i’m having a conversation with a friend of mine, a fellow 1st year phd student here at USU. we’re both curious about the effectiveness of ocw, because we both want to take it to the grassroots, to the people who can’t afford to get to higher education. those are the folks who could really benefit from it.

today i had a good conversation with the the good professor fellow and we chatted about this whole ’studying the effectiveness of open courseware’.. essientally he said that it really can’t be done. and further, if you go to no significant difference you’ll find study after study that talks about how its not about the medium through which you are learning, but how effective the design of the instruction is. so, don’t study the effectiveness of ocw, because its just a different medium.

makes sense. okay, thats nice to finally figure out after 2 weeks of banging my head against the wall. but i learned a lot, i think, during those 2 weeks and now its time to move on.

so, back to the conversation between me and cohort member. there is something different about open courseware, thats what we both think. just like online learning is different than face to face in a class learning. i use the analogy of different kinds of clay — simply because i like to take the abstract to the concrete. georgia red clay just dug from the earth is different than the stuff that crayola creates and calls clay, which is different than the stuff that potters out at the oregon country fair use to create their works of art. in some ways it is the same thing — all that clay — but in other ways it is difference. there is a difference between open courseware and e-learning with instructor support. it presents differently and the interaction with it is different. imho it is all instruction (yes, that too is up for debate, but i think it is instruction), but its just different.

so, back to my conversation. we’re bound and determined to look at this question. we’re bound and determined to find a difference and to measure it.. i can’t speak for her, but i can be rather bullheaded about things at times. so, we took the question of effectiveness and played with it, molded it just a bit. these are questions we came up with:

• are there teachers using open content?
• how to measure the outcomes of the learning that happens in open education?
• does using ocw help to build a grassroots movement?
• does using it encourage people to develop their own open content?
• does using ocw change teaching styles?
• is it possible to look at how ocw effects the teaching and learning process of students (and students loosely defined as anyone who learns) and teachers (defined as anyone who teaches either informally or formally, so, essientally anyone)?
• do people teach and learn differently based on their experiences with ocw?
• does ocw help to create life long learners, does ocw become a stepping stone for further learning?