From what I can tell, a lot of the oer material released to date as opencourseware is virtually unusable by anyone except sophisticated/experienced learners or maybe educators looking to reuse it (though how i’m not sure)… but I am yet to be convinced that educators would refer their students to eg video lectures from other institutions, unless those lectures were similar in style to Royal Institution public Christmas lectures, such as Walter Lewin’s physics lectures, insofar as they provide “textbook” – and engaging – demonstrations of particular principles… http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/CourseHome/index.htm

Although many of them look dated now, OU tv broadcasts from 20 years managed to engage general audiences at all hours of the day in some quite advanced topics…

http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p=105C3A71B494F906

I think a lot of OER initiatives have a long way to go yet in terms of usability/pedagogy (depending on who the intended audience is)… one approach may be unbundling content (eg http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/013035.html) so it becomes discoverable and reusable as a fragment in other people’s courses (getting a clearer appreciation of rights issues is one of the stumbling blocks i think).

Some of the OpenLearn material is instructive insofar as the material was designed for independent, individual use by students who may have weak independent study skills…

Someone like Grainne Conole should maybe do a graph or spectrum showing how current oer materials are appropriate/designed for reuse to a greater or lesser extent by naive/sophisticated learners vs formal/informal education instructors…!

You write:

(I have to admit I haven’t yet seen anything, anywhere, that is billed as elearning material that I find compelling in terms of the integration of personal and social learning design, web design, interaction design, and a pedagogy appropriate for independent, distance study…)

I agree, and I’m not knocking anyone who is putting up good stuff for other target audiences. While your description describes an ideal, I’d settle for any of just a few of the characteristics you list as long as it includes appropriate pedagogy.

There’s a part of me that gets frustrated when groups like OCW and those who created the Open Ed Declaration make the aspect of providing an educational experience to disenfranchised groups an explicit part of their philosophy and appeal for support without a lot of evidence that they are actually creating something that can give those learners a significant educational experience… I know that’s not you, I’m just noting it here for future generations

This material is typically delivered in print, though we are increasingly we are making this sort of material available via the web as HTML courses, with a via-the-browser, personal print option. For the last few years, our courses have also provided students with the opportunity to converse on a course by course basis in online conferences… So I agree with Sarah, up to a point (many students lurk, not all go online; however, all students can avail themselves of our SOL – supported open learning – mechanisms, which for traditional courses include contact with a named Associate Lecturer (‘tutor’; tutor:student ratio approx 1:25 I think?), face-to0face tutorials, and tutor marked assessments every 6-8 weeks that provide personal, on-script feedback from ALs to students; the online courses do not have a personal tutor, instead, stidents are enrolled into online conferences with a moderator:stuent ratio of approx 1:50, I think).

The design of these HTML delivered courses is heavily influenced by our experience of producing distance educational print material and I would argue in the majoority of cases does not represent authentic elearning material. So I agree with Laura, too…

(I have to admit I haven’t yet seen anything, anywhere, that is billed as elearning material that I find compelling in terms of the integration of personal and social learning design, web design, interaction design, and a pedagogy appropriate for independent, distance study…)

The key thing about OU distance ed material is that is a) written, and b) designed for independent study.

We have started delivering this material via the web, but I would personally argue that we do not yet fully exploit web technology in those materials, nor are we innovating as much as we might in identifying web design/interaction patterns that maximise the potential for effective, independent, personal online learning. I would not class it as ‘elearning material’.

So: “the origins of the OpenLearn content as distance education teaching material” holds, but that material was not designed as elearning material. The MIT opencourseware material was not designed for distance use, nor was it designed as elearning material.

In the OU onlne vernacular, HTH