Kevin Carey has written a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education that describes a smart initiative from the Departments of Education and Labor:
The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials—videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more—available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER’s. …
The rise of online instruction gives us the ability to capture more value from the time and resources invested in designing a course, and it also gives instructors metrics for gauging their effectiveness.
The $2-billion Labor-Education project could transport the open-resource movement to a new level of prominence. Because the materials will be developed under the auspices of a federal-government competition, they will carry an assumed mark of quality absent from random lectures posted on YouTube. The departments also plan to organize the materials so that educators can search and shape them into rational sequences of learning. Private companies will be able to repackage, improve upon, and sell the materials they like, as long as they acknowledge the original developers.
That still leaves the problem of credit. Public libraries were the original OER, yet people can’t demand a diploma just because they’ve learned from a book. But here, too, new developments are under way. The latest and most sophisticated open educational resources have tests embedded within them because assessment is a fundamental element of learning. Feedback-based, assessment-driven “cognitive tutors” developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon are woven into science, engineering, and philosophy courses produced by the university’s Open Learning Initiative. For example, studies have shown that their online statistics course produces equal or better learning results than do traditional lectures. The same Carnegie Mellon experts will be helping the federal-grant recipients design their educational tools. Assessments create evidence. And that’s all a credit is, in the end: credible evidence of learning.
This is tremendously important, and it should serve as a model for other public investments. Are we extracting as much value from a given investment as we can? Do we have rigorous metrics for gauging success? Can successful projects achieve scale? Can private firms and community groups extend the platform by creating a rich ecology of new applications?
Update: Via Alex Tabarrok, Jennifer Imazeki has written a fascinating post describing the virtues of SWoRD, a distributed grading system that seems perfectly suited to online instruction. In a follow-up, Imazeki notes that SWoRD hasn’t yet proven an adequate substitute for instructor grading. But one wonders if it can at least reduce the labor intensity of grading, and if assignments can be structured, and students trained, so that SWoRD is a better fit.