So how do we actually re-use content in practice?
Sandie has just submitted her first attempt at pulling together all the content for MOSAIC and has done an amazing job. However it is something to be reckoned with. As a starting point she has included the text from all the sources we want to use, so that a course which would normally be about 100-150 pages long, is 527 pages. It is a lot to review but this is really the only way to move this forward.
Once you have got over the sheer scale factor, you very quickly realise that there are a lot of questions that you have never really properly thought through before.
- For now working on the assumption that we can clear copyright for everything we want…do we actually want to have all of this “in” the course? Some things work best as external websites, yes they might change but for many of the activities we want the students to engage in, dealing with this change is part of the process.
- What do we do in using content that is valuable in the main but with small faults, spelling mistakes or even minor factual errors?
- Or when content is not wrong as such but our author is itching to just slightly rewrite it for style/clarity….?
- How do we decide when to include materials as a quote, as a pop up or as a document?
- If we do include it as a pop up do we keep their page design or try and make it look like our course?
- How do we most elegantly reference this stuff?
- Mash-ups ….do we even want to go here? There is definitely stuff in our course which we could start mixing up – but can we get the right permissions?
Well these are the ones we are grappling with for now, and I am sure there will be more as we progress, I’ll post any more questions and our answers up here as we decide them.