating student incentives

Developing student incentives: (emerging list)

Do to get access to course material in the future; Do to get closer access to TA’s and teachers; Become part of the online DScribe community; Do for the greater good; Do to learn better; Get a Tshirt; etc…

1 hour course credit for UG DScribes – learn a bit about IP, media management, how to use tools

3 hour course for Grad DScribes II – leveraging interest among SI students – more complete coverage of IP, multimedia, lecture capture, synopsizing, notes project – general ‘lite editing for web’

Goal of having the DScribes provide much of the ongoing infrastructure for the actual cleaning, tagging and preparing for export – two tiered: DS II’s help DS’s – maybe GSI’s, alumni

But, we hadn’t really looked hard enough at students (especially students), faculty and the teaching-learning process in the web era

So, by way of working with students in my SI 514 ‘semantic tech and OCW’ class this past winter/spring…

…a few moments with John Seely-Brown, Chris Anderson and some ideas on emerging pedagogies

Think of OCW as Helping to Fill Out the Long Tail

With Quality Material,and,

dScribe Activities asIntroducing People in the

Academy to Models of Mentoring That are Fundamentally

Participatory, as OS Models Are

Long Tail of Education

Why fill it up• Where a lot of the action is• Personalization of learning examples and

objects largely happen in the tail

What about the head• Future Learning Environment has both –

well populated head and tail

Students as Co-Producers

• Emphasizes Mentor/Apprentice relationships

• Participants in learning process• Not jugs to be filled up with knowledge• Povides value to faculty – students know the

tech• Think of as a ‘Participatory Pedagogy’

Higher Education Institutions and OCW Community -

Both BenefitHE Institutions• Meeting needs of HE - for

innovation and adoption of emerging methods

• Increases importance of teaching in HE – contributes to re-balancing vs research

• Creating virtuous cycles in HE institutions, and outside – publish, feedback, improvements, re-publish…thus,

• Showing the importance of “Open” in/to HE – introduction to web 2.0 dynamics in education

• Bridging formal and informal ed – classroom and self-learners

OCW Communities• Mobilizing our established

communities of scholars• Best place, in ways only place, for

generation of enough material to fill the long tail

• Universities are one place where the mentors are…we are teachers

• Showing the importance of “Open” in/to HE – introduction of web 2.0 dynamics in education

• Bridging formal and informal ed – classroom and self-learners

Why Do OCW?3 Incentive Structures for Adoption

• Administration – why Chuck Vest adopted OCW, modified for non-”first-movers”, with local context added. Why Provosts, Deans, Department Heads…

• Faculty – why your faculty would adopt – e.g., for exposure, then student demand, new form of publication, build into evaluations…

• Students – see following slides…

All 3 have initial, then self- and mutually-reinforcing aspects as the system becomes embedded, woven into the fabric of university – sometimes similar to adoption of Sakai/CLE in the first place

Digital Scribes – making this work

Basic idea – students help the faculty in courses they are taking – students become digital scribes – dScribes – get access rights to OCW tool area, taking large part of load off faculty

Why would students do this? – (see following early research)Leveraging the students’ interests, creating student incentives:Developing student incentives: (emerging list)

Do to get access to course material in the future; Do to get closer access to TA’s and teachers; Become part of the online dScribe community; Do for the greater good; Do to learn better; Get a Tshirt; etc…

1 hour course credit for UG dScribes – learn a bit about IP, media management, how to use tools

3 hour course for Grad dScribes II – leveraging interest among SI students – more complete coverage of IP, multimedia, lecture capture, synopsizing, notes project – general ‘lite editing for web’

Goal of having the dScribes provide much of the ongoing infrastructure for the actual cleaning, tagging and preparing for export, using the tools – two tiered: dS II’s help dS’s – maybe GSI’s, alumni in future

Students as Apprentices and Co-Participants in Teaching/Learning

• What happens when we encourage, support and integrate student efforts, as we are in the dScribe/OCW project

• We are encouraging both students and faculty to engage in more participatory pedagogies

• The faculty (and admin) incentives we know a good bit about• The students’ incentives we don’t know much about, but they

have, and quickly recognize they have, multiple, significant positive incentives

• This mobilization of new incentive structures parallels results of the recent research done on open source (see S. Weber), which shows that complex artifacts can be constructed by distributed communities, with unexpected incentive structures, in an open environment

• Investigating such alternative incentive structures is driving the social part of the development of the S-OCW tool

• And cracking the last nut of sustainability – cost

dScribes

• Catalyzing new relationships between faculty and students and among students – institutionalizing collaborative apprenticeships at the earliest possible level

• Finding places the students can become “peers in the process,” can become contributors, using their ‘digital native’ tech knowledge and experience

• Introducing faculty gently, in the process of their teaching, to new (digital/social) technologies and their use, with the help of the students

• New partnership construction in the academy• Practical engagement as a part of learning at all levels,

building it into the learning process – Dewey would be pleased

Building a dScribe Community -Building into a Curriculum

• What a student might do if taking the 1-credit OCW dScribe class:

--Learn about IP issues related to making course materials available--Learn about useful metadata standards relevant to open courseware (eg, marking up citations to enable use of open URL resolvers; ).--Publish a course they are taking - work with faculty to

--get permissions; generate substitutions where necessary  --mark up citations; perhaps find open versions  --tag materials, using MIT's navigation categories, or faculty’s

• What students might do in a 3-credit SI 501 dScribe class:

--Go into more depth on IP, metadata issues above --Learn about effective, easy, low-touch capture, production, editing of A/V,

include screencasts, podcasts, videocasts of lectures, discussions--Learn about appropriate techniques for capturing different types of events, from interviews to lectures to conferences, includes setting up wikis or other tools for distributed capture of events and their activities

--Mentor students taking the 1-credit OCW dScribing class – to Learn, Teach --Act as dScribe for some of their own classes, and for professional event (e.g.,

a conference)

“dScribes” at U Toronto

• Potential example of ‘student volunteerism’ on scale we need

• The University of Toronto engages hundreds of students each semester to take notes for classes, those notes then are put online and used to support accessibility to the course materials for those who need them (like hearing or sight impaired students). 

• The students are recruited and trained each semester – largely by each other; some staff, but not much

• Is this an existence proof for the idea of large dScribe communities at universities? Maybe.

Baseline & Investigation of Benefits vs Incentives

UMichigan Survey – April 2007

• All instructional faculty, including graduate student instructors, were invited to respond (n=7,244). There was a 20% response rate to the survey (n=1,481).

• A random sample of 25% of the student body, stratified by college/department, was invited to respond (n=8,790). There was a 26% response rate to the survey (n=2,281).

What is your familiarity with OCW websites at other institutions?

76%

11%

7%

5% 1%

I have never heard of OCW

I have heard of OCW but have nevergone to an OCW site

I have looked at an OCW site

I have looked at and used material froman OCW site in my studies

No response

Student

Value of "Would provide a resource to enhance my own personal knowledge"

26%

6%

42%

24%

2%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Student

Value of "Would help me to plan my long-term course of study"

27%

9%

40%

22%

2%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Student

Value of "Would allow me to preview prospective courses in depth before I register"

22%

2%

37%

38%

1%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Student

Value of "Would allow me to use materials from past courses for review"

21%

3%39%

2%

35%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Student

Value of "Would allow me to see examples from past courses or work done by students"

22%

5%

43%

29%

1%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Student

What is your familiarity with OCW websites at other institutions?

58%23%

14%

4% 1%

I have never heard of OCW

I have heard of OCW but have nevergone to an OCW site

I have looked at an OCW site

I have looked at and used material froman OCW site in my teaching

No response

Faculty

Faculty

Value of "Would increase the visibility of my courses"

45%

18%

29%

5%3%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Faculty

Value of "Would allow me to see how other faculty are approaching material in my area"

27%

4%

45%

21%

3%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Faculty

Value of "Would help me to prepare materials for an upcoming class"

34%

8%40%

15%

3%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Faculty

Value of "Would help me to connect with faculty at UM or other instiutions in my area of teaching or research"

36%

9%

40%

12%

3%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Faculty

Value of "Would help me to develop or plan curriculum for my department"

42%

9%

35%

11%

3%

Not Sure

Not Valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

No Response

Focus Groups – Incentives vs Benefits

• Often talk about value/benefits to faculty and administration

• Usually list benefits for students• Results of focus groups at UM• Students see incentives to help generate OCW,

and the highest incentives do not necessarily line up with usually cited benefits – they have more to do with interaction with faculty, and deepening pedagogical relationships – that mentor-apprentice relationship

Mean Mode Mean Mode Mean ModeAllows me to preview prospective courses before I register 4.5 5.0 4.0 5.0 4.3 5.0

Provides a resource to enhance my own personal knowledge 3.8 3.0 4.5 5.0 4.1 5.0

Provides an additional resource for alumni to enhance personal knowledge 3.8 4.0 3.8 3.0 3.8 4.0

Helps me to plan my long-term course of study 3.8 4.0 3.5 4.0 3.6 4.0

Helps reaffirm the University’s reputation for innovation 3.5 3.0 3.8 3.0 3.6 3.0

Helps reinforce the University’s commitment to learning 2.8 2.0 4.0 4.0 3.4 4.0

Allows me to complement current course content with materials from other courses 4.3 5.0 2.3 2.0 3.3 2.0

Increases my interaction with faculty members or other instructors (when participating) 3.0 3.0 3.3 4.0 3.1 3.0

Allows me to make my own contributions and thoughts visible to others 3.0 3.0 2.3 3.0 2.6 3.0

Quantifier

Undergraduate Graduate TotalB

enefi

tsSegment

Mean Mode Mean Mode Mean ModeBeing able to master the course topic and course materials by helping to create OpenCourseWare

4.5 4.0 3.8 4.0 4.1 4.0

Interacting directly with faculty when creating OpenCourseWare material 4.0 5.0 4.0 4.0 4.0 5.0

Regular (free) lunches and dinners for students involved in the creation of OCW 4.5 5.0 2.8 3.0 3.6 4.0

Learning about intellectual property and related issues when creating OCW 4.0 4.0 3.0 N/A 3.5 4.0

Being able to conduct research as an undergraduate/graduate (Research Program) 3.5 N/A 3.5 4.0 3.5 3.0

Getting course credit for helping to create OpenCourseWare 3.3 4.0 3.0 3.0 3.1 3.0

Connect with other students who are involved in the creation of OpenCourseWare 3.5 4.0 2.8 3.0 3.1 3.0

Being recognized for contribution to creating OCW (i.e., contributor on the Web site) 1.8 1.0 2.5 N/A 2.1 1.0

Quantifier

Ince

ntive

sUndergraduate Graduate TotalSegment

Tools for dScribes

• Workflow customized for dScribes and faculty, not ‘professional OCW’ staff

• Build around ‘participatory pedagogical’ model• Faculty engagement gated, can be large or small

(faculty can be their own dScribes)• Tools integrated with learning environment, so

faculty can use knowledge from CLE tools• Create portable materials for faculty and students,

and Library

dScribes and Tools• Going back and thinking about a collaborative

material production process• Work in progress• Development on a dScribe tool underway this

summer• Hope to use this fall with first-generation dScribe2

students leading the process, and mentoring dScribe1 students

• This winter plan to have first large dScribe1 class as part of SI grad/undergrad curriculum

• Go from there

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

Some V~0.3 Screenshots

dScribes and OCW tool

• Building social foundations of technology applications, integrating the two into socio-technical process

• Blending Open Source successes with Open Content Initiatives

• Mobilizing transformative processes of Web 2.0 dynamics in service of transforming the academy,

• While at the same time using resulting contributions from the academy to feed Learning Web 2.0 dynamics

• Developing positive feedback loop that rewards participatory pedagogies and drives both transformation in the academy and the growth of Learning Web 2.0

• OER/OCW generation at the center of both

Must Reads

and, for pedagogical foundations

(and fun summer reading)

Thanks - Quex