Can ODL course material be as intuitive as an iPod?

I quite dislike blogging out of context and blogging about stuff I know nothing about. However, I thought this would be a good discussion as it aroused my curiosity. 

I was attending a workshop on instructional design by David Murphy (http://opob.edublogs.org/) the other day (who actually knows a thing or two about instructional design) when we got into a debate about making instructions for ODL more intuitive. The example which was thrown out was the iPod and how it doesn’t have (or how no one bothers to read) an instructional manual on how to operate it. However, the design of the device is so intuitive, almost all of us, ranging from toddlers to retirees, can quickly figure out how best to use it.

Thus the question… 

Can ODL course material be written in such an intuitive way that students won’t need instructions to figure out how best to learn from them?    

This certainly sparked some interest in me as an academic and also as a techi who never reads the instructions of anything. It would certainly be quite fantastic to come up with an ODL material which has no instructions but is as easy to figure out as an iPod. I just might give this a go over the next couple of years…

Re-using OER to create ODL course material

There are a number of models of sustainability for OER mentioned in literature. (I) the MIT model where an institution is so big and so rich that they don't mind giving away stuff for free; (ii) the philanthropy model where funding is provided to create resources and make them available as OER; (iii) the model which makes money out of OER by providing support services such as tuition and printing; and (iv) the collaboration model where institutions co-develop curricula. There are other models but these seem the more prominent.

From an institutional perspective, the best model would be the collaborative model where multiple institutions co-develop and share courses as OER. As an example, if a program on Liberal Studies was co-developed between four universities whereby each would develop 25% of the courses and share them as OER, the course development cost for each university will be reduced by 75%. This is when the true cost savings would be seen from OER. However, unfortunately universities (at least in Asia) don't seem to collaborate much with each other as we have found out from our OERAsia survey (http://www.oerasia.org/oerasiasurvey).

Thus, if you are really thinking about going down the OER route where courses are developed by re-using OER, then it would most definitely be a good idea to get a few other collaborating institutions on board.

Estimated cost savings when using OERs

I'm sharing my personal experience here with respect to developing courses using OER as a preamble to my post OER Based ODL Course Material - Web Database Application. The following gives the background of what went into the development of the now published OER based ODL course.

Wawasan Open University (WOU), Malaysia, took a bold step last year towards developing its self study ODL course material using OER by coming up with an institutional policy on the use of OER. Since then (for around 8 months now) I have been working to put together a technical course material on “Web Database Applications” (a second year specialist technical course of a BTech (Hons) Degree) using OER. Although it might sound easy to do, I found it to be quite challenging. However with a few people who are believers of the OER movement I’m glad to say that we have completed all the five units of this five credit course with considerable quality.

To very briefly share with all of you how we did it, we first put together a team of people who are excellent techis and are passionate about the use of OER (this was the most challenging part as the mix had to be perfect for this to work). Then we located the OER resources we would be using in the course material. To ensure quality, we crossed referred the OER material with the actual technical manuals (not OER), textbooks and made sure that two more techis in addition to the course writer (who himself is a techi) verified the content. I’m not saying that the content will be 100% error free but it will be quite close. Then the whole course material went through the instructional design process which made it suitable for adult ODL students.

Now let me share the cost implications; the normal process of creating a course material (not based on OER) at WOU costs quite a bit of money for the University as payments need to be made to the course writers and course reviewers in addition to the time of the in-house academics, instructional designers, graphic designers etc. The course material developed using the OER material incurred the same costs for us. Thus there was no immediate saving with respect to the development cost of the course material. However, when considering that this new course will also be offered as an OER material, other institutions can save on the development cost by using this material directly. The same will apply to WOU as well as it will have the opportunity to save costs by using OER course material developed by other Universities (ideal scenario).

Therefore, in my opinion and from an institutional perspective, there are no immediate cost savings to be had by developing courses using OER. In fact it seems like the University is spending such a large amount of money to develop course material which it will giveaway for free under the CC license. This however is the micro picture of it. The macro picture clearly shows that if institutions talk to each other, collaborate and contribute to the pool of courses in OER format, there will be significant cost savings to be had in the future. The challenge is however to convince the management of a university to spend money on courses to be given away for free in anticipation of a promised cost savings in the future. In other words to take the "leap of faith". This is the toughest part of the whole exercise (in my opinion of course).

OER Based ODL Course Material - Web Database Application

Being one of the youngest Open Distance Learning (ODL) institutions in Asia, Wawasan Open University (WOU) recently embarked on the journey towards predominantly adopting and adapting Open Educational Resources (OER) as self directed course material for its adult learners pursuing their undergraduate degrees.

The School of Science and Technology (SST) along with the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) initiated a pilot project which would investigate the adaption of readily available OER material under the Creative Commons license to be used as course material for undergraduate learners in the Information Technology (IT) discipline. As a result, the middle level course TCC242/05 Web Database Application, which deals with the Open Source Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL architecture, was developed completely re-using existing OER. The course has completed one full presentation cycle (beginning January and ending June 2012) with the students sitting the exam.

The complete course material released under CC BY-SA can be found at http://www.oerasia.org/OERResources/WebDatabaseApplication.pdf