OERInterop-UserStories

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User Stories
Coming from the discussion on Monday morning, December 11, 2007, the group put forward a number a user stories that cut across the OERInterop-Scenarios developed before the meeting began. The user stories included:
 * Professor wants to get community input on his course, see what other faculty are doing, improve the course
 * Faculty member wants to put together high-quality book based on re-used
 * K-12/schools sharing materials, activities, etc. (copying Lessons, distributing to teachers, sharing of contents via CD, aggregating)
 * Teacher in Europe who wants to put together a curriculum in a given subject area that includes materials that have been approved/vetted/includes materials related to national standards
 * Offline use of content, remix, authoring and use offline and re-upload
 * Mobile delivery and use
 * Person in a developing country wants to put together materials, but has trouble getting to resources (including political, cultural reasons)
 * Findability, recommendations, use, context, mashups, location

Things to think about
When providing details about the user stories, the group was asked to consider:
 * What does the user want out of this?
 * Remember, there are people in the network
 * Process flows and diagrams
 * Don’t constrain to what’s currently possible
 * Don’t constrain to a single system/repository
 * What’s unique about OER

Principles

 * Social network, the people are important
 * We're assuming a goal of seamless interoperability
 * Only collectively do we have enough content and services that satisfy the wealth of needs that exist
 * How do we leverage the collective?
 * Learning doesn’t happen in isolated area distinct from the rest of their lives, will do what they do when they look for something
 * All over the world the types of educational materials exist, not just about push of content, how do we help people find the materials that they need locally?

University Professor Needs to Teach a Course

 * Prof. Min Do at the University of Illinois, has been contacted by a group in Hanoi to teach a course in digital signal processing (DSP). He got a description of the students. He is an authority in DSP. He thought he might have to spend several months putting together the course. His colleague Doug Jones, said much of this material already existed in Connexions. In a few days Prof. Do took the goals of the course, time of the course, details on the students he pulled together the book in Connexions. Prof. Do did need to create some of the materials. Using the course composer he put together a book—that was transformed into a book by Qoop. The book was printed and shipped to Hanoi for $12-15, ready for the students to use. The book included modules from 14 different authors—compiled by Prof. Do in the span of a few days. The tools worked, the content was there, the licensing worked. There was a bit of hand work in finalizing the figures.
 * There was a missing piece—a video from Teachers Domain was a good example. Do the students have access to the Internet? Thumbnail and the URL in the book. If the book came with a CD, then the video could be included. The Connexions conversion program, converts links to links that are printed in the book.
 * How did Prof. Do fine the material in Connexions? Looked at content page, searched by content, title?
 * How did Teachers Domain get into the book?
 * OER Recommender
 * OER Commons
 * How did he find the content in French/Vietnamese? Was it translated it automatically?
 * The students work with teachers to translate into another language
 * Where does the translated version go? Back into Connexions? Mirror site in Hanoi?
 * Prof. Do had some time, to add to a queue to be translated, it gets translated and sent to him
 * The CD includes an e-book version
 * Sub-title of the video?
 * Dotsub
 * Transcripts of the video
 * How does the collection/work get re-shared back to Connexions
 * Is this a lens? Could this be a lens?
 * Where do you find the other stuff?
 * Gaps in knowledge
 * Did he compare the content with other materials?
 * What about the UC Berkeley course on DSP? In YouTube?
 * Automatic speech generate from XML, MathML
 * Where did Prof. Do get the exams for the course? The assignments?
 * From students that took the course previously?
 * Student projects?
 * Tutors?
 * Where did they come from?
 * Some tutors were not Vietnamese, they provided feedback while the Vietnamese students were sleeping
 * MIT (or another university, organization) sent students to provide tutors
 * Comments travel with the resources
 * Unique Identifier
 * Social networking
 * Labs
 * National Instruments player for lab in LabView
 * Assignments
 * Value to Prof. Do: Taught the course, got recognized and received an award.

Schools/K-12 Teacher trying to prepare a lesson on fractions

 * French speaking teacher, who only understands French. Mainstream teacher. He needs to give a lesson in primary school about fractions, because the curriculum requires him to give it in the 5th grade. He is using the national portal for France, that is connected to a federation of national repositories and other content providers. All content is “open”, but not necessarily Creative Commons licensed.
 * Needs to be able to find content about fractions—browses the French curriculum, and select the curriculum item for fractions and gets the resources. (In the background, search occurs across federated repositories.) He’s looking for adding and multiplying fractions with different denominators. Search results are ordered by relevance (for the right age group, for the language, correct subject area).
 * There happens to be a Finnish learning object that is exactly what he needs.
 * The system returns 500 results
 * The system sorts out mundane from higher quality one—based on rating from other users and based on download/assessment
 * Other language resources are ok, as long as they “travel well”
 * Ranking includes those that are easily customizable
 * Ranking across federation
 * Tagging—common vocabulary? Use of native languages? Are they machine translatable? Or relatable?
 * Teacher wants to see other teachers, local, that has used the resource. Are the teachers willing to participate? Rankings are based on teachers “metadata” and “activities”
 * Teacher finds what he wants, one click away
 * Authentication
 * Unique identifier
 * Wants to aggregate it in a longer lesson, take some of the Finnish text and translate it into French (a friend helps him do this)
 * He’s not sure what the license is letting him do? It’s “open,” but not Creative Commons.
 * Reads metadata in French
 * Finds comments by other teachers about how they have used it in their classrooms
 * Where did the friends come from?
 * System helps him create networks
 * He needs to put the materials where the parents, curriculum administrators can see it
 * French-speaking and Finnish-speaking students can compete on games
 * He changes schools and now needs to teach the course in Flemish or a different level of student (grade level)
 * When the teacher goes to combine this resource on fractions with one that is not compatible (license, the system checks on license compatibility)
 * He wants to contribute this back to the community—there’s a small bit of material that’s not correctly licensed as Creative Commons
 * Create localization networks to help out
 * Do teachers really want to do this? Do they really have the time? Do teachers need complete course, matched to the curriculum?
 * Master Teachers (in US), see problem areas and they can spend some time addressing the problem on behalf of the individual teachers
 * Summer workshops
 * G from Cameron, who speaks French, finds the resource from OLE Nepal, took the bits that were available as free content.
 * Some materials were unavailable because of license or file format
 * In Ghana, an English and French speaking country, sees the same example, but thought the example of dividing the Belgian waffle in half wasn’t relevant, but there is a related example relevant in Ghana
 * Let teachers recontextualize

 

Offline and forms of delivery

 * Raphael in Nigeria—he’s a community educator, not a teacher. He believes education and teacher training is a way to make an impact. There’s an alarming rise in HIV/AIDS. Believes that he can make an impact by educating 17-22 year olds.
 * Looking for a café, clearinghouse and marketplace. Wants to go someplace to have a conversation with someone, describe the problem, get some feedback, get a compass to get steered in the right direction, has to navigate through strong issues in the area, wants someplace “safe” to talk about this
 * Wants to find material, content, people, wants worldwide input into content and participation
 * Wants people to fill in notebook, wants to decide what to use where, wants to create booklets that are appropriate for the audience
 * Has made book from copies, radio show, CDs, playing cards, posters
 * Wants online and offline display of materials
 * Has to reuse and remix material—there is no single course that fits all of his audiences
 * Has done house-to-house surveys, training workshops with mentors and elders
 * Part educator, community organizer
 * He wants to teach others how to do the same thing he’s done
 * He’s visited TWB and places that other people have said is appropriate, he has to use expensive cybercafés, has used inventive methods to gain access to content
 * Success of a project may depend on one person, who has a multiplier effect, what can we do to help this one person do what he needs to do
 * Will we similar kinds of scale (impact individuals to reach whole groups)
 * Enablers:
 * Ubiquity
 * Interface—doesn’t need to be trained to use something—how is an individual invited into the system, how are they greeted, how are they inspired?
 * What are the obstacles?
 * Needs to organize and mange resources? Why not Google? He goes to the places he trusts
 * To solve the problem, what did he need?
 * Magic search engine?
 * Support group? To recommend the content, from people trying to solve the same problem?
 * Trust?
 * He’s not able to evaluate the material that comes in. He needs to be comfortable with the material and approach he takes. Where does he go for factual information, without an agenda?
 * Individually, needs resources—he wants to be certain where his material came from, and that it’s “right”, he’s figuring out stuff, he’s motivated
 * There are other people like him, but he wants to know more.
 * If a trusted network exists, the network/system/community can push the information to him
 * How does he vet the information?
 * Governance and oversight, tools, surveys, statistics, community responses, hand-holding
 * OER Materials
 * Could attach vetting information to the materials
 * Connecting to the social network, robust and flexible
 * How does he contribute back? How does he get plugged into the network