Collaborative Creation of Educational Materials: Lessons from the Field

SPEAKER: Cynthia Jimes
Senior Research Associate -  Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

In South Africa, a group of young scientists recruit volunteers from across the world to help write free science textbooks online for South African schools. In India, five organizations pool their expertise to collaboratively write training materials targeted toward managers of community IT centers in villages across the country. In California, a group of community college instructors meet on Connexions to revise a statistics textbook that will be offered free to community colleges and other students in the U.S. and beyond.

Across the world, educators, scientists, trainers and other individuals are coming together to create freely available open educational resources (OER) using Web 2.0 tools. In doing so, they are developing innovative new materials that draw on the expertise of diverse individuals and that meet the needs of teachers and learners in search of free, high quality content, that facilitate a participatory learning culture, and that mitigate the high costs of education by offering alternatives to proprietary materials.

But what do these efforts have in common? How are they inspiring, facilitating, and maintaining engagement around collaborative content creation? The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org) has been studying these and other efforts as a way to support future OER projects and individuals in—among other things—collaboratively creating content  to be used, reused, localized, and improved upon by others. Six key lessons gleaned from ISKME’s work around the collaborative content creation process include:

Match Technology to Authors’ Needs. Whether your authors are a group of scientists skilled at LaTeX, or a set of high school teachers new to Web 2.0, the key is to continuously streamline the peer production platform and associated technologies to the authors’ technology skills and current ways of working with technology. Doing so will help to facilitate workflow and ongoing content contributions.

Establish an Iterative Workflow Process. Establish a workflow process that allows for an iterative cycle of writing, feedback, and editing. Short feedback loops have surfaced as especially important to the workflow process, wherein, for example, assigned editors are matched to content areas and provide rapid feedback to authors.

Keep Assignments Small. Break content assignments into small, manageable chunks so that they are more manageable for authors to work on and complete. ISKME’s research has shown that doing so helps to increase authors’ ability to consistently complete assignments within expected time frames.

Set Up Two-Way Communication Channels. Establishing two-way (as opposed to top down) channels—through which authors and project coordinators can communicate, and ask and answer questions—supports community engagement and continuous improvement of the content creation process. It is important that within these channels, authors feel they can confidently ask questions and receive relevant answers—even to novice questions; thus, facilitating a culture of openness and acceptance within the project’s communication channels becomes central.

Allow for Peer Pressure. The group effect works. ISKME’s research has shown that as the size of a peer production group increases, authors are more likely to stay involved over longer periods of time and contribute content on an ongoing basis. On the whole, authors who work individually were found to create less content over time than those working in groups.

Serve Pizza! Projects that promote or facilitate face-to-face meeting spaces alongside their online peer production platform will likely benefit from increased content contributions from authors. Face-to-face meetings provide a way for authors to interact and motivate one another as they create content. They also provide support for questions that arise from authors along the way, and contribute to a participatory culture that values constructive and diverse feedback. In setting up face-to-face meetings, it is a good idea to give authors something to look forward to. Pizza, coffee, sweets—whatever it takes to create a fun, enticing environment.

Recognizably, the shape, size, goals and dynamics of each and every collaborative content creation initiative will vary. The key is to pay heed to what is unique about a project, and draw upon, adapt and localize lessons from the field such as those above to support its efforts. For more information about ISKME’s work on OER and content collaboration, and for links to its research reports, visit www.iskme.org.

Comments

[.hj barraza]

Textbooks have long made up an all-too-significant proportion of college students' annual costs, currently approaching an average of USD 1,000 per year in the US, according to Make Textbooks Affordable. General outcry has ensued, but a new experiment from publisher Flat World Knowledge just may provide a new—and ad-free—solution.

Website: www.flatworldknowledge.com
Contact: eric@flatworldknowledge.com

[Gabriel Kent]

I have a lot of hope for Free & Open Source Education efforts.

In fact, I believe those efforts will have the single largest impact on education.

The internet, computers, social nets... all of which have a large impact on society as a whole but are not education specific, whereas FOSE draws upon those larger social impacts to create a direct impact in education.

I think there needs to be more emphasis on 'free' and 'open source' in the collateral being generated in Open Education space so that the effort can draw from an increasingly better understood space: Free & Open Source Software (FOSS), which is a working model for this type of ad-hoc distributed development.

Go FOSE!

[Cynthia Jimes]

Gabriel, you're right. I think there is a lot that can be drawn from the open source model--not only conceptually but also pragmatically in terms of structuring workflow and in engaging users/creators/authors.

[Bob Rose]

May 25, 2008
Maria Montessori wrote, almost a century ago, that three- and four-year-old preschoolers will learn to read spontaneously if they get "sufficient" practice forming alphabet letters. Although boldly claimed in her "The Montessori Method" this possibility has strangely never before been subjected to a scientific test.

In 2002-2004 I found five kindergarten teachers on the Internet who provided experimental data on 106 experimental kindergarten students as they practiced printing fluency and we monitored their reading ability (and also five other first-grade teachers who did NOT make the effort of inducing printing practice, but who only measured how much of the serial alphabet students could print in a timed, twenty-second period of time, and the correlation with reading skill. These 94 students formed a control group).

The correlation was very obvious in all ten classrooms. We found that all but a very small percentage of students read well, and with good comprehension, shortly after the point in time when they were able to print at least the first thirteen letters within 20 seconds. Multiplied by three, this equates with a fluency rate of 39 letters per minute.

The children enjoyed the practice sessions, and observing their gradual increase in fluency as the weeks passed. No apparent stress was noted, and it was found that the median kindergartner, after spending five minutes daily of each school day practice printing, was "printing fluent" after a mere three months. But printing fluency didn't correlate with reading skill among older students, according to our results with a group of fifty fourth-graders.

The kindergartners wrote and read with about the same skill as the first graders at the end of the winter of school. The fact that kindergartners were reading and writing at a level of children a full grade ahead shows that the early acquisition of literacy in the kindergarten (experimental) group was caused by the dedicated attempt to induce practiced fluency in printing, and not just a coincidental marker of some third, and unknown, causative factor.

At the present time (May, 2008) I have collected another group of kindergarten and first-grade teachers on the Internet. Fourteen K-1 teachers have already submitted correlations of the printing fluency and reading skills of their pupils. In each case the correlation has been obvious and strong. Anyone wishing to join and monitor (or participate on) this free list need only send any email to k1writing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Returning the automated "confirmation message" to the computer will result in automatic list membership.

Printing practice and fluency training in the early grades has completely gone out of style during the twentieth century, though it is still practiced (though not specifically tested) in India and China. This rediscovery of this important principle offers an inexpensive and effective means toward ensuring reading and academic success from the earliest grades for children of all races and ethnic backgrounds.

It has also been found that second-graders able to give correct answers to simply addition facts more fluently than 40 answers per minute rarely have problems with math or science thereafter.


Bob Rose, MD (retired), rovarose@aol.com
Jasper, Georgia