OER1147 Demonstration pptx

Wednesday 11 May 11.30 Cockcroft Theatre

MIT Core Concepts Catalog

Jeff Merriman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Conference Theme: Academic practice and digital scholarship

Intended audience: Educational technologists, pedagogical designers, etc.

Abstract: This presentation will introduce the MIT Core Concepts Catalog proof-of-concept project, aimed at exploring and facilitating academic re-use of Open Education Resources (OER), including content in MIT's own Open Course Ware and other openly available resources. This project shifts the perspective from content to core curricular concepts, and "learning objectives" as defined by MIT faculty, and initially focused on a handful of relatively inter-related domains, including Physics, Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering. The approach relies on independent management of user-defined conceptual models and relating these to existing content sources.
Tools developed through this project are designed help us to answer questions like "How can OCW content be more effectively used by MIT faculty for instruction?" The ultimate goal is the ability for a teacher or learner to perform searches and/or browse content based on the criteria of curricular concepts for a particular subject or field of study.  From a teacher's perspective it facilitates the re-use of cross-disciplinary content in the preparation of course materials. For students it allows for more efficient navigation of the vast and growing global collection of OER content to help augment understanding.

The Core Concepts Catalog architectural approach anticipates future needs beyond the immediate scope of this project:

• Content that is stored and managed in multiple places and supplied by multiple providers, at MIT and elsewhere, must be supported by the system.
• Multiple providers may also manage core Concepts and Learning Objectives data in multiple places.
• Programmatic access to concept data is as important as programmatic access to content in fostering the independent development of new applications that leverage common concept management infrastructures.
• The service model for conceptual data should allow for mappings to multiple curricular elements, such as assessments, classroom response systems, or student performance tracking systems, etc.

Initially the Core Concepts Catalog will support and inform a small number of proof-of-concept applications, including web-based applications and client-based ones (including Tufts Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) and a new concept/content tool currently being developed at MIT for iOS/iPad) some or all of which will be demonstrated as part of this presentation.

Keywords: open course ware; concept maps; learning objectives

References:

The Core Concepts Catalog project currently has no web reference of its own.