Archive for the ‘Localization’ Category

People’s Open Access Education Initiative is an intriguing new project, one of a few I’ve seen emerging that I call “second generation” in that they don’t create OER from scratch, but instead build on the open resources already made available by others. In this case, the project intends to use a collaborative development model to localize public health content for developing regions. Here’s an excerpt from their About page:

The inspiration

The open source software movement provides an inspiration for an affordable and credible solution - Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS . Many hundreds of individuals have contributed to the development of high quality software which is freely available on the Internet.

In the education field, there are now parallel developments of Open Educational Resources (OER), with an ever expanding range of high quality on line resources that are freely available through the Internet. (http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Main_Page).

Our solution

Develop educational context around freely available open educational resources on the Internet – Peoples-uni.org. This is an open activity, to be developed in partnership across the global and digital divides. We are in development phase, and hope eventually to m ove towards the establishment of a ‘ Peoples Open Access University’.

Organisation

We do not plan to have a centralised organisational structure and are calling on various individuals and organisations to undertake various of the required tasks. We are calling this ‘Volunteersourcing’ – a variant of ‘Crowdsourcing’. While many of these tasks might be performed by volunteers, others will require funding (such as accreditation).

One book that has really influenced my understanding of how open education affects the production of course materials is MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Published in 2005, this book doesn’t address open education or educational resources directly, but rather it discusses how companies are taking advantage of lead user innovations in a range of fields including, among other things, the manufacture of kite surfing equipment.

von Hipple’s book has a lot to say indirectly about how educational materials may or may not be suitable for reuse. One basic idea von Hippel puts forth is that the wider an audience a particular product is designed for, the less satisfied on average any one audience member is likely to be with the product. This is one challenge that designers of learning objects must grapple with.

He also describes how innovators often are less interested in the details of a particular product’s implementation than in the approach taken to create the product. The details usually differ enough that the innovator cannot directly borrow the product, but can fashion a similar product from scratch using a similar approach. This makes me wonder whether localization is less a process of adapting existing materials to local conditions and more a process of using openly published models to fashion new materials from scratch to address local needs.

Like Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation is available for free as a PDF under a Creative Commons license.

Open education is not addressed directly in this report, but it’s a useful primer on the challenges faced by Least Developed Countries, and issues of how to support and promote the learning as an underpinning to development run throughout this report. An example from the overview:

…the effectiveness of ODA [official development assistance] for non-agricultural technological learning and innovation has been severely compromised because donors typically do not support this activity. Although agriculture is still the major source of employment and livelihood in the LDCs, the employment transition which they are undergoing means that this position is not tenable if development partners wish to reduce poverty sustainably and substantially. There are, however, difficult issues regarding how aid should be used to support technological learning and innovation outside agriculture.

One challenge for the open education community is to understand the role OER can play in helping LDCs to improve their own educational systems. I suspect the answer will be somewhat more complicated than straightforward adoption of open content. (via Information Policy)

“Localization” is a term you’ll hear often in the open educational resources world, so it’s worth a post to sketch out a few aspects of the issue. Localization refers to the process of taking an educational resource developed for one context, and making it appropriate for one or more other contexts. Examples of localization include translation of materials into other languages, updating content to reflect field developments, and converting a lesson from MS Office format to html embedded in a Blackboard site.

There are at least four uber-categories of localizations:

• Currency: Updating materials to reflect new knowledge in the field.
• Cultural adaptations: Modifications made to render materials more culturally appropriate, such as translation into other languages and substitution of referenced examples (such as commercial products) with more familiar equivalents.
• Academic adaptations: Materials created within one academic system are often modified to fit into a new system, accounting for student skill level and preparedness, subject sequencing, and time available.
• Technical adaptations: Modifications made to adjust for the technical platform on which the content is delivered, such as the conversion of materials created in MS Word for classroom use to html formats intended for distance learning.

This of course barely scratches the surface of the complexities surrounding localization, but it’s a start at least.