OERGlue welcomes Bowen Masco to the team. Bowen will be focusing on the backend services behind OERGlue, and any other challenges/fun stuff assigned to him.

He joins the team after developing rocket avionics software for USU’s Chimaera rocket project, where he could legitimately use the phrase, “It is rocket science”.

In addition to his experience with rockets, he brings years of Ruby development, computer security, and system administration experience to the team.

You can find Bowen on his blog, twitter, and github.

Welcome Bowen!

Last night, Justin and I attended the Kynetx’s Impact 2011 evening sessions in SLC and got to listen to Doc Searles, Phil Windley, and Q&A with Scoble talk about the live web. We think OER Glue is a perfect example of the Live Web. We visited with Scoble and gave a demo.

On our drive back to Logan we talked about what the key affordances of OER Glue are and what benefits they provide:

Remix in place vs. copy or link to

In contrast to other tools, OER Glue lets you adapt content to your context where it already exists instead of requiring it to be copied into a new repository or system for modification. Benefits of this are:

• Easy reuse – Makes it easy to reuse existing content.
• Content stays fresh – The content stays current, your course always references the latest version.
• Single point of maintenance – Authors maintain the content using their existing tools
• Copyright – Avoids copyright issues related to using other people’s content by accessing it just as it is normally used in their web browser
• Coherence – Provides a more coherent, contextualized  experience than just linking to courses.
• Content lives beyond class – When content lives in the open rather than behind a password students can refer back to it and even learn from it long after the course has ended.
• Motivation – When students work in the open rather than behind a password, they are motivated to do work they can be proud of.

“Integrate with everyone” vs. re-implement functionality

After years of building web applications for education and experiencing the frustration of using systems that re-implement functionality that has a better counterpart on the open web, we arrived at the strategy of “integrating with everyone” instead of trying to replicate functionality such as blogs, discussions, quizzes and the next cool tool that shows up on the web. OER Glue makes this easy by providing light weight integrations via widgets placed in pages, back end communication with APIs, and tools on the OER dock. Benefits of this strategy are:

• Decreases learning curve – Using popular tools from the open web that teachers and learners are already familiar with decreases the learning curve.
• Prepares learners for the real thing – Instead of learning to use tools that are “like” the popular tools on the open web learners gain proficiency using the real thing. This prepares and makes them more effective for out of school experiences and the workplace.
• Ready for the next cool thing – New powerful tools are always springing up on the web. The expense of trying to re-implement those tools for use in learning is immense. OER Glue’s light weight integration with existing tools makes for a simple and efficient method of incorporating and using whatever comes along.
• Community can contribute integrations – OER Glue widgets, dock tools, and mashup scripts are implemented using a small amount of Javascript and HTML. We plan to provide simple ways for the community to contribute integrations and draw from contributions.

We are always looking for ideas, feedback, new tools to integrate with. Please send us yours!

We’ve been heads down in OER Glue since last October so we haven’t had much time to post. However, we’ve now got the software into a state where we can share it with a few select friends and beta testers. We’re still improving it daily. If you want to play with it sign up for the beta and we’ll send you an invite.

If you prefer to wait until the software is fully baked we understand. In the mean time you can see how OER Glue works here.

While I did sport facial hair early on – I had a full Tom Selleck style moustache in high school – my dad never taught me to shave. He didn’t have to. He did teach me how to think and how to figure things out so he never had to teach me how to do simple things that aren’t that hard to figure out. I do think he might have regretted that education when I took apart one of his old cars to figure out how it worked. I never did put that back together….

Students engaged in the OER experience face a similar challenge. Consumption of OER by self-learners is currently a lonely process. Those learners represent a special group of highly motivated individuals who are willing to put in the effort to figure things out on their own. One challenge of OER then is to figure out how to support those users to enhance their experience and to build a community. We hope to alleviate learner isolation by connecting communities via OER Glue. Of course the big networks come to mind – Facebook and Twitter. We’ll integrate with those. We’re looking for other communities that can help OER Glue users navigate their way through the learning experience. Are there other networks we should be looking at?

Whenever you talk about technology in education accessibility is one of the first topics to come up. We’ve been asked several times how OER Glue addresses the issue, most recently when we presented as part of a webinar to the open textbook research community. To make sure we had a clear answer we did what any new company should do – found an expert and offered him lunch. Lucky for us the expert is a good friend of mine from high school (Jared Smith) who is known world wide for his expertise. Large companies pay big bucks to have him come and train their employees. We’re poor so we bought him a sandwich.

The conversation was enlightening and helped us to formulate a strategy that not only helps us become compliant with accessibility standards but which can also help other content find its way to compliance. In particular OER Glue is capable of modifying content based on input from a course author. This means that an instructor can build their course using resources from MIT OCW, Wikipedia, and their own WordPress blog (just to name a few). They don’t need to import the content into a new CMS or LMS. The part where we modify content in place inspired our conversation and the result was a bit of brilliance.

We can make other sites compliant and thus usable by those with disabilities even if the content owner isn’t willing to change their site. Our first step will be integration with a service provided by WebAim that helps content providers determine compliance. Then the course author can modify the content of a page by adding alt tags, proper titles etc. Then all users will have access to the material.

Long term we envision a community that analyzes courses and makes contributions to help make the open courses developed using OER Glue available to all students.

I’ve been a ‘PhD student’ for quite a while now. It’s one of those things that I’ve always meant to finish but building stuff has always gotten in the way. I’ve also just gotten tired of the lunacy of academic requirements. I’ve written and received a number of grants. However, that doesn’t count for my PhD. I talked to one of my professors and he informed me that I would need to follow the requirements of the class. I found it amusing that in order to get a PhD I needed to pretend to get a grant rather than actually get a grant.

To be fair if I pushed the issue or if I started the ‘class’ before I wrote another grant I’m sure that I would get credit. However, I think that this experience highlights part of academia that is broken and has serious implications for OER adoption. Too often our focus is on the requirements and the certification rather than the experience and outcome. I’ve been in a many classes where a student would ask, “but how will I use this in real life?” All too often the response from the instructor is a curt response – ‘because I say so’, ‘because the state requires it’, ‘for the sake of learning’, ‘to pass the test’ etc. This immediately alienates students who are seeking context and real world application for the information. I think this is a trait common amongst human beings. When presented with so much information we discard the bits we don’t find useful (Calculus) for the information we find immediately applicable (how to get a date for the dance).

The world of OER has an interesting opportunity to approach the ‘how will I use this’ question in a novel way. Currently many of the individual learners are consuming OER because it does answer some real world problem. That problem might simply be curiosity but the motivation for consuming the course comes from the student rather than from the potential for credentials. No other scenario is available to the student of OER. Institutions offering the material (kindly) provide it, but the student is left without an opportunity to receive a degree. Most employers determine eligibility based on whether the individual has been stamped by a respectable organization. This leaves a chasm between consumption of OER and the professional advancement of the student. Due to the rising cost of higher education I believe that over the next decade or so educational opportunities will branch out from large institutions. Those who can afford to attend a university will still do so, but that still leaves a large population of individuals unable to dedicate 4 years and thousands of dollars. That group can be served by the OER community.

Our vision is authentic, sustainable, open learning. Along the way I hope we can find a way to provide the credentials users require to succeed, but provide them with authentic learning experiences. OER glue aims to use the web, the real parts, WordPress, Drupal, Facebook, Google Docs, etc to enhance OER materials. I’d like to think that a user pursuing education via this technology won’t ever have to ask ‘how will I use this’, but instead will find themselves using the technologies immediately to build an online reputation or even start the next big thing. I know that I would rather find myself in WordPress than in Blackboard any day. We use Google Docs everyday. Students using OER Glue will as well. We’ll monitor student success as we go and make adjustments to improve the learner experience. Oh and in case you are worried that I lack the academic credentials. Don’t lose any sleep. Joel has a PhD.

Years ago we had an opportunity to build several small pieces of software that integrated with popular so called ‘Web 2.0′ services. The experiment was a mild success with one of the services – ozmozr.com bringing in a new user every few minutes on the day we launched. At the time we were ecstatic about the potential and excited about the new development platform we had used – Ruby on Rails. We had a grand vision for what we could build but never had the chance due to a lack of funding and other pressing projects.

Fast forward a few years and hundreds of ideas later. Today we have greater insight and greater development capacity. We’ve had years of experience in the OER space and have had time to observe what works and what doesn’t. The sum of all we have learned and experienced has come to fruition and we now are able to put together what we believe will be a unique and powerful educational tool we are calling OER Glue.

OER Glue builds on an open source code base that has gone through multiple iterations. Over the next 6 months we will continue to evolve and grow that code base, but in less than 6 months we’ll have a prototype to share with the world.

Follow us here. We’re not ready to share the full vision – we’ll do that when the software is a bit more baked. However, we’ll announce and show off bits and pieces as we go.