From the KY Learning Depot Launch

In November, the state of Kentucky launched their repository the Kentucky Learning Depot. Kentucky has been our pilot partner in developing the Blueprint and has work closely with us throughout the grant period.

Here is an account of the event from Curt Bonk's blog:

http://travelinedman.blogspot.com/2009/11/it-was-good-to-be-in-kentuckytheyre-not.html

Open textbook resources

As discussed in the Blueprint, open textbooks have become an important sustainability strategy for the Orange Grove Repository. Here are some resources you might find interesting:

• “Students Retain Information in Print-Like Formats Better.” This article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Wired Campus” website, reports on a study at Arizona State University that found students had lower reading comprehension of scrolling online material than they did of print-like versions. The article links to the entire report: "To Scroll or Not to Scroll: Scrolling, Working Memory Capacity, and Comprehending Complex Texts" Retrieved March 29, 2010, from: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Students-Retain-Print/22088/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
  
  
• The Community College Open Textbook Collaborative (http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/) supports a Ning group on Open Textbook Research. If you wish to sign up for free membership, please go to: http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/main/authorization/signUp?target=http%3A%2F%2Fcollegeopentextbooks.ning.com%2Fgroup%2Fresearchers
  
  
• This article was posted on CCOTC’s Open Textbook Research Ning network site. Titled: “The Open Revolution: An Environmental Scan of the Open Textbook Landscape,” by Jordan Frith, NC State University, August 10, 2009, it examines several open textbook platforms in depth (Wikibooks, Connexions, Flat World Knowledge, The Global Text Project, and Textbook Media). The author concludes that this movement is dynamic and still evolving. He hopes that “the future of the textbook industry will be one of traditional textbooks competing with open options. Both professors and students will benefit from that competition.” Read the article at: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dspc/opentextbookswhitepaper.pdf

Some articles you might find interesting:

From The New York Times: Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending
Electronic book borrowing is a convenient way for libraries to remain relevant, but publishers are worried.

From Atlanta Journal Constitution: Kindle lightens textbook load, but flaws remain.

Orange Grove Texts Plus

When developing the OnCoRe Blueprint, one of the main issues to surface is that of repository sustainability. No one seems to have discovered an ideal model or approach for addressing this critical issue. One possible model for long-term financial viability of a digital repository is provided by a current initiative of The Orange Grove, Florida's digital repository.

The Orange Grove has been monitoring the increased interest in open textbooks, and, in conjunction with the University Press of Florida, recently launched an effort to address the rising cost of textbooks. Orange Grove Texts Plus (OGT+) is a pilot project designed to provide students and researchers with high–quality texts that are affordable, accessible, and adaptable to reader preferences.

Students can access a wide range of textbooks in a choice of electronic or bound-book formats. These books are priced, on average, 40-50% less than similar textbooks purchased at retail outlets, including online discounters. The financial model for this initiative anticipates that revenues received from print copies of texts will be used to recover printing costs and costs to maintain the system for delivery of textbooks and content. Within three years, it is hoped that the repository will be financially self-sustaining

The OGT+ initiative has been receiving a lot of press coverage, including:

• The Tallahassee Democrat (both an article and an editorial)
• The Chronicle of Higher Education
• The Independent Florida Alligator
• Tampa Tribune
• The South Florida Sun-Sentinel
• The St. Pete Times
• News Service of Florida

Open Educational Resources and Open Courseware

Are you familiar with OER and OCW? If not and you are interested in repositories, then you should be familiar with these terms.

OER stands for Open Educational Resources (OER), a world wide movement to make open educational resources freely available, at no cost, and free of restrictions. The Hewlett Foundation has funded multiple projects to enable this movement. Examples are: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware (OCW) Project, Rice University Connexions, and Creative Commons. The Hewlett Foundation has also funded the Monterey Institute's National Repository of Online Courses which has a cost associated for a state, consortium or institution to become a participating member with benefits. However, content is also freely available from their website - http://www.hippocampus.org/.

I just discovered an outstanding website that provides a comprehensive list of OER and OCW resources. http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-learning-ocw-oer-free.html. Make sure that you scroll down, down, down, to see the long list of repository/content links for the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, Translation Affiliates, and Others. At the very bottom is a link to OER/Free Repositories. This is a compendium of resources that you won't want to miss knowing about.

There is also a Google custom search for OER/OCW repositories which you can embed on your own website, by copying the code at this website: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=000793406067725335231%3Afm2ncznoswy.

The Stingy Scholar blog lists their top 14 MIT OCW courses and summarizes the materials provided: http://stingyscholar.blogspot.com/search?q=mit. The courses are:
1. Introductory Biology, Spring 2005
2. Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005 - The course was administrated by the Space Shuttle Orbiter Project Manager and a shuttle astronaut.
3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Spring 2005)
4. Symmetry, Structure, and Tensor Properties of Materials, Fall,2005
5. Chinese (Regular) which includes a "great free textbook and audio pronunciation files" including a downloadable study software to test yourself.
6. Electromagnetic Fields, Forces, and Motion, Spring 2005
7. Advanced Fluid Dynamics of the Environment, Fall 2002
8. Software Engineering for Web Applications, Fall 2003
9. Logic I, Fall 2005
10. Quantitative Physiology: Organ Transport Systems, Spring 2004
11. Managing Innovation: Emerging Trends, Spring 2005
12. Inventions and Patents, Fall 2005
13. Structural Analysis and Control, Spring 2004
14. Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach, Spring 2002

The OCW movement is still evolving. MIT and The Open University have taken two different approaches. The Stingy Scholar summarizes these approaches on a 3.1.2007 posting. The point is that OCW does not provide a "turn key" solution where a faculty member or a student has everything they need to learn the subject matter.

....pedias, knols, and endium's - oh my!

Today, I learned about some new and interesting web resources from an Inside Higher Education article, Making Wikis Work for Scholars. The article comments on faculty use of Wikipedia and summarizes additional resource sites. A common theme among the developing resource sites is the emphasis on content accuracy and identifying authors which is a stated concern of Wikipedia. I'll provide summaries from each website and a link to help you digest the nuances between the sites.

1. The "Knol" project by Google is currently in development. "Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project." Please click on "Knol" above to read the entire article.

2. And, then there are the "...pedia" and "...endium" resources.

• Wikipedia

• Scholarpedia
• Powered by media wiki
  
• Scholarpedia differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways:

• Each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public).
• Each article is anonymously peer reviewed to ensure accurate and reliable information.
• Each article has a curator - typically its author -- who is responsible for its content.
• Any modification of the article needs to be approved by the curator before it appears in the final, approved version.
• Herein also lies the greatest difference between Scholarpedia and traditional print media: while the initial authorship and review processes are similar to a print journal so that Scholarpedia articles could be cited, they are not frozen and outdated, but dynamic, subject to an ongoing process of improvement moderated by their curators. This allows Scholarpedia to be up-to-date, yet maintain the highest quality of content.

• Veropedia
• Veropedia is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited. The result is a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information.

• Citizendium
• We aim at reliability and quality, not just quantity.
• We welcome public participation—gently guided by experts.
• We write under our real names—and are both collegial and congenial.
• We're now 6,200 articles plus and gathering speed.
• Eduzendium participants write articles for academic credit.

• Eduzendium
• Eduzendium is a program in which the Citizendium partners with university programs throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for the Citizendium

• Encyclopaedia Britannica

Usability

There are some very basic usability tenets in life. One tenet that I use to evaluate tools and products is KISS, or, "keep it simple stupid"! Why? I believe that simplicity relates to usability, usefulness, and ultimately adoption of a tool/innovation. It is especially important for tasks that we repeat over and over again. In evaluating the tool or product, it should be intuitive and require few steps to accomplish the user's goal. In other words, it should be perceived as easy to use.

Another usability tenet which is probably even more important than KISS is "does this tool/product make my life easier or make me more effective? Are there perceived benefits? Is it worth the effort to learn how to use it?" These fundamental questions must be answered in the affirmative for a new technology to be adopted, one individual at a time. Too often we think of adoption in terms of defined groups: early adopters, late majority, etc. The reality is that the decision to adopt something new is made by an individual. That decision is affected by many inputs, among which may be the opinion of others.

Now, consider repository software. From within a repository, try contributing content, searching for, locating, and using content. Imagine that you are teaching a course online or teaching face to face. You are using a repository to build course content or making specific digital resources available to a hybrid or face to face students from within a repository. Would you choose to have a separate login and password to the repository? Or, would you like the repository to be available from within the content or authoring tab of a learning management system where the login and password would be automatically passed from the student information system to the repository behind the scenes. Ah-ha!, we now have integration which leads to simplicity for the faculty member and student. I would choose the latter option.

How do I make the resources available to my students? Is it as easy as < click here > to add a link to my online course? Or, do I need to locate the resource, right click, click on properties, copy and paste the URL into my course? In other words, how complicated is it? Can I figure it out on my own or do I need to attend training?

What are the benefit to me or my students? Do students learn? A professor at Florida State University felt that his graduate students were far more successful when they interacted with a digital content module that he created for statistical analysis. It was so successful that he expended a great deal of energy to digitally create it with a developer. As retirement approaches, he wants to make this content available to a wider audience and place it in The Orange Grove. I believe that the amount of effort that he is willing to provide this project is related to its perceived benefits.

What are your thoughts regarding usability in general and repositories?