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I am waffling and not quite sticking to the topic, but find this angle quite fascinating and worth further exploration sometime.

19. derek keats - june 4th, 2008 at 1:13 am

A quick note for Christine, will come back later:

I argue that an abundance in both learning resources as well as “accreditation” is what will enable velocity. When we provision our own learning, there is an important role for accreditation in its broader meaning as a 3rd party stamp of approval.

Hopefully I have made it clear now that I agree with this. By velocity I was referring to the speed with which resources get created, likening it to the software world, where small changes to licenses or a project’s policies can impede production. Accreditation of resources will create a hoop that not everyone might choose to jump through, thus slowing velocity.

Accreditation of learning is another matter entirely. There institutions should still play a role, unless we can come up with some other mechanism that is hard to cheat.

20. derek keats - june 4th, 2008 at 10:48 am

Hello folks, after a brief discussion with some colleagues at UNESCO I have to admit that I was not only wrong in the statement:

There is a deeply disturbing and absurd movement to try to accredit the so-called “open educational resources,” with UNESCO seeming to wish to do this for reasons that are of dubious benefit.

but I was radically wrong. Indeed the notion of accrediting learning is widely understood in UNESCO and that is very encouraging. I apologize for implicating an innocent party :-)

Just for the record, I chose the words absurd and dubious deliberately in the hope of being challenged, and I think that produced some useful discussion. I am just wondering if there are any readers who think the notion of Education 3.0 is radically wrong or bad, and if the idea of self-learning using Free and Open Resources is something that we should reject? Will it happen? Who thinks about autogogy?

21. ken udas - june 4th, 2008 at 2:49 pm

Derek, Hello. Just a quick response to your question to be about “quality assurance” of content.

Is this something that needs a third party involved?

No, I do not think a third party is at all necessary, because the quality will frequently be based on need and circumstance, and nobody knows more about what I need than do I. That said, I was really thinking about some sort of guidelines for those creating and packaging content to be as usable/reusable for as wide an audience as possible.

Cheers, Ken

22. richardwyles - june 4th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

Hi again,

For Wayne I need to qualify my meaning on shades of openness because I’m a strong advocate on open standards and formats. There is most definitely shades of openness due to many different aspects. Derek describes one - often people will provide the output as an open resource but not the source file. A lot of open content wasn’t constructed with openness as being a primary concern - archived materials subsequently made “open” for example. These can be very difficult to reduce, extend, edit etc. The parallel with open source is that some projects are more open in the sense that the community they have is open and easier to engage with, the code is conducive to hacking and thereby innovating further. In contrast, although having an open license, many projects have arcane coding structures or unwelcome governance structures, sometimes both! Hence my shades of openness comment.

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Source:  OpenStax, The impact of open source software on education. OpenStax CNX. Mar 30, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10431/1.7
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