Hi all,
I feel lucky to be the facilitator for the second topic of this seminar, entitled "OERu operations and lessons we are learning". Lucky, because it addresses many of the challenges I face day to day at Thompson Rivers University, and I am confident that the people involved in this discussion will provide a lot of valuable and fresh insights that will likely be applicable in many contexts.
Some prompts to frame our discussion of lessons learned:
What are the institutional capacity development requirements for OERu operations? How do we address these?
To my mind, we might address these questions in a fairly general sense ("building institutional capacity"), and/or through a more focused OERu lens (our specific needs and challenges in meeting our OERu objectives).
In a broad sense, I'm spending a lot of time these days thinking about the question of "building capacity" around open at my institution. Personally, I see this as a set of tasks that all depend on each other, and to my mind need to be developed more or less concurrently: gathering or raising resources, identifying willing participants, attracting new participants, building use cases, having tools in place, supporting people where needed, sharing lessons learned and celebrating successes. How do you conceptualize the issue of "developing capacity"?
I'd also be interested in hearing some of the specific challenges being faced by OERu partners, and by community participants.
What are the lessons we are learning from prototyping?
Between the first OERu anchor partner meeting, and the second one we will be having in less than six weeks, many of us have taken our work to new places. I hope people will share some of the things they've picked up in the process. Have you or your organizations developed approaches or techniques we can all learn from?
David Bull has posted some very useful reflections from USQ here. -- http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=16816
What technologies will bring us closer to achieving our goals and how do we implement them?
MediaWiki is the technology I most closely associate with the OERu, and in a sense it is a community of "WikiEducators" in the literal sense as well as in its state of mind. But the number of other tools and platforms people are using to connect through this seminar speaks to the reality that OERu is not a technical monoculture. I am a huge fan of wiki-oriented education activities and the power of MediaWiki as a platform, but should we be thinking of incorporating other technologies?
What are the business models for scalable and sustainable operations?
The questions of fostering and managing growth while maintaining a stable footing never go away. Looking across the open education or "free culture" landscape, there are hopeful examples and creative ideas, yet I still struggle to identify and understand successful models that inspire confidence. Where are you seeing success stories whose examples we might emulate?
Please feel free to focus on whatever questions raised here seem most compelling to you, and if you feel thesy are not addressing the real issues of operations and lessons learned, by all means post questions of your own. The plan is to hash out these ideas today (it's the morning of Friday, September 20th here in western Canada as I post this), and Monday the 23rd, after which we will move on to the next topic. I am very much looking forward to seeing where this discussion goes.