Open Education 2013

The open education movement has achieved much in the last decade, but there remains wide acknowledgement that the impact of OER has yet to be fully understood. A suggested approach is to address this through collective approaches that collate information and present them back in an integrated way. This has some appeal, particularly in the way it matches to ideals of openness, but needs to be implemented with care.

In this presentation I critically evaluate attempts that have been made to support communication and collaboration through ?mapping? OER. After endorsing the basic rationale for mapping evidence surrounding OER implementation I review two examples of where this has been attempted. The Open Learning Network (OLnet) Evidence Hub used the concept of ?Contested Collective Intelligence? to inform a discourse-centric social-semantic web application that could structure the discourses of the OER community. I provide a short critique of this approach which focuses on the data model and the metadata requirements made upon users. I go on to consider the UNESCO OER Mapping Project which set out some quite specific protocols for metadata (despite never getting beyond the prototype stage). The value of a ?mapping? approach is defended at the same time as noting that different audience will likely have very different needs in terms of evidence.

A rationale for a new, improved evidence hub is provided along with a number of design considerations and a proposal for future development. I conclude with a brief presentation of the new Evidence Hub being developed as part of the OER Research Hub (OERRH) project. I describe the ways in which our evidence model tries to overcome some of the issues which were manifest in these earlier projects, a range of different data sources, the importance of data visualization, and account for how different types of evidence might be flexibly accommodated. The final part of the session will be given over to group discussion about the idea of ?mapping? the OER evidence base and what the OER community might want from such services.