Compare the presentation on an MIT opencourseware lecture on the MIT page and Academic Earth. Open Earth provides much of what users expect in a site — tools to share the page on Facebook, embed it in a web page, or add it to favorites. Also note the lecture can be graded by logged in users. Along the right side bar we get suggestions of related videos. And along the bottom are the Editor’s picks. On the MIT page? There is none of this. Which site are you more likely to use? Which invites further exploration and return visits?
What’s more Academic Earth lets you create a user account, which give you tools to help organize your learning. You can view playlists drawing from indvidual class lectures from multiple courses. It would be cool if users could create their own playlists and share them with the community. You can create your own favorites area, gathering your own lectures. In a quick informal survey of some other university coursware sites I didn’t see any similar functionality. Some Facebook and RSS feeds, but that’s about it. In an article on Academic Commons author Tom Carey suggests open education resources be designed with the end-user in mind. In fact START with the users needs, and then design with their needs in mind. He doesn’t explicitily mention it, but you might even start by asking some users what they need. Elements that at “sociability” to elements of the site — like ratings, reviews, user favorites — help build return users interest.
University-based open course resources compete in a crowded web marketplace. Build it and they will come may work once. But to keep visitors coming back we’ll need to take a page from the social networking world.
How Do Open Education Resources Acquire Their Value for Teaching and Learning? | Academic Commons
…an open educational resources (OER) network should be conceived “from the outside in.” …we should begin designing an OER network by identifying potential users of the resources, figuring out how they might use these resources, and then working backward to develop knowledge products… In addressing this challenge of sustainability, we can learn from research on other types of social networks, which has shown that “social networking sites’ longevity is proportional to their object-centered sociality.”
MIT OpenCourseWare | Biology | 7.014 Introductory Biology, Spring 2005 | Video Lectures | detail
I am a professor in the Biology Department at MIT. And I will be co-teaching this course with Penny Chisholm who is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a
Academic Earth – Introduction to Biology with Applications
The MIT Biology Department core courses all cover the same core material, which includes the fundamental principles of biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, and cell biology. Biological function at the molecular level is partic
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