Sharing Nicely

My colleague Juliet Stoltenkamp, the head of e-Learning at the University of the Western Cape, and I have been meeting with lecturers from different departments to speak about OCW and encourage them to publish some of their courses. Today we met with Karen Wallace from Chemistry and her feedback and comments really struck a chord with me. It’s fascinating how one person’s story can tell us so much about what works and what does not work in OCW and OER – especially in developing countries.

For the purpose of teaching her undergraduate chemistry course, Karen developed notes and materials for her students, because she knew they could not afford the textbooks. The course is broken into two modules, and really needs two textbooks, but the students simply would not be able to buy more than one. So she took a set of hand-written slides that had been passed down from lecturer to lecturer, and modified a thousand times in the process. These notes were not ready to be printed for the students. She copied the basic structure from the notes, looked at the way textbooks presented the material, and pulled it together into a comprehensive study guide for students. The guide has empty spaces that students fill in during the lectures (or through their independent study). I am not a chemist and would not be able to comment on the quality of the content, but the structure makes a lot of sense to me! And these types of materials that consider both the subject matter and the way it can be taught, are likely to be most useful for students and lecturers in other institutions.

At the end of our meeting Karen described the tension she felt about OpenCourseWare. On one hand she wants to believe (and is excited by the idea) that sharing and openly collaborating will help everyone get better educational content. On the other hand there is hesitation. Will the community embrace the materials, and send feedback and improvements? Or will others just comment on what is missing and should be better, but not engage meaningfully? Is the extra effort of publishing the content online justified, when she could also develop more materials focused on the needs of her existing students?

In the perfect world, OCW publishing should just be part of the normal practices (one-click OCW publication) and no extra effort. That’s what we should work towards, but we are very far away from that situation in most institutions today. The course materials that most lecturers use to teach their courses, and which are perfectly adequate for classroom teaching, are often not not quite ready to be published. Not because they are not good, or because they contain wrong information, but because they were written by the lecturer for her own use – a lot of information is tacit, and in the lecturers head, but makes no sense to outsiders without further explanation.

Karen agreed to publish her course today and we’ll hopefully have it online in the next few months. I’ll let you know when it’s up – so that the OER community can help us convince Karen that she made the right decision to “share nicely”.

PS: Thanks to Jon Udell for challenging all of us at the recent OCWC global conference to make blogging part of what we do (because unlike publishing OCW that’s not a big step). I wrote the whole post during the meeting, and feel like it helped me clarify some of my thinking on these issues.