OER evaluation and feedback

Well, late again...! I guess I'm taking the flexibility of distance education a wee bit too seriously? Last week we were encouraged to reflect on the course and post to others' blogs. My responses to others' posts are here and (another yet to be approved by blog owner). I have looked at others' posts, and decided to avoid lame "Me too!" or "Nice one!" style additions. This post is my last - combining week 9 and 10 activities.

A number of things occur to me as I reflect on this course.

• It has not been as interactive as it might. I know that edubloggers get excited about using social software in education, but there has been little excitement among the class in terms of getting to know one another and sharing views. I daresay that a structured environment such as an LMS, with clear discussion topics or directed attention toward others' work would have helped this along. Sometimes the cloistered intimacy of an LMS is better for sharing exploratory thoughts than the more publicly transparent blog, and email better than RSS. Despite the use of Web 2.0 applications, the other participants are more strangers to me than those I have met in more structured online classes using discussion forums. Will any lasting relationships - or even RSS subscriptions - result from all of this?
  
• I am reminded of the importance of instructional design, and its role in courses such as this. This relates primarily to the 'interactive' point above, but it also might have assisted with pacing. Planning one or two weeks for 'catch up' might have helped as well (I see that there are many more 'active' participants than I yet to reach Week 9). It's difficult to comment on blogs that are 'behind' other than to say, "nice video!"... sometimes educational conversation needs to be more directly seeded and more purposefully managed.
  
• OER is still in very early stages of theory... to the extent that I am still not clear about how it should be considered (see this and this). If OER is going to go beyond a small group of enthusiasts and multiple initiatives some serious work needs to be done. I am extremely impressed by the sorts of coordination that characterise Wikipedia (a prime example of OER resources), but that the best examples of OER courses are actually firmly institutionalised (Open Learn, MIT OER) holds an important lesson. The account-based resources in YouTube and Flickr are in another category again. Work needs to be done on how these different systems complement one another, and how they might be made to overlap.
  
• Hats off to Teemu and Hans. Well done. I have enjoyed the challenges to my perspective and have learned many new skills and have added some feedback.
  

Well, I'm hanging up my OER tag for a while - so long, and thanks for all the fish!