Week 5: Example Open Education Projects

QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does "quality" mean?

It was a very interesting experience to browse the different open education resource sites. First of all, this was the very first time that I visited any of them. I simply had not learned about them before this course. I think that they are important initiatives in sharing knowledge. Most of them still have logins and passwords for the access of the whole features of the courses, but with the guest login one can still have access to important resources, or "chunks" of knowledge.
They have in common this general idea of sharing educational contents. But most of them are aimed at higher education. It was on the National Repository that they made clear the division of contents per level (eg.: high school). I also felt that this site was more dynamic and offered more opportunities for access to multimedia resources.
Well, I would say that all the sites also have in common a certain limitation in the screen design. The fonts are usually small for the average reader (or maybe the problem is with me and I need to check my eyes soon... :-)). I have not identified principles of universal design either.
The MIT site was particularly interesting in this aspect. It offers an uninviting, heavy interface that to me seems to be more aimed at the business world. Well, also, near the phrase that says "Unlocking Knowledge..." there is the picture of a man with crossed arms. The visuals are contradictory in meaning, I would say.
As for the contents being offered, most of them offer college content, but the content is different in scope and categories. Also, some are richer than others (UNESCO, for instance, was richer in diversity -categories and subcategories- and offered PDF versions of the courses).
In terms of pedagogical design, I enjoyed the Carnegie Mellon site better. Also, it has a better rapport with users. The other sites, on the other hand, are very impersonal.
Talking about quality in open education contents, I think that there is still much to develop. I felt that the sites were worried in being only a repository of contents and did not offer much opportunity for discussion and community building (the only exception was the MIT site, which ironically I found visually uninviting). The contents per se also do not seem to have much pedagogical treatment - they are mostly collections of texts transported to the screen. I am aware that dealing with a multitude of materials takes much work and requires the collaborative work of people from different areas, but something has to be done in order to treat information differently in different types of media. Also, it is important to make the interface visually appealing, but is equaly important to make it user friendly and intuitive. I observed that the Open University site was the only one to have a better treatment of the navigation, letting the user know where he is.
Overall, my opinion is that the sites reveal diversity in the concept of open content and treat information in different ways, but mostly in an impersonal way.