BECTA Paper on 'Open Source Teaching' and the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/
research/open_source_teaching.pdf

Likely you will have already seen reference to this paper in today’s OLDaily, but I felt it was worth reposting as it is a good paper and early on makes an important distinction that I think is too often left dormant in LOR projects and leads to no end of confusion about what people are trying to achieve.

This distinction has to do with the drivers behind the use of learning objects/repositories. The paper outlines 4:

- The efficiency route: the argument that learning objects and repositories enable scaleable reuse of materials and are thus a more efficient way to develop materials
- The teacher-centred route: sharing LOs will enable cross the board improvement of teaching materials
- The pupil-centred route: LOs, in that they also promote the separation of content and presentation and can be traversed to present new versions, enable accessibility and learning-style-centric versions of online materials
- The freedom argument: the LO approach allows instructors to take control of the means of production and share the intellectual product widely

more…

Now I think there are others one could identify, and I find their naming and descriptions kind of awkward, but still, it’s important to try and define these. It’s important because, while they are not necessarily antagonistic, depending on which of them is truly your motivator, it can greatly influence a number of choices you need to make in setting up your development processes, tools and technologies. So for instance if your goal is the widespread re-use of ‘expensive’ objects across many contexts and systems (the ‘efficiency route’), you may well end up with quite a different set of workflows, policies and development practices than if your motivation was the ‘freedom argument’ hoping to permit the “profession [to] take ownership and
control over the development and
production of the tools of their trade.”

Where the differences become a big issue is when a project is being sold to faculty with one argument, but in fact is being driven by some other group (e.g. administrators) by another argument. Like I said, it’s not that these are absolutely antagonistic, they’re not and some of the motivations are more complimentary than others. But unless they are made explicit within a project, one runs the danger of building a repository (and related processes) that don’t end up meeting the needs of the actual users, or vice versa meeting the goals of the original sponsers. – SWL