Talk:LangCamp 2012/OER

I thought I'd try to post some notes about the OER discussion before I completely forget.

More than half of the LangCamp participants moved into the incubator stream, leaving 9 for the OER stream. Actually, there were at least 4 Indonesians, including Ivan and Siska, but only Ivan continued after the break.

In the first part of the meeting, there was a great deal of discussion over what we were doing there as not everyone had the same idea about what the goals were. Eventually, consensus was reached that there were three main goals but I apologize that I cannot remember the exact phrasing that Penny, Lindy and Karen came up with. As a result, we divided up into three groups of three people each.

1. Develop strategies revolving around how to get the government involved. I believe there was more to it than that, but this group was run by the three aforementioned ladies, so I cannot be more specific.
2. Develop strategies to promote WM, specifically the Indonesian language articles in order to get more contributors and editors (and possibly also readers). In this group were Chloe, Ryan and one other person (Francis?). I think Chris also sat in on this group later on.
3. Develop measures to improve quality control. I was in this group with Linden and Ivan. We actually came up with some ideas for #2 as well. Ivan was taking notes but I am not sure that all of the things we said to him were fully noted due to the language barrier.

1. Start an outreach program to schools and universities with two goals. First, because there is a learning curve involved with becoming a contributing/editing WM articles, offer free training classes to them to teach the educators how to utilize WM, specifically how to use the editor as well as create and edit pages. Second, suggest that the educators make use of WM for themselves and also have their students use them. For example, original research (OR) could be posted to Wikiversity (as I understand it), whereas students could be given a loosely defined assignment of creating an article in Indonesian (in WP, say) on a topic of interest related to their major or topic of study. Wikinews, as Chloe pointed out, is already being used by some journalism profs in Oz, so why not here (Indonesia), too? We'll get educators who're skilled at writing articles, and we'll get articles that will probably needed to be cleaned up from the students.
2. Contact professional organizations and offer the same training to the organization's members with the hope that we'll get experts who want to become editors and contributors, especially since they'll be able to provide depth that the average contributor may not be able to, and will almost always have more expertise and presumably better writing skills than uni students.
3. Define standards for the barnstar so that it is objective and credible due to systematic determination. Currently, there are few or no rules for applying a barnstar, so it is ripe for abuse.
4. Incorporate a systematic evaluation. This could be accomplished by giving users a series of questions to answer about various aspects of the article, such as the quality of the English, structure, organization, on-topic, references etc. Apparently, there is such a system already in English WP. It was suggested that the evaluation could also include a variable involving the number of featured articles, edits etc.
5. Improve upon the materials available by adding multimedia materials as well as more hyperlinks to definitions, off-site materials, other articles etc. This particularly relates to OER as multimedia resources are desperately needed by teachers. Of course, the resources would need to be high quality. The difficulties of editing such materials were mentioned but we were unaware of formats that suit the need. It was suggested that, prior to posting material that had a dialogue/monologue that was independent of the article's text, the script should be posted for editing and approval. The multimedia could include: audio stream of the text on the page, a multimedia presentation with a series of pictures related to the topic and the audio of the text, a presentation which would demonstrate the information/concepts in a way that is more suitable to teaching etc.
6. The addition of other types of teaching resources specifically for educators with each article, such as worksheets, pictures, activity plans, lesson plans and more. There was some question as to whether lesson plans should be generic, one-size-fits-all-curriculum types, or an attempt should be made to provide a variety, but no decision was made. Afterwards, Lindy expressed concern about the idea of lesson plans because of the vast number of websites offering substandard lesson plans, the fact that the usage of the word "lesson" somewhere (on WM?) were inaccurate, and the tendency of certain teachers to be too lazy to create a customized lesson plan for their students. I suggested that the lesson plans (and everything else) should be of particularly high quality and that, while it is true that customized lesson plans are important if one wants to be an excellent teacher, there are many teachers in Indonesia who are pretty much clueless about how to make such a superior lesson plan. She and I discussed the idea that OER materials designed for teachers could be provided independently of encyclopedic articles for the express purpose of helping teachers learn how to do their job better, hence potentially eliminating the need for lesson plans on WM. Although I think such materials are essential, I'm not sure where we would be able to provide them, and I still feel that some lesson plans may be necessary.

At this time, I cannot remember what else we came up with. If Ivan or Linden can add to this, please do. If Penny still has her notes, please put them up so I can flesh things out.

After the three groups had finished their work, we all came back together and shared our results and suggestions.ReveurGAM (talk) 13:25, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

In looking at the blurb about Wikiversity, it seems like it would be the perfect place to put up OER material for the Indonesian Language, not to mention education in general, since that's a stated goal.ReveurGAM (talk) 07:30, 17 December 2012 (UTC)