A MODEL FOR OPEN CONTENT COMMUNITIES TOSUPPORT EFFECTIVE LEARNING AND TEACHINGKwok-Bun Yue, T. Andrew Yang, Wei DingUniversity of Houston-Clear Lake2700 Bay Area Boulevard, Houston, TX 77058, USA{yue|yang|ding}@cl.uh.eduPing ChenUniversity of Houston-DowntownOne Main Street, Houston, TX 77002, [email protected] Source Software (OSS) has provided a successful model for community-based collaborative development ofsoftware. The success of OSS has triggered interests in applying similar approaches to other areas besides softwaredevelopment, such as open courseware development and open content projects. However, there are nearly no projects onbuilding highly collaborative Open Content Community (OCC) for developing high quality, comprehensive, rich andfreely distributable educational materials on specific subjects. Learners can directly use these educational materials toeffectively learn the respective subjects, and instructors can use them to construct courses. This paper presents an OSS-based model for building an OCC that supports volunteers to effectively develop, evaluate and use open contenteducational materials. The model is composed of fine-grained knowledge units to encourage high degree of collaboration.It also has a hierarchical module-based framework for structuring projects. The community Website provides tools andservices for content development, project management and project navigation. It is designed to provide high flexibility tocater to varying requirements of different projects, which may evolve in a way similar to OSS projects. An initialprototype has been developed and the authors are in the process of fine-tuning the prototype for experimentation withsample projects.KEYWORDSOpen source, open content community, learning, teaching, Web community, courseware.1. INTRODUCTIONThe advance of the Web has significantly and rapidly changed the way of learning and teaching. For mostsubjects, the Web is a vast repository of relevant resources for learners to learn various subjects, and forinstructors to extract course-related materials. However, these resources are usually scattered, unstructuredand of inconsistent quality. Many also have copyright issues prohibiting their adoption by instructors ascourseware materials. A central repository of high-quality, comprehensive, rich, and freely distributableeducational materials is obviously very beneficial for both learning and teaching.We have identified four criteria for effectively using the educational materials for learning and teaching:(1) High quality: The Web is full of information that is incorrect, outdated, misleading, of low value, orpoorly presented. Although it is generally easy to find many relevant resources on a topic through searchengines, tedious effort to sift through the voluminous resources has become a major inhibitor.(2) Comprehensive: The educational materials should have a good coverage of all major subtopics of agiven subject, which can then be customarily selected to satisfy different learning and teaching scenarios.(3) Rich: Learners have different strategies, approaches, and capabilities for learning, which are afunction of prior experience and heredity (American Psychological Association, 1997). Only a rich collectionof educational materials can effectively support a large community of diverse learners and teachers.(4) Freely distributable: Learners and teachers can then freely use them without any copyrightconcerns. More importantly, they can be modified for further improvement and customization, and thenredistributed to benefit more people. This calls for an open copyright license similar to those used by OSS oropen content projects.The Open Source Software (OSS) model is a good candidate to be adapted to satisfy these criteria. Theleading OSS Website, sourceforge.net (Sourceforge, 2003), is a vibrant community with more than 750,000registered users and hosts more than 70,000 projects. This paper describes our effort of adapting the OSSmodel to an Open Content Community (OCC) model. The OCC supports projects to develop educationalmaterials satisfying these criteria. Related work is discussed in Section 2. The model is elaborated in Section3. Examples of how the OCC may be used are discussed in Section 4. We draw our conclusions in section 5.2. RELATED WORKThere are several ongoing open content projects for developing freely distributed contents, such asWikipedia, an open content encyclopedia (Wikipedia 2003). The two major projects focusing on developingand hosting courseware are the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OpenCourseWare, 2003) and Rice’s Connexionsproject (Rice, 2003). The highly successful MIT OpenCourseWare is perhaps the most visible project in open coursewaredevelopment. It will eventually provide the public open access to all MIT courses and has triggered muchdiscussion in higher education, including the advantage of an open courseware model (Newmarch, 2001) andcomparisons with the OSS model (Baldi, 2002). However, it does not attempt to create a collaborativecommunity for content development. Contents are developed solely by MIT faculty for MIT courses. The current major project in building a community for developing open courseware is Rice’s successfulConnexions project. Content developers can develop modules using a set of predefined tools in the site.Modules are stored in custom designed XML documents and they can be selected to construct courses.Both Connexions and OpenCourseWare focus on the development and hosting of courseware, wherestandards promoting courseware interoperability, such as Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI, 2003) and SharedContent Object Reference Model Initiative (SCORM, 2003), are important. Their direct targets are thusinstructors for hosting courseware for their students. In contrast, our goal is to allow both learners andinstructors to use the educational materials directly.The OSS model has been extensively studied (for example, Raymond, 2002; O’Reilly, 1999). An importantobservation is that an active community of highly collaborating users and developers are very beneficial toOSS projects by improving both quality and richness. An OSS community Website such as sourceforge.netprovides the necessary supporting tools and utilities for developing