At a conference in Monterrey, Mexico, I came across a person working for the Connections Project. The conversation was about how to improve the sharing of open educational resources (or OERs). One of the problems that needs to be solved is how to organize material at a low level of granularity such that it can be easily searched.
Lookit a bit closer at the problem I realized that professors tend to neatly organize educational material but at a higher level of abstraction. Most teachers carefully divide their courses in chapters, modules, lessons, etc. There is a huge variety of vocabulary, but everybody is doing more or less the same. The reason behind this organization is to better find what we need, for students to better follow a learning experience, etc.
But the interesting observation is that, below this level, that is, inside the documents and resources that make out a chapter, section, session or whatever similar unit, the content is mainly disorganized. Exercises are just put together in a Word document, additional resources in another HTML document that gets published in the course web page, etc.
The overall picture then is that a course has a neat organization at a higher level and is fairly caotic at a lower level. My perception is that this is mainly due to the type of tools that are used in the creation process. Sorry to say, but the culprit is mostly Microsft Office.
The tools contained in this suite maintain their information internally in a format impossible to manipulate easily outside of this programs. Let me put an example. If I write a collection of exercises with let's say 50 exercises. Let us assume then that due to some course reorganization, some of those exercises should be in a different chapter or session, some of them can be used in another course, or even that the collection can be divided into three tracks that can be used as learning material for students having different learning styles. What would you need in your material to solve this situations quickly? If the material is structured internally, then it would be easy to take the collection of exercises and select each one of them individually with some tool. That is extremelly complicated for Microsoft Word documents.
Another example. Let's supose a teacher relies mostly in Powerpoint slides. In one of them there is the coolest animation about an extremelly complicated process. The professor has realized that the animation greatly helps students to understand the process. Now the teacher would like to take just that animation and publish it in an HTML document in the course website. With structure content, it should be possible to identify this animation, extract it from the document and place it somewhere else.
This problem has been solved in some other domains, and some of them extremelly close to you (either if you are a techie or not). This page you are reading contains text that is internally structured. It contains marks identifying its internal parts. The better and more thorough this marks, the easier is to manipulate the text.
Is teaching staff ready to create structured content? Mostly no. Why? Mostly, because there is no tool out there that provides a simple authoring procedure to create structure content. Most of the teaching staff is using some tool inside Microsoft Office.
To finish with an analogy. Microsoft Office Tools give you a nice and powerful set of tools the same way a car can give you lots of possibilities to travel. You may have a huge amount of tweaks and knobs to turn in your car such that your driving experience is easy, pleasent, efficient (add your favorite adjective). But, what happens if you want to travel overseas? No matter how powerful, confortable, efficient your car is, you won't get there.
Structured content is the view that will allow you to travel overseas with your learning material. It'll allow you to solve problems and adapt your material in ways that are beyond the capabilities of current Office tools. It is complex, yes, the same way a jet airliner is more complex than a car, but it'll allow you to travel overseas, right?
1 comments:
The blog phenomena is a very good example to illustrate this issue. Blogs integrate text, images, video, you name it. Yo do not need to be a techie to have a blog: there are thousands of blogs out there, and most of them are run by people with minimum technical skills.
Google tools are usually good examples of what you can do with the right tool (I know, they have bought --not created-- most of them). Blogspot has made it easy for many to have a webpage (now, a blog). Google Docs have made it easy to people to collaborate on documents remotely, and to have proper version control. Google Reader has made it easy to follow RSS feeds.
You just need the right tool that gets the job done (in this case, structure learning material). If you have the right (read: simple) tool, people do the work.
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