More free education resources
Posted by michael_horn | Under Educational technology, Higher Education, Online learning Friday Apr 24, 2009Is owning content the future in education, or will it be more important to help people navigate through it and filter it to find useful learning that pertains to their needs and desires?
With the free resources increasingly on the Web—two of which we wrote about a few blog posts ago here—one can make the argument that content is becoming more of a commodity. Certainly there are many avenues to find free stuff to help you learn something, and Lifehacker has a post up that highlights several of these.
From resources to help you teach yourself a music instrument or to program code to helping you get a “Personal MBA” or similar formal learning objects that a liberal arts major would work with in getting a degree, there are tons of sites that Lifehacker gives some tips for finding—and then navigating.
There are some neat business models out there as well, such as TeachMate, which allows people to trade skills—the example Lifehacker gives is you can teach someone English and in exchange they teach you to cook.
What other free resources are out there on the Web that you are seeing and using to advance learning?
The California Learning Resource Network is a state-funded project that wades through free educational resources and posts only those that are high-quality and advertisement-free. They’ve reviewed more than 2500 sites, linking them to academic standards, and now also post free software/web tools and free supplementary course materials. Their recent blog post, “Open Source Courseware: Tipping Point, Competition, and Problems” shows their committment to educators.
I am compiling a list of resources relating to open courseware, open education, etc. at http://www.calvin.edu/~dsc8/ocw.htm. But I especially appreciated Zaid Ali Alsagoff’s site and his page at http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-learning-ocw-oer-free.html
Thanks,
Daniel Christian
Grand Rapids, MI
Calvin College
http://www.calvin.edu/~dsc8/
Hi Michael,
Thank you for a wonderful post and opening with a very insightful opening question: Is owning content the future in education, or will it be more important to help people navigate through it and filter it to find useful learning that pertains to their needs and desires?
Your question recognizes the critical importance of a mentor to guide the novice through an ocean of material. I believe this is best accomplished when a master uses a series of questions that probe a student’s thinking prior to offering a learning resource.
An ocean of unfiltered open educational resources may be necessary, but is insufficient in itself to transform education. What is needed is intelligent tutors (human or machine) that can serve as dynamic filters that act in real-time to select the most appropriate resources for learners. A good tutor will operate in each individual’s personal zone of proximal development.
In order for this to happen, the expert tutor must have a deep appreciation for the learning pathways/progressions that lead to advancing mastery of a subject area and the resources available at each step in the learning pathway.
Collect-Organize-Manage-Use
At the present time, the teaching profession is collecting the best resources in digital repositories. These are being organized into subject areas. Once enough material is organized by subject, they need to be managed into developmentally appropriate learning progressions for student use.
So keep an eye out for business models that successfully manage their content into distinct learning progressions for learners on different levels.
An outstanding example of this kind of business model is ChinesePod. You can find them at: http://chinesepod.com/
They are clearly competing in the realm of “nonconsumption,” as Chinese Language classes in the US are few and far between.
All the best,
Gregory Louie
Biotechnology Teacher
http://www.myteacherpages.com/webpages/mrglouie
Efland, NC
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