Hi Jan, Really appreciate your comments and insights. The conversation continues :-)
Jan said: <<I agree that quality is a key concept. One idea would be to establish a review board of people with recognized competence who are willing to review final products. This would imply that after a period of collaborative authoring one finalizes the product and avoids further tempering with it. Users can still break it up in pieces and use those in newer developments. But they will at least know that they build on validated components. This seems to be in line with what you refer to below under Item 2.>> Jan, agreed -- our emergent thinking is well aligned with your suggestions -- that is, to encourage review teams with recognised competence to volunteer review time. Ideally, in the case of educational materials I think we should try to extend review competence beyond subject matter expertise to include peer review of the pedagogical dimensions as well. WE need to think about the practical implementation of these review perspectives. Fortunately there is a wealth of experience we can derive from the distance education model which pioneered the professional team approach for the design and development of distance education materials. Typically well designed DE materials would be developed by teams comprising subject matter experts, learning designers, multimedia designers, linguists etc. It would be great if our review model could incorporate all these dimensions. >From previous discussions on the list, WE think that we should avoid mandatory review of OER. The review process should be optional where the primary author(s) opt-in and request peer review. This is more of a maturity model where individual authors can gain confidence and experience in the open authoring model before being subjected to a rigorous review process which may be daunting for newbies. In addition, some OER materials may be intended for personal classroom use and not for collaborative authoring. This suggests a tiered quality review model as illustrated in this graphic: http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Quality_Assurance_Framework/Contribution_Levels#Introduction Thinking about practical implementation, one idea is to have a "status indicator" of the resource, where for example the author can use a template to communicate the status of development and whether the resource is ready for review or not. For instance: - Level 1: "Draft resource under development" (in other words -- don't review my resource, I'm not ready) - Level 2: "Resource is ready for review comments" (i.e. requesting review) - Level 3: "Published" (i.e. Review completed and recommendations implemented) - Level 4: "Usage comments and feedback from teachers available" -- where the community has provided feedback and tips relating to the reuse of the materials. We could incorporate a star rating system as well. WE've been experimenting with a draft OER metadata template which aims to incorporate the "status" of the resource: http://www.wikieducator.org/Template:OER_Metadata#status Jan said: <<As I said before, I don’t think WikiEducator should want to be a citable source. It’s not its mission. WE is not doing original research that results in the learning materials it creates. Yes, there is a research community, but that community researches the processes involved in the work of WE. Researchers doing so will likely want to publish their papers in media that are set up to validate their research, i.e., in peer reviewed journals.>> I agree -- the core mission of WikiEducator is not to become a citable source in the sense of original research. However, that does not remove the need for citing specific instances of an OER resource. Our license requires attribution -- so we need to think about easier ways to attribute specific instances taking into account that a wiki page can be modified at any time. With regards to publishing in peer reviewed journals, their is refreshing growth in the number of open access, peer reviewed journals which publish research outputs under open content licenses :-). The wiki model provides exciting opportunities for the planning and execution and dissemination of research work -- hence our interest in thinking about WikiResearcher.org. Jan said: <<Are you talking here about review of the learning resources WE is supposed to produce or peer review of research done on the WE processes? If the latter, it will take considerable time before one gets recognized as a serious peer reviewed online research journal. There are good examples of such online journals in the biomedical sciences, though, and one may learn from their experience. It may be less costly and less of a distraction if researchers chose to publish at least initially via the existing scientific journals. This also has the advantage that one brings one’s work to the attention of colleagues of existing scientific communities that read those journals, thus avoiding preaching to the WE choir, which I think is important.>> In time, with the implementation and maturation of WikiResearcher.org (in addition to WikiEducator) I think we mean review of both. recognising the the review of educational materials is different from academic peer review of research. I don't see the WikiResearcher concept as a replacement for traditional publishing models -- but rather augmenting the channels and technologies we can use to further knowledge production and dissemination. Great conversation! Cheers Wayne -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. 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