Feeding from open courseware: exploring the potential of open educational content delivery using RSS feeds

An implicit aim of many open courseware projects, including OpenLearn, is to encourage the informal use of open educational resources, as well as its reuse. In this presentation, I shall describe several examples of how open courseware can be disaggregated into component parts that can be easily shared and republished using RSS and OPML web feeds. From 'daily learning chunks' delivered to candidate PLEs such as PageFlakes using a Web 2.0 mashup to mobile access, this approach can also be used to turn bibliographies into online bookstores and provide a way of displaying media assets in a rich media slideshow. The original wave of opencourseware initiatives, such as MIT's OpenCourseware project, sought to make high quality educational resources available for reuse and repurposing by whosoever wanted to avail themselves of that content. More recent thinking implies that just providing the content is not enough. Approaches such as OpenLearn provide a learning environment around the content that can provide personal learning support tools and support the formation of learning communities and. Although providing 'reuse and remix' opportunities forms part of the war cry for the OER community, few demonstrations of just how the content may be used in such a way are offered. In the same way that the learning object economy that was much heralded by educational technologists never seemed to be as successful as was originally hoped, is it possible that the hoped for reuse and remix of OERs will similarly fail to take off (Lamb, 2007)? The granularity at which open courseware content is typically published - the course, or course unit - makes it difficult to consume bite size chunks of content easily , and arguably makes it difficult to discover reusable or remixable items of content.