11 Aug
Posted by: admin in: Open Educational Resources
My trip to the Open Education Conference has allowed me to catch up on some blogging that I’ve been neglecting.
Something I’ve been thinking about is the law of diminishing returns. As you might remember from Econ 110, this law states that the more one gets of something the less valuable each additional unit may be. For example, I might get 10 units of pleasure out of eating 1 piece of pizza. The second piece of pizza may give me 7 units of pleasure, 4 units from the third piece, and a fourth piece may give me no additional pleasure.
Do we ever get to a point where we have “enough” teaching resources and that providing more provide little marginal return?
Consider the following scenario.
A private educational organization has a set curriculum that it teaches students. For the sake of example, let’s say that this is a Christian organization and that the curriculum for the year is the New Testament.
Teachers have access to the following:
1. A teachers manual
2. A student manual
3. A DVD that contains multi-media
In addition there are magazine articles, supplementary video clips, pictures, and PowerPoint presentations that all are made available to teachers by the organization.
As I have studied Open Educational Resources, I have thought that one thing that would really help a teacher in this course would to collect lesson ideas from other teachers (like Curriki) and allow teachers to share clever lesson ideas and ways to engage students. I’m probably prideful, but I think I have some great ideas that other teachers could benefit from. And I’ve definitely seen other teachers with resources that I would love to get my hands on.
However, some might argue that the teachers of this course already have a plethora of resources. If a teacher were to teach Matthew 5, it could easily take him an hour to read Matthew 5 and review all of the resources that the organization had already provided. If something like Curriki were made available, would there be a danger of having “too much” curriculum? Is it possible that some teachers would spend so much time going through the different ideas that were out there that they would neglect to spend enough time on actually preparing their lessons? If these are dangers, how significant are they?
One Response
Christopher Phillips
18|Aug|2009 1Great questions John
I don’t think it is an issue of too much curriculum so much as it is of too much “most important” curriculum. I never find too much information when I search for something in Google as long as the result I want is in the top 10 results.
While some teachers have the desire, time and expertise to sort through a large number of resources to identify those that are the best, many others are looking for a precompiled list of best resources that they could teach from.
I think the biggest challenge of a New Testament Curriki would be categorizing, rating and validating the Curriki content so that it could be filtered, ranked and made available where relevant and appropriate.
While the list above list may represent “official” curriculum, the teacher already has access to additional (unofficial) curricula through any number of sources. Those additional resources will be created and found regardless of whether an institutional repository is established. That brings up some other interesting questions for that organization:
*What level of involvement would the organization like to have in the creation of those resources?
*Are the needs of the organization unique enough to pre-empt participation in an open New Testament Curriki?
Great thought- looking forward to more!
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