Project Goals and the Challenges of Modular Course Design

The first objective of the NZ OER project was to develop some 'proof of concept' courseware that was freely available to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand. Underpinning this objective were our goals to increase the quality of eLearning materials, increase flexibility in their re-use and significantly reduce the duplication of investment in their design, development and production. The license used was the Creative Commons Share Alike 2.5 therefore the content is actually free to all. Note that this project is planning to develop a New Zealand version of the Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Further details will be published on eduforge.org and this site.

On the basis of a successful pilot, the second objective is to develop a model to initiate future projects for the benefit of the education sector at a system-wide level.

All materials are being developed using a modular approach to best enable customisation, increase the potential for re-use, and lower the cost of maintenance.

This project philosophy came with some additional instructional design challenges for our team, used to design courses as a whole. One of the resources for every course is a model (Moodle) course page, a showcase for how we would offer the sequence of developed smaller (granular) resources. Although this means harder work, it makes more sense as we think 'context', 'authenticity', and 'activity', rather than 'content' and 'object'. But during our design brainstorms our two delivery models sometimes seemed to clash: can a contextualised learning environment be delivered in the form of resources that are granular enough to serve the purpose of this project?

Ron Oliver's paper 'When Teaching Meets Learning: Design Principles and Strategies for Web-based Learning Environments that Support Knowledge Construction' explores some of the issues surrounding the design and development of Web-based materials. The paper does not answer our practical questions on how to make our online course pages more attractive and inspiring, instead of a shopping list of links. But it reminds us what is important in course design: choosing meaningful contexts and learning activities ahead of the content.

Easier said than done when developing Open Educational Resources. To be re-useable in as many other educational settings as possible, these resources needed to be developed into the smallest possible 'granules'. In this way, future users may choose to pick only the materials they need to develop their own courses. However, if we develop the context and the activities within the context in too much detail, we may end up with a very exciting and authentic story as the backbone for our course, but future users may get stuck with an 'all-or-nothing'. It's the old debate around learning objects: how much meaning (context) do you need to add to make it a learning object? When re-usability goes up, contextualisation goes down (Stephen Downes). There is a lot written about granularity, but few guidelines on how to apply this in course design. For more about grain sizes, combinations of granules, and "how learning technology specifications and standards efforts are ignoring critical instructional design issues", check Wiley, Gibbons and Recker.

Practically, we were trying out a number of more or less elegant solutions. The course page can hold the backbone story or context, but the 'just-in-time' information or training 'nuggets' should not make a reference to the story, otherwise they cannot be used without. In one of the business courses in development the case study is about a run-down fitness centre. The information nuggets mention a fitness centre as an example to keep the learner in the same context, but it is just 'a' fitness centre and not the fitness centre of the case study. In another course there is one case study that holds a number of proposed collaborative activities, where a 'case study note' was added -- a reminder of the story as it were. Ideal? Probably not, but contextualised and granular they are...

Thank-you to Anouk Janssens-Bevernage for her input from an instructional design perspective.

Context

New Zealand is reasonably large in geographical terms - a little bit larger than Britain. However, the population is small at 4 million people and we’re geographically isolated. While the education sector is well served there are limitations on resources with many institutions regionally based, serving smaller more rural population centres.

In a country like NZ with limited economic resources, we have more to gain by being an active member in a global community of open educational resource sharing and development. There’s a phrase used in open source - “What you give, you receive back improved.” Sharing and reusing can cut the costs for content development, thereby making better use of available resources. The overall quality should improve over time, compared to a situation where everyone always has to start from the beginning. Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse. When presented with a list of proposed goals or benefits with using OER in their own teaching, the most commonly reported motive was to gain access to the best possible resources and to have more flexible materials.

Educational institutions should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources developed by publicly funded institutions. To lock learning resources behind passwords means that people in other publicly funded institutions sometimes duplicate work and reinvent things instead of standing on the shoulders of their peers. It might be seen as a drawback for this argument that it does not distinguish between taxpayers in different countries – learning resources created in one country may be used in another country, sparing taxpayers in the second country some money. But free-riding of this kind may not pose so much of a problem since the use of a learning resource in a foreign country does not hinder the use of the same resource by domestic teachers. Similarly to the open source paradigm, so called “free-riders” tend to become customers of the originating body.

Origin of Funding

The NZ OER project was funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission’s Innovation Development Fund. The Innovation Development Fund Innovation is intended to enhance the quality and relevance of tertiary education and support it as a driver of New Zealand’s economic, social and cultural development.

The official period of development was from mid 2006 to April 30th 2007 although we are continuing the current direction under alternative funcding. The total of the original amount was NZ $350,000 which is about US$275,000.

Our argument for some form of continuation runs something like this. It is reasonable to assume that NZ tertiary educational institutions do not make much profit, if any, from the sale of traditional educational resources, so loss of potential revenue should not deter an institution from collaborating and sharing its learning materials output.

The business driver of marketing individual institutions is unlikely to be a significant benefit for institutions in New Zealand because they do not have international brand presence. However, high quality OERs developed in New Zealand could raise the profile of New Zealand education in a general sense.  However, it would be problematic for an individual institution in the New Zealand context to commit to open educational resources on its own. The primary hurdle is the fear that another institution could take openly available materials and use them to gain a competitive advantage, especially if commercial use and use by private, for-profit institutions is allowed. Cost conscious institutions are not eager to make course materials available without reimbursement or controls, primarily due to this free-rider effect.

In essence, though, it is precisely this wider utilisation that delivers the economic benefit to the funding body. The “free-rider effect” is really a “multiplier effect” for the education system and knowledge economy.

In the New Zealand context, with a public funded education system, a mechanism for promoting open educational resources presents an optimal business model at the system-wide level. Open Education Resources represent a major step toward sharing teaching materials, method and tools. This is not to say that all educational resources should be OERs. By devoting a relatively small part of the overall investment in courseware development, the New Zealand Government would achieve costs savings and provide a catalyst for collaborative arrangements between institutions that might otherwise duplicate this investment on their own.

In summary, our project is advocating a macro level business model.

Project Strategy

Modular Courseware

Our strategy was to develop new course materials suitable for online delivery. This is different from opening existing courseware. Course materials are being developed as reusable content packages, with the level of granularity for the packages determined for each course to best enable customisation, increase the potential for re-use, and lower the cost of maintenance. Materials are being developed in XHTML that enables them to be transformed into different formats, and learning design and technical specifications include adherence to accessibility standards.

Using sound pedagogy is a key factor in developing effective online resources and learning experiences. That is a major focus of the project. We have set out to design courses that are based on sound educational best practice and that are engaging and interactive for the learner.

They fit a modular and re-usable format so they can be customised to suit different organisations, whether they are providing a distance learning course or blended learning for on or off-campus students. The aim is that all of the courseware can be easily re-edited, extended or re-designed by the organisation using it.

Show-case and Distribution

The best analogy for our project strategy that we could come up with here was kit-set housing. For kit-set houses you will visit a show-home but what you buy is the kit-set. We have showcase courses in a Moodle environment. Users are welcome to simply take away copies of the showcase courses which is particularly useful for other Moodle users.

The kitset though is what we call the source files. Original source files and sample style sheets are available for download to enable educational organisations to contextualise materials to their particular student audience or delivery model if required. Of course the materials can be re-used in whatever platform the User wishes. Each piece of courseware is IMS Content packaged.

The infrastructure to support the show-casing and disseminating of course materials is delivered via associated open source projects. We use a Moodle environment for the OER showcases.When each course is completed, the source files are deposited into a repository system using the open source Fedora system. This is located at http://www.repository.ac.nz

What worked (and why)

The New Zealand Open Educational Resources model is to enable the sharing of easily disaggregatable, media rich, accessible and engaging learning objects but its focus is on courseware rather than single media elements.

With a strong emphasis on instructional design, the team worked hard at expanding the usual focus on individual learning objects by creating a model which allows entire courses, not just individual multimedia elements, to be repurposeable and re-useable. This required careful juggling of course activities during the course mapping process and an attention to detail (removing unnecessary cross-referencing, for example) when writing the scripts. This allows learning episodes (the lowest level of course granularity) to operate both as part of the course but also as single units of instruction which can be altered and incorporated into other courses.

The NZ-OER project covers many subject areas but the Employment Relations 801 module for the New Zealand Institute of Management (NZIM) certificate in management provides a good overview of some of the design issues we faced and resolved.

Rather than starting with the technical aspects of the content development process, we began by fleshing out a course concept which was intended to clarify why particular pieces of legislation were important for the learner to understand. In other words the design process was dictated by course objectives, with the planned learning outcomes actually suggesting the forms of learner activity and engagement. More specifically, we wanted to create an online learning environment which would support constructivist modes of learning - using tasks to drive the acquisition of knowledge rather than course materials being presented as an end in themselves or as useless facts to be memorised for no good reason.

We drew up a simple instruction model consisting of a problem-setting scenario (like a scene from a soap opera), followed by a task (usually a group activity or a simple assessment) for each of the course's learning outcomes. Researching each problem, learners would be encouraged to access ‘just in time’ information available to them ‘on demand’, rather than in the usual form of an online text-book pushing page after page of ‘facts’ at them. In solving each problem, students would therefore be encouraged to mediate their own learning, both individually and collaboratively.

Using graphical mind-mapping software we first outlined the course learning outcomes then created a course vision map based on our initial Instructional Design strategy. In keeping with the NZ-OER objectives, breaking up the learning objectives in this way allowed us to chunk the materials into their lowest level of granularity. It also allowed us to see which of the course materials would not fit our simple problem-solving model. We found that peripheral information such as course background, introductory issues and future developments in Employment Relations did not really fit as they did not require 'problem-solving' or even assessments. Equally the multitude of legal documentation required to cover the subject in depth and which we wanted to make available to learners as reference materials - not pushed at them but available in plain-text versions to enable students to solve the series of problem-setting scenarios.

Driven by a strong desire to create a course which would enable the student to contextualise their learning, the course design began to take shape. We decided on an office setting as a way of bringing all of these disparate course materials together. Presented from a first person perspective it would encourage the learner to think of themselves as a real manager having to apply laws and legislation to real problems. We also wanted them to think of their office (or desk) as a place where they went to think about issues, research and prepare for meetings. On the desk would be a computer (which became the interface used by learners to watch the problem setting scenarios). A phone would allow them to call for advice. A newspaper and a radio could be used to make announcements. A filing cabinet and books could contain important reference information. From there, the instructional design and multimedia design became a unified vision and preliminary multimedia storyboards were drawn up.

Referring back to the course learning outcomes we now mapped them to specific learning activities and environments. For example, the radio would be used as an interface for students to access historical information about the subject; a desk diary would list the key players; the newspaper became “tomorrow’s newspaper”, detailing future developments in Employment Relations.

The resulting course-map is a detailed model of the courseware which served as a blue-print for development. It allowed the team to see not just which multimedia objects or templates were required but also how best to re-use them across the entire course contents – how many objects or activities would be required and how best to design and build them in order to facilitate re-use. In this way, granularity and modular build strategies usually adopted for individual multimedia elements can be seen to have been applied at course level and extended to the whole courseware design process.

At the asset and resource level, many constituent parts (images, text, audio, video and animations) may be useful to others, and may even be re-used in an entirely new context. A number of techniques can be employed to facilitate these aims. Self-evident naming strategies for all resources, clean, semantic XHTML/CSS mark-up, flash files built in a modular fashion with multiple swf's and external libraries all of which import external assets such as text, xml and audio or visual content at runtime. All of these simple strategies make editing, re-authoring and the re-use of 'contextualised' materials easier for users wishing to re-contextualise the courseware.

But these techniques also streamline the build process and allow for the efficient and cost-effective production of multiple objects for entire courses rather than single, standalone media elements. Additionally, templates and shells such as flash audio or video players or CSS stylesheets can be re-used across multiple courses, further highlighting the benefits of such an open source model.

The video activities are a good example of the usefulness of such modular build strategies. With time being a constraint the lead multi-media developer, Jerome Di Pietro re-used the flash video player he had first created for a ESOL comprehension exercises then later refined as the videoshell builder for a JISC project - an example of reusability in action. The front-end was redesigned and themed to fit with the office context of the NZIM course. The quiz and text legends were easily updated by changing xml and text files so that we were better able to focus our time on the instructional design and educational validity of the materials rather than on pure multimedia development. In the same course, Jerome also developed a mobile phone interface as a way of presenting text heavy content together with an audio commentary in order to help learners focus on important points. This re-used the flash mp3 player he had originally created for the Oxford and Cambridge RSA examinations board and which he also adapted into a history radio. Other developers have since gone on to re-use the design for Building and Construction and other courses!

Rather than building e-learning objects which exclude certain technologies because they are not available to all end-users, the team were able to better realise a complex hybrid of pure, semantic, CSS/XHTML, AJAX, flash and other rich media (video and audio files) which allows learners to access online materials in a variety of different ways. The starting point should no longer be to make the most of a lowest common denominator approach to design but rather to find efficient ways of making a myriad of possibilities and choices available to the end user. The history radio, for example, includes a link for learners to download the audio files to their mp3 players – thus enabling the m-learning potential (even if not all students own one). For learners who prefer reading to auditory learning styles AJAX is used to dynamically incorporate text-transcripts into the page. The mobile phone and employment contract builder interfaces use similar XMLHttpRequest/innerHTML includes to enhance usability. The video activities offer full text transcripts and text equivalents for the quizzes in a format which is equally engaging whether viewed as an accessible flash object (including full keyboard shortcuts for users with low IT/mouse skills) or as a printable, screen-reader friendly, text-equivalents – all driven by the strong belief that accessibility should be regarded as a sub-set of usability and not dictated by a designer’s perception of end users’ disabilities.

Of course all of these materials degrade gracefully in legacy browsers or when security settings do not allow certain scripts to run. Function critical code, as in the case of the employment contract builder, is clearly sign-posted - turn off JavaScript and a warning will appear together with a ‘noscript’ text equivalent. This activity also uses a Flash local Shared Object rather than cookies in order to minimise problems with the restrictive security settings of computers usually found in educational establishments.

Although these techniques can sometimes bloat materials and make updates and edits more difficult, the office diary demonstrates how the same materials (in this case the exact same snippets of text and images) can be delivered using two different online technologies – flash and HTML. And while these building methodologies may initially increase development time, this is more than offset by the many benefits of careful templating and re-useable shells - benefits which, as previously explained, can be applied at both object and course levels.

These benefits, together with multimedia development strategies which are driven by sound instructional design practices, are at the heart of the NZ-OER model and we hope that the project will become an inspiration for other e-learning courseware developments in New Zealand and beyond.

Attribution - Jerome Di Pietro http://baroquedub.co.uk/

What didn't work (and why)

In terms of reusability it is fair to say there are shades of openness. Most of the courses ended up being expensive in terms of time and money, largely because we were going up major learning curves to adhere to the project principles. The more complex learning objects will require more technical knowledge for reuse. The complex nature of design for learning objects (requiring a team of designers and technical experts) means that they are designed for the learner. Polansi (2003) suggests that an ideal situation would be to develop several interface and stylistic environments that are user-controlled, which would enable the user to choose the most suitable form of interacting with and exploring the knowledge. Such an approach leads us to where the learner has more control of the objects and takes us a step closer to a situation where learning objects are created with the learner. It may also help limit any cultural differences between the maker/s and the learner/s.

While this might sound overly idealistic, ePortfolios and multi-user virtual environments like Second Life make it possible to move in this direction.

In summary, what didn't work is our time and financial budget with this defined project. The scope was large and we've learnt a great deal that will be useful going forward.

Attribution for input into this section - Cheryl Brown, Open Polytechnic of New Zealand

Polsani, P. (2003). Use and abuse of reusable learning objects. In Journal of Digital Information, Vol. 3 Issue 4 Article No. 164, 2003-02-19. Retrieved June 3, 2007 from http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v03/i04/Polsani/

Next steps

A sustainable New Zealand Open Educational Resources (NZ OER) model has been recommended to the Tertiary Education Commission in New Zealand by the project leader, Richard Wyles. However, there is yet to be a policy decision in this area.

There are currently several discernible trends that a wider implementation of the NZ OER Model would mitigate.

Firstly, collaboration and sharing is proving difficult to accomplish without an agreed framework. Secondly, duplication of investment is occurring along with uneven adherence to good practice, interoperability and accessibility standards.

By reducing the cost of learning materials, over time each institution will have access to a corpus of appropriate educational resources for delivery, extension and further innovation.

What are the required conditions for effective implementation? It is recommended that the funding mechanism is kept separate from the decision making process on which courses will be developed. The selection process needs to be transparent. It is recommended that commercial providers of courseware are eligible to apply for funding for projects in combination with educational institutions.

It is recommended that prioritisation areas for selecting courseware is weighted towards:

• Areas of broadest utility - i.e. widely taught by a majority of providers, and applicable to large number of learners.

• Areas that will help deliver significant productivity gains or ‘transitional’ benefits towards a knowledge economy.

• Areas that do not duplicate good quality alternatives readily available elsewhere

• Areas of demand – i.e. users are ready to accept mode of delivery.

With regards to licensing, we have recommended that outputs are licensed under as open a regime as possible. Reuse in private sector contexts builds connections between industry and education, and leads to a multiplier effect across the economy. To that end we have actively avoided the Non Commercial restriction.