What does “Good Enough” OER look like?
It looks like Sal Khan.
I just saw his stuff via Jon Udell, and it blew me away. Technically, it’s not under an open license, but every single person involved in OER should look at the site. Right now.
Forget the “lecture capture” vendors. Don’t worry about editing out false starts. Don’t spend any money on post-production.
Just explain stuff to people. Online. And remove it from the context of the class, make it modular.
Stop capturing classes, and start capturing explanations.
We lay on the fainting couch in the OER world sometimes and worry about reuse — well here’s your answer. Sal’s work has been viewed end-to-end 10 million times. That’s more than anybody at MIT or Yale. He has 33,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.
You have people at your college right now that can do this. I have people at my college that can do this.
Let’s get them to do it.
In the interview, Sal explains that he doesn’t think this kind of thing will come from inside the academy. For the academy’s sake I hope that’s wrong. (Although ultimately I don’t care about the academy, I care about outcomes.)
But here’s why he may be right:
> …remove it from the context of the class, make it modular.
That is /such/ a violent disruption that I’m not sure it can happen. Meanwhile, the field is wide open for superempowered guerillas invading from outside.
It’s true — that’s the stumbling block. That’s why we are getting so tied up here about “lecture capture” which is the wrong direction. There’s this belief that what we do in the classroom translates generally and can be made modular, when in reality only a piece of it is modular.
We’re filming plays and Sal’s making movies.
But here’s why I think it *needs* to come from inside the academy — Professors have to engage in systems thinking about what they do — have to come to understand that a class is a variety of things which could actually be pulled apart and retooled separately… it kind of reminds me of your piece on gut bacteria and raw food, we are stuck treating the class as the atomic unit of analysis and it’s hindering our ability to make it better. Pulling the abstract explanation away from the application (and understanding different people can deliver those different pieces) is what is going to allow us to move forward…
Actually, it’s worse than filming plays, but I don’t have the right analogy yet.
I detect a cruelly circular irony. To fix education, educators need to practice systems thinking. Which few can, because education brokenly doesn’t teach it, thus educators don’t learn it and can’t practice it.
My bet is increasingly on outsider disruption.
I saw this a few weeks back via @gardnercampbell (who no doubt either got it from Jon or sent it to him, small world) and was similarly impressed. It’s a whole load of inexpensive, free to use, easy to understand goodness. And I agree – we want to stop “filming plays,” but here’s where the metaphor break down; one of the things I LOVE about computers is they let you perform the work AND document/record it at the same time. That is if you realize it and organize yourself thusly. Which is where good educators could really shine – not by recording lectures, which just promote a mode of “teaching” that is little more than information dispersal, and instead performing, capturing and sharing “instructional interventions” – moments of actual *instruction*, by which I mean events, happenings, interactions, responses, conversations, etc., where someone with a high level of mastery of a subject AND a sensitivity to the leaps and bounds and obstacles that often occur for learners in to ‘getting it’ helps someone to learn, actually *teaches* them. I know there is a great deal of skepticism in the network learning/authentic learning crowd about not only the right to do this but even about the very ability, but I think that is hogwash. I’m all for an overall approach to education and indeed knowledge that asks people to think for themselves, problem solve, construct their understandings, but there are a large number of things we generally agree are “right” and we know full well some people are much better at conveying that to a wide variety of learners, based not only on their domain mastery but also on the various models and metaphors they bring to it and to how others learn and think. It’s this which we could capture AS WE DO IT, share it freely. Khan’s stuff is a big step in that direction, and definitely basic screencasting and built in vid cams and cheap and simple video editing all need to be part of the new arsenal. But so does getting over this idea that “first we do it, then we document it.” That is definitely not “Good enough.” </rant>
Scott — I agree with the looking over the shoulder bit — we want to go there, not exclusively, but it’s part of the equation. Jon has some neat stuff in the interview and on the blog about the value of capturing missteps.
I think the thing that Sal is doing that I love most is the mode is lecture-like — but the orientation is conversation. When you start one of these up, I feel like I just asked Sal a question, and he’s talking to me. And you can hear him think through some of this at times, he is, as he points out, a guy talking through things he is interested in.
And for me, whether is is over the shoulder stuff, or Sal-like modules, I think that that is the key — this is a conversational, intimate medium, or at least it can be, and we should be building OER that recognizes that, and embraces the humanity of the speaker. Sal doesn’t have to do all that distancing and authority projecting that is the bread and butter of the lecture classroom. He can just be a guy. That’s a huge opportunity, and if we limit ourselves to class capture, we will never take advantage of it (just like we won’t have the variable length lecture, etc).
But yes, capturing real, unstaged practice is part of the equation.
Yeah, this is an amazing approach, and like you say, who cares about the details of OER, metadata, and the like, get it out there. And the idea of lecture capture has never been interesting to me, but a concept explained, that’s a different story all together.
[...] http://mikecaulfield.com/2010/02/04/stop-capturing-classes-and-start-capturing-explanations/ [...]
Khan Academy did not strikeme at all.
I just could not trust what is shown there.
I wonder if all the equations presented there are right ?
I am all for OER . But from a trusted and dependeble source.
I would like to see more comments of people to decide what it is .
Great insight, Mike. This is indeed the difference between teaching and lecturing. It’s difficult to pinpoint the important distinction, but I suspect what we lament in recorded lectures is the predominance of recitation of information as mere information, divorced from the specifics of problem-solving that make the information meaningful to individuals.
Of course, one could not expect to address the problems of each individual in a class in a single hour in the physical space of a classroom, but there is no limit to the quantity and quality of video answers that can be cherry-picked by learners for their unique needs.
@Jared — Absolutely — one way to look at it is this: What question is your lecture answering? All too often the answer is that it is answering nothing…