Scale for Engagement
2 min read
I've been thinking about the idea of scale, and how our current conceptions of scale are askew.
Within the Open Educational Resources space, there are a range of efforts that focus on broad scale adoption of OER. This vision includes hundreds or thousands of resources adopted hundreds of thousands to millions of times. In this vision, OERs replace textbooks, and save students hundreds to thousands of dollars on textbook costs. This is a very good thing. Arguably, this is a necessary step on the road to broader adoption of OER.
But, this vision of OER at scale is still predicated on scaling for delivery.
If we shift our vision of scale to tens of thousands of resources adopted tens of thousands of times, we begin to access some of the transformative power of OER. This vision of scale embeds and requires two elements: an informed and empowered teacher or learner, and high quality content available in a format that supports flexible remixing. These two elements - empowered learners and hassle-free remixing - begin to bring us to places you can't get to with traditional texts. Scaling in this way requires increased engagement, and it requires that we begin building system that remove barriers to engagement.
At best, current systems allow for flexibly copying content within a system - meaning that we have some flexibility within a circumscribed environment, but we lack the ability to work in our chosen space. While many platforms allow for export in a variety of open formats, every platform has context-specific display needs that are littered throughout the content. This cruft markup - injected everywhere, by every platform - is a huge barrier to both reuse and accessibility. If we are serious about scaling for engagement, we need to be serious about eliminating cruft content from canonical versions of openly licensed texts.
It's also worth highlighting that scaling for engagement would support scaling for delivery just as well. But we have a choice: do we want OER to just replace textbooks, or do we want open education to transform how we view teaching, learning, and authority? Scaling for engagement lets us do all of the above.
