OpenSpires and learning design
As part of the Oxfords OER project, OpenSpires we are feeding in our experiences from the Mosaic, Phoebe and LDSE projects. Despite developing Ancestral Voices as an OER, up to now we have been a net consumer of content (both those developed specifically as OERs and everything else on the web that might be used for learning) . This project is letting us look at it from the other end of the continuum, we are producing OERs what will help people use them?
For a long time I have been suspicious of the model of reuse learning design projects often assume, an unproblematic set of learning objects to be found in a repository certainly does not reflect reality. The LDSE team is definitely grappling with this – recognizing learning content comes in many different forms, that the stuff we use to build our learning experiences is everywhere. There is also the hugely social aspect of learning design, in a web 2.0 world I sometimes think we overstate this, but all the data we have on reuse and design processes suggests that this is crucial. So while we need to look at things like UK LOM I suspect that Flikr and YouTube are more important.
Last thought for now – we know academics are busy, they will only engage with these processes if they are easy, lightweight and offer demonstrable benefits to them.