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Using knowledge media tools to foster open learning communities
Abstract
The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has been growing rapidly, opening up new opportunities for widening participation. One of the Open Content Initiatives is the OpenLearn project, launched by the Open University, which integrates three knowledge media technologies: Compendium, Flashmeeting and MSG. Our current work is to investigate how these social software tools can be used to foster open sensemaking communities and promote the collective building of knowledge, by mapping knowledge, location and virtual interactions. Compendium (knowledge mapping software) Compendium is a software tool for visual thinking, used to connect ideas, concepts, arguments, websites and documents. Compendium (http://www.compendiuminstitute.org) was initially developed at Verizon in the USA and then in 2002 the Open University in the UK took over writing the software. The purpose of the Compendium application is to manage business information, model problems, and map argumentation discussions. It can be used as an individual or group tool to develop new ideas, goals, logical concepts and collaborative scenarios. Fig 1. Compendium used to collect disparate resources.
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Summary The Open Content movement is concerned with enabling students and educators to access material, in order to then learn from it, and reuse it either in one's studies or one's own courses. The core efforts to date has focused on enabling access, e.g. building the organizational/political will to release and license content, and in developing open infrastructures for educators to then publish and reassemble it. The key challenge in the next phase of the open content movement is to improve the support for prospective students to engage with and learn from the material, and with each other though peer learning support, in the absence of formally imposed study timetables and assessment deadlines. This paper reports on tools for e-learning and collaborative sensemaking developed at the UK Open University which are now being considered as candidates for open content learning support. Framing the challenges The Open University (OU) is Europe's biggest University, with over 220,000 students. With 170,000 students online, the OU is the UK's largest e-learning institution, and specialises in providing the support that distance learners require through small group tutors, online interaction, print and digital media. Fundamentally, the OU's perspective is that open distance learning does not 'just happen' when a student encounters 'content', but that the engagement must be crafted and scaffolded. This is of course a core element to any instructional design approach, but the challenges are more acute when most of the time the student is working alone much of the time, and it is in this context that the OU has developed particular instructional design strategies. Arguably, this is the mode in which most learners will engage with open content most of the time (but this hypothesis may be refuted by studies of open content learners, and possibly by emergent patterns of social software use). I propose four key challenges for the open content movement to move to the next level: 1. Engage the instructional, multimedia design and computer-supported collaborative learning research and practitioner communities, some of whose members will engage with open content when they catch the vision. These fields are as much craft as science, and require situated, focused application to the open content context.
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