OER platform discussion notes

Cross-institution platform discussion We met with MIT OCW and Stanford's OCW group to talk about where each of us is in dreaming about a new delivery platform for OER/OCW. Here is what we learned and some initial reactions:

MIT


 * MIT has recently started the "dos project" to understand requirements for a next generation of OCW delivery. This project is focusing on reviewing the life cycle of the course from the faculty’s perspective. The platform would allow faculty to reuse content, find content, deposit content, build a course, teach the course, manage that course, let students add content throughout the course, work the scheduling of the course, record the course lectures, and archive the course. Most of this already exists within a home-grown site - it's just a matter of bringing it together.


 * Instead of downloading a zip file of course materials, MIT OCW would be able to use a mapping tool to OCW-ify the content - might be the same CMS and repository, might not. Just as now, they plan to send OCW courses to DSpace for permanent archiving. Another goal is to make content distribution modular but how is this done?
 * we want to host this, we want an iPhone app, on and on.
 * printed formats are included here
 * putting a different face on content -- part of presentation
 * get out of PDF for printing - move to XML, and what about mathML? (what is the next step beyond PDF? look at Connexions)


 * The dos project is generating lots of documentation and their timeline for completion is about 18 months. They do not have a requirements document yet, but should hopefully have something by January.

Stanford


 * At the moment, Stanford is depositing 10-15 courses per year into iTunesU and now YouTube. They have some funding from president’s office -- recording courses and publishing them (sometimes with syllabi). They are producing courses more for a consumer market - externally used. One major issue is that the current financial situation will decrease funding - what is the long-term viability of their OCW efforts? A large source of costs is recording lectures -- it's very expensive.


 * Stanford seems to have pockets of OCW activity around campus. Their School of Med is talking with OpenCast and will be grateful adopters as opposed to contributors. The future: we would like to publish all courses at the scale of MIT, but also 1) take a look at energy, environment, health, and do a thematic presentation of content (super-aggregated, but also do disaggregated) 2) automated extraction of metadata and copyright from Sakai. Stanford sees the need to automate some of the processing of courses - are there ways to do automated extraction of metadata and copyright?


 * At the moment, Stanford has an internal proposal to do: "something bold." We'll know more about their status come January.


 * Stanford are "big fans of other peoples' open source software". They made the astute observation that attempting to internally create everything is a hugely uphill task and one that doesn't even need to be done since there are several components that offer the functionality that is being sought. However, some glue code will be required to bring all the various pieces together.

General Observations


 * The presentation problem is a daunting one. There are issues of institutional branding and how each institution views OER presentation. The Open.Umich project aims to provide very granular access down to the individual content object. It wasn't clear if MIT and Stanford had the same goals. In all 3 cases, the technology available to present seems the least easily available. Perhaps this question should be explicitly discussed since we are currently using EduCommons as our presentation platform.