Hope Talk Abstract
From openmichigan
Title:
Creating a Global Campus: Open Educational Resources
Abstract:
Educational institutions are seeing increasing demand for innovative teaching methods, expanded access to courses, and the sharing of rich learning content. One of the ways this is viable is through the adoption and generation of open educational resources (OER): open, high quality digitized, educational content which is freely available for use, remixing and redistribution. Examples include syllabi, lectures, readings, case studies, images, videos, and demos. Students and faculty at the University of Michigan have developed an innovative, low-cost, and scalable process, called "dScribe", to facilitate students in the process of transforming educational material into OER. The University of Michigan is also collaborating with institutions in Ghana and South Africa to co-create health educational materials to address the global shortage of healthcare workers.
The dScribe process and the global collaboration and distribution of OER pose many interesting questions about how technology may be used to mediate these processes: • How can we use technology and historical data to streamline the process of determining the copyright status of content objects i.e. non-textual and/or third party components such as images, sketches, graphs, screenshots, etc. that constitute a significant portion of our OER content? • Is there a way that we can crowd-source the tagging of images content objects for quality metadata for ease of searching? • How can we build a federated search that includes other institutions' OER repositories? • What are the best file formats, compression techniques, and hardware for distribution of OER in developing countries with low bandwidth? • Which software platform(s) do we use for remote collaboration and co-authoring materials?
