Last year in March I did a lot of soul searching about my mission in the EdTech space. At the time, figuring out the incentives for authors and teachers to produce open educational resources (OER) seemed like an insurmountable mountain to climb. I didn’t see a clear path for interoperability between content sources. OER yes, but OER how?
Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the open content landscape and I’m starting to feel more optimistic about the prospects for OER. Could year 2018 be when the switch-over happens? I think so.
Tech Strategy for 2018
Below is a list of technology building blocks that will be half-built by Mar 2018 and fully built by Mar 2019. Together they represent the foundation for OER becoming a mainstream phenomenon.
Content library
One year from now, accessing all the CC-licensed educational material from the web will be a solved problem. When a school principal wants to setup a local OER server, they’ll be able to import educational content from a choice of multiple free content libraries. (Technical details such as the data format wget+zip, web archive, OpenZIM, cartridge, kchannel, etc. and the browsing and search interfaces can be solved by something like pandoc for OER content and listing syndication and indexing service integration.)
Editing tools
Given a global content channel like Khan Academy, a teacher might want to edit the content structure to: change folder titles and descriptions; reorder items within folders; cut, copy, and paste items; and add new items by adding files or creating them from scratch with the authoring tools.
Authoring tools
A lot of the OER content out there isn’t that good. If learning will happen on a new medium like a tablet, then it might be easier to start from scratch and produce new content adapted for tablets. We need more tools for educators, teachers, and students to produce learning activities.
Make some sushi and feed the kids for a day, or teach them how to make sushi on their own and feed them for life.
Diff tools
Since content channels are not static, we need to make an easy-to-use system for distributing and applying updates. The source channel that you imported has changed, do you want to update your local copy from the source channel? Click Yes or review changes by looking at diff between old content and new content: nodes added, nodes removed, nodes moved, nodes whose content was edited.
When looking at individual content items that consist mostly of text, there could be copyediting and typo correction tools. Any contributor could fix a typo in the description of a content item and submit a typo fix “pull request” upstream to the original content node owner (use word-level diffs git diff --color-words ... for showing text changes).
Standards alignment tool
Imagine an editing interface for manipulating educational standards and setting parallels. For example, let MATH.US and MATH.MX be the math education standards for the US and Mexico. We can setup links that say “Every content item tagged with MATH.US.tagP should be automatically tagged with MATH.MX.tagQ” and this rule can be applied whenever importing content. (i.e. do the standards alignment once up front, instead of doing it for every content item).
Student backpack (like in RPG games)
I’m generally against gamification techniques because I don’t see what’s the point of introducing metaphorical rewards like points and badges. However, if achievement rewards are related to the content matter then things could be very interesting.
What if badges were awarded when students pass some exam or “validation test” that confirms they know the concept inside out. You get the badge for X when you’ve completed all the tests required for X. For example the QEQN badge can be awarded whenever students have proved they know the formula x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2*a) for obtaining the solution set to the equation ax^2 + bx +c = 0.
When you unlock the QEQN badge, the “quadratic equation tool” will be available for all the problems you will solve in the future. By earning the QEQN badge you proved you know the rule x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2*a) by doing all the exercises, therefore from now we’ll stop forcing you to do this calculation by hand and let you use the quadratic equation tool when solving problems (click view source to see how it works).
I’m not sure every skill can be turned into an applet, so we could instead give them a “knowledge scroll” as the achievement—a short document that summarizes the concept that students can use whenever they need to use an X-related formula. Another option would be to earn “effort” badges for investing a lot of time to read/practice.
Perhaps I’m being too optimistic and the OER revolution is still far away, but I don’t think so. Now that I know the good folks at LE are thinking about these problems, I feel free software for universal education is coming up soon! It will take a combination of vision, technical expertise, implementations experience, and partnerships to make this work. As we say in Bulgaria, “Сговорна дружина, планина повдига,” which roughly translates to “An organized group can lift a mountain.” If you’re interested in lifting some mountains with us, check out the LE jobs page.
