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.
