Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/Pathways to Open Content

Pathways to Open Content

• Main contact: Pierre Far (pierre at ocwsearch dot com)
• Team: Meena Hwang, OCW Consortium; Joel Thierstein, Connexions; Larry Cooperman, University of California - Irvine
• Hosts: OCW Consortium, OCW Search, Connexions
• Status: confirmed

Summary

Open Educational Resources are only useful if people can find them. Share ideas about the kinds of searching and browsing abilities that would make OER more useful to learners and educators.

What do you want to achieve?

• Generate ideas for building improved search engines, recommenders and other means of organizing and locating OER
• Gather ideas of how to involve greater audiences in promoting OER use, such as libraries, faculty, professional organizations, community education groups, governments...

Who should come? How many? For how long?

• Anyone with ideas or needs for finding OER

SPECIAL NOTE: Keep hacking! We have extra space allocated to small organic sessions around working textbook content. Other tool experts will be on hand to discuss approachs, support users, and gather feedback and ideas. Feel free to work at your leisure on OER in this sub-space.

What will they do when they get there?

1. Brainstorming activities
2. Share ideas in discussion groups
3. Build on other people's ideas to create maps for discoverability

What will you / they have at the end?

• Input into real improvements for search and discovery of OER
• Other great possible outcomes, like automatic recommenders or something useful that hasn't been tried yet

Additional background and context

This isn't a new topic for OER, and there are several search engines already available that specifically search for OER and OCW. Despite the great work done by many people so far, discoverability remains one of the biggest obstacles to OER use. We need more ideas to help us get this right.

Related links

http://www.slideshare.net/nyergler/jisc-ukoer10-oer-search-panel
http://blog.curriki.org/2010/07/02/look-no-further-for-oer-search-engines
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/oer-search-discovery-not-just-another-tla