The Open Education Resource movement can advance its mission of making available educational resources through digital production and distribution technologies which are more cost-effective than production processes related to hard-copy distribution of text-based materials.
This presentation discusses efforts that build on such digital trends to deliver a new generation of hybrid educational media products while illustrating the value of re-usable content repositories in fostering greater rates of product innovation.
Such a move towards development of accessible, re-usable content components is consistent with the conference theme that calls for ‘intentional action to build resources, practices, and systems that are open’.
(This topic is particularly relevant to those involved in developing, acquiring, or influencing the design of open educational resources.)
The case study starts with the following premises regarding the needs of post-secondary students in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines:
- Students often need products which compactly present exercises representing learning objectives (course review exercise materials).
- Roadblocks to understanding can often be overcome through the availability of multiple presentation forms of the same concept.
- current media should include tools to facilitate interactive exchanges with other students, instructors, or mentors.
The presentation shows how a collection of accessible XML files provided the needed raw materials for a product which addresses those needs as a desktop/mobile web application of review materials derived from peer-review texts.
The project reviews the technologies used to extract review materials from products published by OpenStax (
https://openstax.org/ ), converting source documents into a presentation neutral format (DITA), then applying media specific converters to render forms appropriate for desktop and mobile devices. Also covered are points showing why the suggested standards-based repository offers greater opportunities for innovation than existing publishing standards.
An alternative method to annotate and exchange annotations of review materials among students is presented, emphasizing the ability to conduct such exchanges using any transfer technology (e-mail social networks).
The text-based product is then extended with the ability to search video transcripts of curated, open content from MIT’s Open CourseWare line of physics products, resulting in a hybrid product offering multiple perspectives (text-image-video) on problem-solving techniques.
The presentation ends with a summary of the key factors which are necessary to make text-based content components re-usable, as well as guidelines for making video presentations that are more likely to be successfully integrated into the next-generation of media products.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Identify the key characteristics of re-usable, accessible educational content components that encourage integration into future media products
- Identify the key features of video presentations which make them more useful in supplementing instructional texts
