Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs : Issues and Challenges

[acde...@gmail.com]

Dear Colleagues:

Hi, I am Santosh Panda from IGNOU, India and shall facilitate the
virtual forum on instructional design and collaborative authoring of
OERs. We are late for a day, and hope to catch up with the
discussions in about the coming one month.

We have already been exposed to the nuances of OERs within the
discussions in the virtual forums that have already been started; and
therefore I will not dwell that any more. Instead, let’s focus on the
issues and challenges confronting instructional design for ODL in
general and for developing OERs in particular. As we all are aware,
context, content, active and reflective engagement, community, and
facilitation / mentoring are crucial to self learning / independent
learning at a distance. Culture, language, generic and specific
needs, and learning styles are also crucial variables to consider for
designing open learning materials / open education resources. Recent
research has also suggested that only either content knowledge, or
pedagogic knowledge, or technological knowledge or even a combination
of all the three do not contribute to a comprehensive framework to
teachers for enhancing quality learning; rather an integration of all
the three in the context of one’s discourse is most effective.
Therefore, in the context of OERs, we need to consider capacity
building for a new framework involving context, content, pedagogy, and
technology. Given such a framework, can we think of using open source
platform like Wikipedia and/or WikiEducator (COL) to create and share
learning resources! We therefore need to agree, critically examine,
and if needed contribute to redesigning such open source platforms to
the new framework.

The challenges that are emerging include: funding, investment,
collaboration for joint creation, adoption / adaptation, ownership,
training, editing and contextualisation, digitalisation, copyright
(?), researching, and evolving a culture of OERs. Collaborative
engagement in designing and developing such resources requires
significant grounding in instructional design, interactive / active /
reflective learning, and learning technology. Researching OER is
another area of concentration as we proceed with such an agreed agenda
for collaborative development of OERs.

As has rightly been pointed out by Neil and Catherine in the first
virtual forum write-up, capacity building for developing ODL materials
(and especially for OER) is the crux of the issue. Most ODL
institutions mistakenly assume the capacity of their own people as
appropriate to developing ODL / OER materials. Most may have
developed learning materials with quality content even without any
grounding in instructional design and curriculum design; however, the
most depressing thing is that many of them may not be engaging,
interactive, active, discursive, exploring, reflective (and,
therefore, creative and transformative). This is an issue which is
worth exploring, since ODL has been castigated not only to serve those
at the margins but also itself less capable of an engaging,
collaborative and quality learning, (This is an issue in the
developing countries: Should we continue providing low quality
education to those who had otherwise been deprived of quality
education earlier?)

The challenges are many. A few, though neither suggestive nor
exhaustive, are underlined as follows for consideration and
discussion:

1. Developing basic capabilities in designing and producing highly
interactive and engaging learning resources (which could eventually be
treated as OERs).
2. Using OERs and OER platforms for developing learning materials to
be used as OERs by the ODL institutions and others.
3. Developing OER training materials which could be shared by all
concerned. One example is the development of training resources
(OERs) on researching ODL by the Commonwealth of Learning in which, I
presume, Olu, Neil, myself and many other colleagues were involved.
This is an impressive series, created for the first time exclusively
on this neglected area; and, which has remained untapped so far. This
leads to another issue: What even if OERs are available but are not
used intelligently and productively to one’s advantage? I have seen
contexts where free availability is either not noticed or not
considered as important. This, therefore, requires branding,
promoting, and educating (including educating even the institutional
leaders). This also requires financial investment. Collaboration,
therefore, is the key to investment, development, and sharing.
4. The other issue to be seriously looked into is : Are institutions
ready to break even while willing to share their existing resources as
OERs? While this is generally not forthcoming, does it mean that we
need to develop OERs on agreed themes / contents afresh?

You may have many more to share. Let’s join the debate, and as it
proceeds. I will bring in more content appropriately to enlighten the
discussion.

Warm regards,

Prof. Santosh Panda
Director
Staff Training & Research Institute of DE,
Indira Gandhi National Open University,
New Delhi – 110 068, India
(Email : spanda...@gmail.com)
(web : www.ignou.ac.in/institute/profpanda/FINAL/Home.htm )

[Juliet Inegbedion]

Dear Prof. Panda,

 

Thank you for the introductory presentation on Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs, which is a major challenge in African.  I think this conference would serve as an opportunity for a collaboration for joint creation, while the ownership could be under the auspices  of ODL in African by so doing we would be able to solve pertinent problems as it may affect each insitution.  The major problem with OERs is that they do not take care of institutional needs.  Look forward to see this conference moving ODL in African forward.

 

Juliet Inegbedion

acde...@gmail.com wrote:

[Tunde Ipaye]

Dear All,

It is really nice to note how much momentum this forum had gathered in the last two or three weeks The topic for this week by Professor Santosh Panda  raises vital issues as contained in his introductory write up.  In addition to the issues raised by him, I am also interested in knowing what are the main principles if any to be folowed in designing OER materiasl.  Is it possible to design OER for a complete progamme in an ODL enterprise without recourse to other materials?  In the African sense a medicine (juju) that did not cost you anything is either not well regarded or even left unused. Is this analogy applicable to OER?  i.e. being free will users, students etc value it much no matter how qualitiative?  What should designers bear in mnd in this regard?

Hope to join again later.

 

Professor Babatnde Ipaye

 

[Richard Heller]

Dear Profs Panda, Ipaye and All,

In case you are not aware of a new site from UNESCO on an OER Toolkit,
you can see it here:
http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=UNESCO_OER_Toolkit. It
provides a comprehensive approach to the design and development of OER.

In the experience of the Peoples-uni of co-authoring course modules,
we are finding that while those with good IT skills take to this
easily, most academics and Public Health professionals are rather
scared of the IT aspects and struggle to join in effectively. Thus
there is a steep learning curve for the non-IT familiar person to get
involved in this kind of development. There is a great need for simple
co-authoring tools for OER development.

Dick

Dick Heller
Emeritus Professor
Coordinator Peoples-uni
http://www.peoples-uni.org

Quoting Tunde Ipaye <bip...@gmail.com>:

> --
> Professor Babatunde Ipaye
> Educo-Health Project
> 234-803-310-1920
> 234-805-310-1919
>
> >
>

[elviso...@gmail.com]

Good morning All,
The issue of developing basic capabilities in designing and producing

highly interactive and engaging learning resources (which could

eventually be treated as OERs) to my mind is a core field in ODL
scheme. I want us to guide the tendency to invest massively on
infrastructure without commensurate inputs on the human resource
required to pilot the scheme to a logical success. It is rather sad
to note that recently a university in Africa in an attempt to be
involved in Distance Learning programme invested over N30,000,000 on
various equipments but when it comes to investment (about N3,000,000)
on staff training for the project, the institution management went to
sleep. The staff training never saw the light of the day, yet the
personnel were constantly under pressure to perform. Our institution
management must be readily to take decisive action in this regard
rather than on cutting corners and expecting optima performance.

Regards,

Elvis Otamere
Snr. Systems Analyst
eota...@nou.edu.ng
National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN)

> (Email : spanda.ig...@gmail.com)
> (web :www.ignou.ac.in/institute/profpanda/FINAL/Home.htm)

[AMADI MARTHA]

Dear prof. Sanda,   Thanks for your well detailed contribution on this week virtual forum discussion on the topic: Instructional design and collaboration in OER, Issues and challenges.Could you please address these questions for me:   How do we address the problem that the institutional reward and incentive systems do not recognise the time spent authoring materials ? Secondly, materials or software is created and made openly available as OER, and because open distribution, sharing, and co development are not part of the workflow design, the marerials are frequently not stored for easy sharing and reuse, why ? Thirdly, why is that in many traditional settings the academic time used to develop elearning materials instead of doing some research or teaching is not recognised or assigned as cost to course development ?   My regards to all who are involve in these academic excercise. Dr Amadi Martha Nkechinyere Research Fellow Regional Training & Research Institute for Open and Distance Learning

National Open University of Nigeria

14/16 Ahmadu Bello Way, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria +234-8038723221 --- On Mon, 6/16/08, acde...@gmail.com <acde...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Juliet Inegbedion]

Dear All,

 

It may interest us to know that OER is not totally free, though we have the freedom of free usage but need to spend money on:

• training,
• customising/adaptation, and
• purchase of the necessary equipment.

The desingers of the OER only consider the possibile need in various educational sector and there by make it free for those who may be interested in using it.  It is then left for the interested sectors to train the users (students/facilitators/instrustors) and purchase the required equipment.

 

Juliet Inegbedion

 

----- Original Message ----
From: Tunde Ipaye <bip...@gmail.com>
To: acde-2008-onlin...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 7:27:00 AM
Subject: Re: Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs : Issues and Challenges

Dear All,

It is really nice to note how much momentum this forum had gathered in the last two or three weeks The topic for this week by Professor Santosh Panda  raises vital issues as contained in his introductory write up.  In addition to the issues raised by him, I am also interested in knowing what are the main principles if any to be folowed in designing OER materiasl.  Is it possible to design OER for a complete progamme in an ODL enterprise without recourse to other materials?  In the African sense a medicine (juju) that did not cost you anything is either not well regarded or even left unused. Is this analogy applicable to OER?  i.e. being free will users, students etc value it much no matter how qualitiative?  What should designers bear in mnd in this regard?

Hope to join again later.

 

Professor Babatnde Ipaye

 

On 6/16/08, Juliet Inegbedion <ladyj...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Dear Prof. Panda,

 

Thank you for the introductory presentation on Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs, which is a major challenge in African.  I think this conference would serve as an opportunity for a collaboration for joint creation, while the ownership could be under the auspices  of ODL in African by so doing we would be able to solve pertinent problems as it may affect each insitution.  The major problem with OERs is that they do not take care of institutional needs.  Look forward to see this conference moving ODL in African forward.

 

Juliet Inegbedion

acde...@gmail.com wrote:

[Richard Kajumbula]

Greetings to you all.

Thank you Prof. Panda for that introduction and other participants for the
contributions.

The issue of ODL materials development is a big challenge. I remember when I
visited IGNOU, I was taken on tour of their materials production systems
and facilities. I must say it was an entire production “plant” of study
materials (print, Audio eg cassettes, CDs, radio stations and recording
studios, and Visual including television). This to me was a distant dream in
Africa. In my University, even producing print materials (because that is
the generation in which we are operating) is difficult and about 70% of the
courses are not covered.

Two of the biggest hindrances I have noticed, as have Prof. Panda and Prof.
Babatunde Ipaye in their earlier submissions, are, first the assumption that
our people have appropriate capacity of their own and, secondly the cost in
terms of time and money. Even where authors have been promised royalties and
that the material will be considered as one of the works of the individual
when being evaluated for promotion, little has been done.

This means that we need to improvise new methods of having the print
materials in place. An investment of money is needed coupled by
sensitization and training. I would like Prof. Panda and any other
participant to enlighten me on whether it is possible to hire a team of
private writers whose fulltime responsibility is to write with the guidance
of the tutor.

Of course writing in a team is already going on in several universities but
the practice has been that the team is composed of the same tutors who are
busy on other duties. This is common in dual mode universities like Makerere
University where I lecture.

As we move towards OERs and developing materials, several questions again
come up.

1. If the resources are free for the readers, who is going to invest time in
writing them and at what cost?
2. At what point is an OER material considered ready for use by the students
since it is always undergoing changes (I presume if it is on a wiki) by
anybody interested including the students?

Dr. Amadi asked a question that has been puzzling me too, that “How do we

address the problem that the institutional reward and incentive systems do

not recognise the time spent authoring materials?” I do agree with this
but it also depends on the context. I would again use the example of
Makerere University. Authors of ODL materials are hosted in a hotel for two
weeks and are expected to write some chapters. They are paid for the time
they spend there in a writing workshop. They are also paid for each chapter
completed. Alternatively, they are paid a certain amount of money per credit
unit. I do not know how this can work if it were OERs being produced and to
be availed free.
However, the fact is that by the time a book is completed, there is a lot of
unrecorded time that the author spends writing and this is not immediately
or recognizably rewarded. The question of “what motivates a teacher to
write a material?” also comes in here. What will be the motivator of the
author contributing to OERs?

This is where the need for a lot of sensitization comes in and
collaboration. If you are in it with others, it is not as bad as it can be
when you are in it alone.

We also have to consider the context of the University as we introduce OERs.
That is my submission so far.
Richard Kajumbula
Incharge, Student Support Services
Department of Distance Education
Makerere University
Kampala, Uganda

[Terry Anderson]

Richard makes a number of good points and I appreciate the window he
creates into the African DE world.

I will address his questions about OER.
Richard asks:

> 1. If the resources are free for the readers, who is going to invest
> time in
> writing them and at what cost?

There are a number of possible revenue streams available for OER -
Stephen Downes writes about them at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/3/5/36781698.pdf
in an article called Sustainable Models for OER development. The most
common model is that academics are payed by their institution to
develop materials, they are rewarded to some degree(usually not as
much as "research") for this work at promotion and tenure time, they
get prestige, social capital and personal exposure by the contribution
and they may be able to sell the material in different formats as well
as make it available for free (for an example see the release of The
Theory and Practice of Online Learning 2nd Ed. on sale for $40.00 or
free as PDF at http://www.aupress.ca/books/Terry_Anderson.php
The costs are really not much different than if one was producing the
materials for local print production, since most content is created in
electronic form (using word processor or publishing software) anyways.

2. At what point is an OER material considered ready for use by the
students
>
> since it is always undergoing changes (I presume if it is on a wiki)
> by
> anybody interested including the students?

OERs can be closed at any time by the instructor. This can happen by
printing them or putting them on a CD, DVD or other medium. As Richard
suggests they MAY be placed or developed on an open WIKI, but even
here, the editing capacity of the WIKI can be text can be shut down or
the text can be copied to a static site for the duration of the
course, if that is what the instructor wants.

Richard's final point that "we have to consider the context of the
university" is of crucial importance. Most Universities (in any
region!) are not known for their capacity to innovate and OERs have
potentially disruptive consequences on many current practices. But
remember we also create cultures as well as live in them!
Terry Anderson

Terry Anderson
ter...@athabascau.ca

__
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[myani Bukar]

Hi all,
I totally and absolutely agree with Mr. Elvis' sentiments. Further to
that is the reality of a lack of proper project planning and
management in the invest as such. I think our institutions should
always evolve project timelines that will ensure the training of the
staff either before the procurement of equipment or as soon as the
equipment is procured...after all, programs are meant for people and
not vice versa

Myani Bukar,Esq
Virtual Library Manager
Odade Consulting

[vunnam venkaiah]

Dear Colleagues,
 
 I wish to inform you that I would like to participate in the Virtual Forum. My area of interest is educational media in ODL. Of late, my current research interst includes OERs, particularly in the developing countries context.

Prof. Vunnam Venkaiah
Head, Dept. of Business Management
Former Rector & Executive Director, GRADE
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University
Road No. 46, Jubillee Hills, Hyderabad - 500033

Tele - Contact:
+91- 40- 2311 2141   -   Residence
+91- 944-071-52-94    -   Mobile
+91- 40- 2368 0442   - Office
+91- 40- 2354 8883     - Fax

email: vven...@hotmail.com / venka...@gmail.com

---

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:02:23 +0530
From: ema...@gmail.com
To: vven...@hotmail.com
Subject: Fwd: Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs : Issues and Challenges

[Tunde Ipaye]

Dear All,

I read the contributions by Terry with some keen  interest since I wanted to learn of what happens elsewhere.  I did not hear him say what the situation is   at Athabasca.  So what is the OER situation there?  How are the Faculty rewarded?  What is the level of motivation in faculty participation and how do the older faculty  encourage younger ones to contribute? How is the issue of capacity building handled?  How are students introduced to the use of OER and how are course writers/designers/developers introduced to use of OER.  I hope the questions are not too personal I am just curious learning from an in situ situation.

 

Professor Babatunde Ipaye

[Richard Kajumbula]

Greetings to you all.

First of all, thank you very much Terry for the information that you gave
responding to my concerns. I would like to join Professor Babatunde Ipaye in
requesting to know your experiences at Athabasca. The same request goes to
Prof. Panda at IGNOU. This will be very usefull in helping us (those who
have not yet started) to learn and these already on the road to improve.

Regards

Richard Kajumbula
Incharge, Student Support Services
Department of Distance Education
Makerere University
Kampala, Uganda

Tunde Ipaye writes:

[dr_bhandari]

Hi,
The production of OER should be a targeted process. One should know
what syllabus one aims to cover via the OER produced by him/her.

All OER produced by the educators can then be peer reviewed by a
quality control committee formed by the discussion leaders on this
forum.

All OER thus produced shall then be used under the creative commons
attribute-sharealike license. All such content shall be branded by
this forums logo and posted on web2 portals like docstoc.com or
scribd.com. Third party use, downloads, embedding and modifications
are ably supported by such document ( pdf,ppt,doc.) sharing sites.
They are also indexed by all the major search engines and so good
visibility and availability of the material is assured.

This independent-non profit forum can also issue certificates on line
for educators providing a certain quantity of OER material.
Organizations like Health-on-net ( HON) http://www.hon.ch can also be
involved. Due respect and publicity given to this quality control and
certifying forum will ensure more participation by educators.

Just my ramblings :)

regards,
Neel.
Dr.Neelesh Bhandari
www.geocities.com/neeleshbhandari

Program Lead (Medical elearning)
www.medrcedutech.com

Terry Anderson wrote:
> Richard makes a number of good points and I appreciate the window he
> creates into the African DE world.
>
> I will address his questions about OER.
> Richard asks:
> > 1. If the resources are free for the readers, who is going to invest
> > time in
> > writing them and at what cost?
> There are a number of possible revenue streams available for OER -

> Stephen Dows writes about them at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/3/5/36781698.pdf

[Terry Anderson]

Thanks for the kind words Richard and Tunde.

I will try to describe the use of OERs at Athabasca, but Athabasca (probably like many universities) is like the elephant, in that it has many parts and it depends which you are feeling and experiencing. I am  not in "production" but a researcher/teacher in a single Centre for Distance Education. In this Centre, that does only graduate education, we adopt a much less formal production process and courses are mostly done in craft style by a single professor with occasional aide from an instructional designer or graphics person. The key is the use of Moodle as a learning management system that allows us to add resources or incorporate text or activities very quickly and easily.

But I imagine you are more interested in the  production model followed in the undergraduate courses, where a more formal course team is involved. Here we are making slower progress. We have a pilot of a Calculus course now in production which will use quite extensive online graphics (mostly using Flash) and it will be released under a Creative Commons license. We use Moodle for nearly all courses. We assume that all students have access to the Net (and only do work arounds) in rare cases where net access is not available.  We encourage our faculty to check first on the Net to insure that resources, activities and even text is not available elsewhere before creating our own units. We still have full time staff members to gain copyright clearance of some articles, activities  and chapters, but again we hope and encourage developers to find materials published as Open Access. We also run a "Virtual reading room" from the library that allows students to easily access electronic versions of copyright materials legally as we license them from various aggregators and can have them available online for our students, but only if they sign in using passwords as registered students.

Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in a grant application to the Hewlett Foundation (who have funded MIT, the Open University) and most of the other signature OER projects. Thus, we have not yet put very much of our content online and made it accessible. This is partially due to the fact that our courses often contain copyright materials (like textbooks) which we can't make available.  But there is also a sense that we can't put our courses on OER because our competitors will use the materials. This concern is now less than it was under our previous administration, but still a nagging concern. 

We also have a repository using DSPACE where academics are "encouraged" to place their published materials. I failed to get this made into a requirement for faculty to do so (it is very hard to force academics to do anything!!!) and as result only a subset of academics have uploaded their research work - again there is some copyright issues involved, but we encourage faculty to publish in Open Access journals. You can see my publications in the AUSpace collection at  http://auspace.athabascau.ca:8080/dspace/items-by-author?author=Anderson%2C+Terry  or look at others publications from the main entry point at auspace.athabascau.ca  One unforeseen advantage of the system was that when my computer was stolen in Europe last fall, it was nice that I could still access most copies of my publications.

As for students, I don't think they really know or care if it is material developed by AU faculty and copyright is held by Athabasca or if it is licensed by us for their use, or if it is Open Access or licensed under Creative Commons.

OER is still new here in Canada, I would like to say that we have succeeded in moving all production to OER models, but as we say in Canada, Universities move at glacial speed - meaning VERY slowly - a glacier (river of ice) can take a few thousand years to move down a mountain side!

Hope this helps

Terry

[Toyin Oloniteru]

This is a good idea.

I support it. We have to be creative and make maximum use of our
community participation.

Olutoyin Oloniteru
Director, Knowledge Age Africa Limited
Lagos, Nigeria.

2008/6/19 dr_bhandari <neelesh...@gmail.com>:

--
Toyin Oloniteru
Lagos, Nigeria
Email: toyin.o...@gmail.com
Cell:2348022920006

[hakeem otun]

this is a good idea from the group, it need to be perfected.

otun Akeem
TRCN, Abuja

--- On Thu, 6/19/08, Toyin Oloniteru <toyin.o...@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Toyin Oloniteru <toyin.o...@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs : Issues and Challenges
> To: acde-2008-onlin...@googlegroups.com

[dr_bhandari]

Hi,
Thanks for the appreciative comments.
We, at Medical education research center, Hyderabad can take this up
as a social project.
If i could be given the names of the "Project OER- Africa" forum
members, and their email ids, i can proceed on this idea.

Regards,
Neel.
www.geocities.com/neeleshbhandari
www.medrcedutech.com

On Jun 20, 3:46 am, hakeem otun <holaj...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> this is a good idea from the group, it need to be perfected.
>
> otun Akeem
> TRCN, Abuja
>

> --- On Thu, 6/19/08, Toyin Oloniteru <toyin.olonit...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> > From: Toyin Oloniteru <toyin.olonit...@gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs : Issues and Challenges
> > To: acde-2008-onlin...@googlegroups.com
> > Date: Thursday, June 19, 2008, 10:19 AM
> > This is a good idea.
>
> > I support it. We have to be creative and make maximum use
> > of our
> > community participation.
>
> > Olutoyin Oloniteru
> > Director, Knowledge Age Africa Limited
> > Lagos, Nigeria.
>

> > 2008/6/19 dr_bhandari <neeleshbhand...@gmail.com>:

> > Email: toyin.olonit...@gmail.com
> > Cell:2348022920006- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[akina...@gmail.com]

Dear Prof. Panda and all participants,
My name is Akin Adejimi. I teach in the Department of Architecture,
Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ibogun campus, Nigeria. May I have the
following to say as an addition to what the moderator of this
discussion has said in great detail.
The essence of instructional design is to plan ahead rather than
solving problems as they arise. This is cheaper, easier and neater on
the long run. As a matter of fact, the major work in distance learning
and OER is their planning. Anything may be quickly posted on the
internet for others to learn from but whether such information will
achieve its objectives is another big question. Apart from this,
different courses demand for different instructional designs.. While
some may be easily designed and packaged for students’ consumption,
others are technologically inclined and need special techniques and
technologies to be able to achieve the tutelage, interaction and
collaboration required for such courses, e.g. technical courses.
Other key challenges in instructional design include the following:
Ensuring that authors actively involve the learners. It has been said
that new authors have a natural tendency to write for their peers,
especially if they are academics who are used to writing for academic
publications. According to (COL 2000), they need to be convinced that
their materials should read more like a tutorial than a lecture, with
an emphasis on interaction. One way to do this is to get them to
develop the learning activities (Lockwood, 1992) for the students
first, and then write or locate the content to complete the tasks.
They can even be required to complete formal assessment items like
exams, assignments or project requirements before building the
learning materials to support them. Another challenge is the issue of
design materials. Since this is a new area, materials to use as a
guide are scarce.
Technology is another challenge in designing online instructions. This
means that the designer must have been conversant or used the
technology, otherwise how do you design for a technology you don’t
know anything about? Or how do you design instructions that there is
no technology to carry it out. Also in the same vein is the fact that
online technology changes too frequently. The issue of deadline is
another challenge when distance education or open resources is
concerned. Likewise, the issue of teamwork is another challenge. As
good instructions are more or less always come from a team work rather
than from individuals, if care is not taken, this may lead to
abandoned project because of the diversity in orientation and
experience of the team members. Some team members may not be able to
work together.

Thank you

Akin Adejimi
Dept. of Arch, OOU

On Jun 16, 10:13 am, acde2...@gmail.com wrote:

> (Email : spanda.ig...@gmail.com)
> (web :www.ignou.ac.in/institute/profpanda/FINAL/Home.htm)

[spanda...@gmail.com]

Dear Juliet:

Hi. Thank you for your very valuable and interesting remarks. I also
look forward to this very important conference to make pairs/
collaborations/consortia of institutions and people to take the agenda
forward. This is crucial since we wre meeting people (and most
importantly, institutional leaders) F2F (even if we teach at a
distance) and have long and sustained discussions on the issue. For
me, development of OERs does not restrict to only course materials;
they can also be for capacity building/(continuing( professional
development, research capacity building including resources for
bidding and dissemination (for instance, open source online journals),
collaborative projects, community resouces, etc

The issues concern: to what extent can institutions go to collaborate
to develop open course resources and in what way to share; how to
share student fees even if the resources are open; how should the
institutions adopt/adapt the resources (this is most crucial in OERs
since people within cultures/nation states differ in many ways
including the way they learn and their capacity and level of
learning). Baba (Prof Ipaye) has raised an important issue while
giving a very appropriate African example--we have a saying in India
"Home chicken is as good as normal cereal--while cereal outside (may
be in the neighbourhood) is better than chicken"--should we consider
OERs as totally free of cost or should we (who?) charge a fees? Are we
allowed to charge a fees even if we have not developed that? What
about the creators who still retain the moral right to their creation?
If we take the example of Wiki/WikiEducator, we create resources
together, and continue improving together--therefore, the 'community'
of creators own it--in a way, the humanity owns it (though one needs
to be professionally competent and responsible towards 'not tampering'
the creation).

Santosh

On Jun 16, 2:54 pm, Juliet Inegbedion <ladyjay4...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Prof. Panda,
>
>   Thank you for the introductory presentation on Instructional Design and Collaborative Authoring of OERs, which is a major challenge in African.  I think this conference would serve as an opportunity for a collaboration for joint creation, while the ownership could be under the auspices  of ODL in African by so doing we would be able to solve pertinent problems as it may affect each insitution.  The major problem with OERs is that they do not take care of institutional needs.  Look forward to see this conference moving ODL in African forward.
>
>   Juliet Inegbedion
>

> (Email : spanda.ig...@gmail.com)
> (web :www.ignou.ac.in/institute/profpanda/FINAL/Home.htm)

[Felix Olakulehin]

Dear Prof Panda,

 

Thanks for your expositions on these issues. I am happy that you will be facilitating a pre-conference workshop on Researching Open and Distance Learning at the workshop. I hope you will be able to shed greater light on the use of OERs for research capacity development as indicated in your contribution.

 

Looking forward to seeing you in July

 

Felix

 

Research Fellow
Regional Training and Research Institute for Open and Distance Learning

National Open University of Nigeria

14/16 Ahmadu Bello Way, Victoria Island

Lagos - Nigeria
+234-805-544-7164
folak...@nou.edu.ng, felix...@gmail.com
...........................................................
---------------------------------------------------------
RETRIDAL is an International Training & Research Institute co-established by the National Open University of Nigeria and The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) to develop a strong corps of experts in various areas of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) within the West African sub-region.

[azi joseph]

Dear Prof. Panda and all participants,

 

I have been reading with keen interest all the postings.

 

I am an Industrial Designer by profession and have since 1992 been lecturing Graphic Design at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria-Nigeria. Presently, my post-doctoral research is an exploration into Computer Graphics and Animation application for ‘Instructional Design’ purposes. I call my Ph.D. dissertation project the ‘Interactive Child Learning Aid Project’, aimed at developing an indigenous model for enhancing pre-primary education in Nigeria (you may google i-CLAP for details). A lot of facinating results were revealed after the model was tested for 4 weeks on 40 pre-primary school pupils (ages 5-6) in Zaria, which opened my eyes to the crucial need for ‘indigenous content development’. 

 

Of course, in order to determine a successful instructional multimedia design piece whether for ODL purpose or otherwise, 2 issues are fundamental ‘interface’ and ‘content’, for which African art and design symbols, crafts, music, architecture, fashion and so on proffer rich sources for great inspiration. If African renaissance through digital imaging is to be a reality the tasks transcends merely integrating computer hardware applications to relevant facets of the African socio-eco-cultural life like education, health, governance etc. The need to designing and developing relevant software contents pertinent to local needs, learning styles and preferences cannot be ignored. Through which process the African experience would constitute the learning experience, consequently the rich heritage would not only be preserved, but promoted and projected to the global community.

 

I agree with Akin Adejimi and all the others. A key area of take-off is content development for which all stakeholders must put their hands on deck and work towards.

 

Thank you.

 

Dr. Joseph Azi

(0802 8506 299)