Last weekend, Anne Jonas and the Participatory Culture Foundation invited me to attend a working group about video and Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Open Video Conference 2011 in New York City. The meetings included a diverse group of OER creators, developers, instructional designers, and teachers who work with media and education on the web. Mainstream producers from NPR’s RadioLab and PBS Kids were also present, ensuring that the group reflected perspectives from beyond the immediate world of OER advocates.

Each afternoon, we discussed many of the central issues of video and OER: the challenges of teaching with video, licensing considerations for sharing video content, tools for creation and dissemination, and production techniques for supporting large-scale webcasting solutions. For me, it was particularly interesting to hear from instructors and designers who wanted to make video a two-way conversation, where students don’t just consume pre-baked content but are actively engaged in creating their own media along the way. This echoes our vision for the Floe Project, where everyone can be involved in the process of adapting, enhancing, and deriving content in different formats and modalities.

There was also a lot of enthusiasm for the potential to create layered, synchronized learning experiences using entirely open web technology such as HTML5 video, JavaScript, and synchronized media. RadioLab’s Hypermedia Audio Player, built with Popcorn.js, provided a lot of inspiration and food for thought. Platforms and tools were a big issue for everyone; we spent a lot of creative time our sharing ideas, goals, and requirements for new content delivery platforms optimized for learning, remixing, and adapting video on the web.

An Inclusive OER Design Workshop

On the second day, I facilitated an inclusive OER design workshop where participants designed their own open educational curriculum and platforms that are optimized to the needs and preferences of individual learners. We started by talking about our ideas and preconceptions of accessibility, ultimately re-framing disability and accessibility in terms of usability and design–the capacity for a software system to accommodate the needs of the user. In this model, we all experience disability in different contexts and environments. Well-designed, personalizable user interfaces can enable diverse users to engage with learning in a way that respects their own needs, preferences, cultural values, and learning styles.

After talking about our own experiences of accessibility in open educational resources, we broke up into smaller groups to design, as Betty Carter would sing, the “Who, What, Why, Where, When [and How]?” of our OER curriculum and platforms.

Who?
Each group was tasked with the creation of a unique user persona, complete with their own goals, preferences, and learning needs. We gave our learners names and personalities to bring them closer to the design process, ensuring that our solution was grounded uniquely in their needs.

When and Where?
Once the identity of our learners was established, the design teams were asked to consider the environment and context in which their learners learn. Is it at home late at night where sound might disrupt others? In a busy classroom in collaboration with other students? While traveling? Using an older computer, lower bandwidth, or slow mobile device?

How?
Each team was also asked to consider the teaching methods and content delivery platforms for their OER content. Is the course primarily online or in person? Does it involve independent learning or regular group participation? What learning levels is the content targeted towards? How are students assessed and graded, if at all?

Why and What?
With the learner’s context, environment, and goals in mind, each team fleshed out an open educational resource and the details of its delivery to the learner. The resulting designs were remarkably creative, thoughtful, and innovative. Here’s a quick summary:

• The first group built in-class resources that were specifically tailored to the physical and attentional demands of young learners, combining traditional teaching with the use of mobile social networking and at-home exercises driven by freely available open educational resources.
• The second group, designing for rural lifelong learners, created library-based personalized learning packages where OER content was compiled and remixed based on the learner’s unique interests. Delivery was available over the phone using text-to-speech conversion, or on a DVD shipped by mail.
• The third group designed a flexible video delivery platform that took effective web design techniques such as graceful degradation and progressive enhancement to the next level. This platform made it easy for learners to view content in text, audio, and video formats, adapting to the capabilities of the user’s device. The platform could deliver sophisticated formats such as synchronized media and HTML5 video when used with more advanced devices, and would always fall back to a baseline of plain text and HTML on older devices and lower bandwidth. More importantly, it let the learner choose the experience they preferred most.

Notes, Slides, and Next Steps

Our notes from the design exercise are available on the Video and OER Workshop Etherpad. I’m really excited that many of the ideas we came up with at this workshop are directly useful to our work on Floe. In some cases, they directly echo the designs James has been working on for our upcoming Floe iterations.

It’s going to be exciting to take these ideas and explore them with real OERs and platforms, designing new ways to interact and learn with rich video on the web. I’d like to thank Anne and the PCF for inviting me to participate, and the rest of the attendees of the workshop for their creative and engaging ideas. I look forward to continued collaboration!

I created a handful of slides to guide the workshop process. They’re available on Slideshare in case you’d like to try a similar design activity at your own event; ping me if you need them in an alternative format. Let me know what you think!