=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-307/paper-8
|storemode=property
|title=Reward structures for participation and contribution in K-12 Open Educational Resources communities
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-307/paper08.pdf
|volume=Vol-307
|authors=Griff Richards
}}
==Reward structures for participation and contribution in K-12 Open Educational Resources communities==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-307/paper08.pdf
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning & Exchange
Reward structures for participation and contribution in
K-12 OER Communities
Griff Richards1,2
1
Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique,
180 – 10200 Shellbridge Way
Richmond, B.C., CANADA V6X 2W7
2
Simon Fraser University Surrey
griff@sfu.ca
Abstract. Much of the promise in Open Educational Resource (OER)
communities is the sharing of educational content, learning activities, and
experiences in their design and usage. Achieving a critical mass of relevant
quality content that will in turn attract a sustainable volume of users is the
single largest obstacle to the launch of an OER community. This paper looks at
participation structures and their potential application in the development of
eVrest, an OER community for the K-12 minority francophone schools in
Canada.
Keywords: Open educational resources, Wiki, communities of practice,
minority language schools, learning objects
1 Introduction
Écoles virtuelles, ressources éducatifs, et strategies en téléapprentissage (eVrest) is a
one year knowledge exchange project to encourage the sharing of resources and on-
line education know-how among the francophone minority school boards across
Canada. Funded in part by the Canada Council on Learning, eVrest brings together 15
partners from across Canada in hopes of establishing a sustainable community of
practice. In additional to regular meetings and joint productions, eVrest is developing
a community wiki (www.evrest.ca) for on-going collaboration and exchange of
resources.
Many of the eVrest partners have developed their own on-line courses using course
management systems that confine content in secure course spaces. A challenge for the
eVrest community is to encourage provincial education ministries, school boards and
teachers to move their material to the more accessible wiki. We also see the potential
for the wiki to expand into regional subsections and to have teachers and learners
begin to make contributions. The goal of this paper is to examine the participants in
the eVrest communities and suggest a number of structures for participation.
Ultimately, to be sustainable, the communities need to become self-governing and the
61
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning & Exchange
rewards intrinsic for both learners and teachers.
2 Wikis, Content, Community and Sustainability
Leuf and Cunningham [1] define a Wiki as a "software tool that promotes and
mediates discussion and joint working between different users". The most popular
wiki community is probably Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a massive on-line
encyclopedia developed entirely by voluntary user contributions. Wikis can be set up
by any person or organization by downloading and installing one of the many wiki
software tools and then inviting contributors to participate. However building content
is not as easy as installing the software. Even with Wikipedia fewer that 5% of the
hits are related to making contributions of content. In part this is blamed on the
learning curve for the wiki editing tools, on the time requirements to make a good
posting, or on the motivations for doing so. Hong [2] analyzed postings of users and
noted the difference between propensity to post and actual frequency of postings.
Even those who say they would like to post do not always find time to do so. A key
factor in making contributions as the importance of building reputation and being part
of a community. Thus, building content in a wiki is closely aligned with building the
community itself. A successful wiki, one that has ongoing development and renewal
from community contributions, can be a key sustaining factor for a virtual
community that otherwise might not coalesce.
Although we have identified common goals and brought key stakeholders in the
eVrest community together, they remain separated by their geopolitical mandates.
They have much to gain by sharing, yet they are often organizationally stymied in
attempts to formally do so. A wiki, with its open contribution approach and inherent
informality offers an opportunity for contributions to be shared by individual
members of the community, whether as individuals or on behalf of the formal
organizations they represent. Over time, as the collection grows and organizations
begin to derive more and more benefit, it is hoped that formal barriers to cooperation
may relax.
2.1 Intitial Features of eVrest wiki
The eVrest wiki is in a on-going state of evolution. In its current incarnation the
eVrest wiki has three main sections:
1. a collaborative authoring space for the eVrest project members, including for
example, a workspace for collaborative authoring of a monograph on on-line
education,
2. the Bibliothéque Virtuelle which is a collection of teacher-recommended links to a
wide variety of on-line resources of interest to teachers in the preparation of their
courses. In actuality the library has become a meta-library also pointing to similar
collections of links held by various partners, and to learning object search engines
that will help locate on-line content and learning activities.
62
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning & Exchange
3. a collection of member-contributed learning resources to support on-line learning.
In the long run, it is this third content area that will attract and benefit learners, in
particular because there is a shortage of appropriate French language content for
minority contexts where vocabulary and fluency lag that of comparable students in
majority language contexts [3]. However, much community development remains to
be done to stimulate contributions to the wiki and create a critical mass of useful
content.
2.2 The participation curve
In his Power Law of Participation, Mayfield [4] has nicely captured a progression of
contribution and involvement in social networking sites. He notes that within a wiki
or other social networking community there is a continuum of twelve actions
distributed along a logarithmic “power law” that represent a transition from
”collective intelligence” to “collaborative intelligence”. The most popular action,
reading, requires the lowest level of engagement. The least common action, leading,
requires the highest level of engagement. The twelve actions are:
• Read,
• Mark as favourite, Tag, Comment
• Subscribe, Share, Network
• Write
• Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate, Lead
The participation curve might seem to suggest that without leadership a wiki might
not survive. It is interesting to look at this list in the context of other successful
sharing sites such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) where there really is not much upper
level of involvement. Images are contributed and tagged by folksonomy, others are
free to add comments and to subscribe and share, but because the content is
predefined as digital stills, we do not see the same opportunity nor necessity for
higher levels of intellectual engagement. For contributors, Flickr offers a tool for
storing and managing thousands of digital images. For some it also offers a way of
sharing those images. Flickr offers “Groups” as opportunities for curating collections
or collaborating, but these lack the intensity of editing a Wikipedia entry. It is easy to
create content with a digital camera, it is more difficult to create a definitive
encyclopedia entry and and few are willing to undertake the task of monitoring and
editing sections on an on-going basis [5]. Leadership may be important for
community quality in Wikipedia, but it is less important for Flickr where quality
seems to concern not violating the community standards of decency and privacy.
In summary, the purpose of the community and the nature of its artifacts determine
the features and tool set of the sharing site. In turn, the ease with which those tools
facilitate the authentic tasks of the users, the lower the technical barriers to
participation, and the more likely users will embark. However it is doubtful that users
will embark on a non-authentic task just because someone builds a tool that makes
something obscure or inane easy to do. In the case of eVrest, organizations want to
share educational content among francophone schoolboards in order to increase the
63
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning & Exchange
amount of material available and to decrease costs. Teachers want to find new on-line
resources, and ideas for planning lessons. Eventually, classroom learners will look for
course readings and learning activities that are clearly written at their level of French
understanding. None of these are possible without a clear strategy to attract and
manage users, contributors and content.
2.3 Tagging
A folksonomy is “a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web
content … using open-ended labels called tags” [6]. As natural language and non-
specialist language is easier for lay users to use than structured taxonomies, meta-
tagging has become more popular with folksonomies than with taxonomies and
generates up to 70% more terms [7]. Although the additional terms may be present,
their use is indiosyncratic and folksonomic tagging tends to be less precise and less
complete and therefore less efficient than tagging by experts. In eVrest we see the
need to use both approaches – have defined fields for grade and subject area and
allow open tags as well. The text of the wiki can also be freely searched, but search
can be more appropriate if the materials have some basic descriptors of subject, grade
level and reading level. For the subject and intended grade level, the schema used by
the European SchoolNet for mapping between countries and across languages seems
appropriate. However the development of an automatic readability indexing of wiki
submissions is foreseen as a useful guide for both users and contributors
2.4 Sharing Links
Wiley’s [8] Send2Wiki is a tool for lowering the effort required for content collection.
Send2Wiki is installed on the browser and it permits a reader to highlight a web page
segment and transmit that content to a wiki page. Send2Wiki also affords comments,
and tags and machine translation. Unfortunately it does not clear copyright of the
material, so its use in an institutional environment would be limited to web content
that was clearly licensed for reuse. To extend and encourage the suggestion of useful
links to eVrest’s bibliothèque virtuelle a similar link submission button is being
developed that will automatically send the suggested url and comments to the wiki,
and also to the contributor’s personal page. A heuristic is yet to be developed for
automatic transferring suggested links to the recommended links page – this requires
close scrutiny because of a self-imposed quality standard that links need to be of a
certain level of quality and are vouched for by a teacher who has received training in
the quality review process.
2.5 Creating Content
The utility of Send2Wiki is also foreseen in selecting and moving content from
course management systems to the eVrest wiki. However, minority language students
often have less environmental exposure to French and thus they have smaller
vocabularies and lower reading levels than similarly aged students in majority
64
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning & Exchange
language settings. While their English language skills are often on a par with their
Anglophone peers, finding texts that are appropriately leveled in accessible French
and aligned with the provincial curriculum remains a problem. This is particularly
true for secondary science courses where writing levels are typically higher than the
grade level [9]. Translation from English exacerbates the reading level as it usually
results in 30% more words for the comparable English expression. eVrest is
developing automatic indexing of each page’s readability as a guide to both
contributors and consumers, however it will be necessary to seed the wiki with initial
content and provide incentives for early contributors.
The Francophone School authority of British Columbia (CSF) is committed to
resolving the content issue, and as it develops on-line course materials, will contribute
these directly to the wiki under a Creative Commons Licence. The wiki is important
for providing content with all learners in the CSF (not just those in the on-line
courses). The CSF hopes that by doing this in conjunction with eVrest, that other
school districts will reciprocate and contribute content of their own. While there is
little hope of coordinating 15 different school authorities so they all contribute
materials, at least less redundancy of development will take place and there should be
a better distribution of resources across the curriculum. We have held one workshop
for partners on wiki editing, however a second workshop will be required on content
development once a number of validate content templates and exemplars can be
published. We have noticed other wikis have held quality competitions to encourage
early content contributions, and we are examining the possibility of such events for
our users.
One additional activity is to encourage the contribution of topic outlines or maps
that can serve as “stubs”, blank pages, to guide would be contributors to areas of
current content need. Teams of contributors could then be recruited across content
areas with a challenge to teachers to assign stubs to students as research projects.
Provincial curriculum guides can provide an initial source of outlines. If learners are
also encourages to provide content then clear guidelines for quality review,
provenance verification and intellectual property will be required.
2.6 Creating learning activities
We are aware of the content production wiki in use by Quebec’s distance education
producer, Sofad, and are examining their use wiki templates to generate interactive
learning activities and quizzes [10]. This creates a close linkage between the wiki and
repositories for interactive learning objects and podcasts. Wikis are frustratingly
textual. Even the popular MediaWiki program which Wikipedia runs on is at best
awkward when it comes to integration of audio-visual materials or dynamic content.
While new, graphic interface wiki systems are on just over the horizon, they are not
yet stable enough for a production environment.
3. Extending community activity beyond the virtual
Ultimately we look to organizations such as Merlot (www.merlot.org) for leadership
65
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning & Exchange
in how to turn a content community into a sustainable professional development
community of practice. If peer recognition and prestige can arise from advanced
engagement in collaborative intelligence of eVrest and this prestige leads to the
eventual production of a freely available curriculum resource for all grades of
francophone minority students, and an inspiration for teachers then it will be indeed a
successful, sustainable project. A wiki can be a simple tool for collecting open
educational resources, but it will not be effective until its use is commonplace among
members of the community of practice. Leadership and participation incentives may
hasten inspection, but sustained development will only take place once the value for
involvement can be demonstrated.
Acknowledgments. eVrest was supported in part by funding from the Canadian
Council on Learning. Dr. Richards’ work is supported by Canada’s Natural Sciences
and Engineering Research Council through the LORNET Research Network. The
author wishes to acknowledge the technical contributions of Manon Ruel and Yves
Otis.
References
1. Leuf, B. & Cunningham, W. (2001). The Wiki Way: Collaboration and sharing on the
internet. Boston: Addison-Wesley Professional.
2. Hong, S., R. (2007). Knowledge Contribution in Wikipedia. National University of
Singapore, Thesis, last accessed 08 July 2007 from http://www-
appn.comp.nus.edu.sg/~seahruho/ruhongwiki.pdf
3. Dion, S. (2003). “Comment amélioré le recrutement et la retention des élèves dans les ecoles
francophones?” Notes pour une allocution de l’honorable Stéphane Dion, 4 Oct 2003,
Toronto. Last accessed 19 June 2007 from http://www.pco-
bcp.gc.ca/default.asp?Language=F&Page=archive&sub-speeches&Doc=20031004_f.htm
4. Mayfied, R. (2006). Power Law of Participation, web posting last accessed 8 July 2007 from
http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html
5. Tancer, W. (2007). Who’s really participating in Web 2.0. TIME (web article posted 25
April 2007), last retrieved 08 July 2007 from
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,161475,00.html
6. Wikipedia (2007). Folksonomy (wiki entry) last accessed 08 July 200 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy.
7. Trant, J. (2007). Cited by T. Vander Wal in Folksonomy Provides 70 Percent More Terms
Than Taxonomy (blog entry of 13 June 2007) last accessed 08 July 2007 from
http://www.vanderwal.net/random/category.php?cat=153.
8. Wiley, D. (2007). Sustainability models for open educational resource projects in higher
education. Third GLOBE-NIME International Seminar, 14 February 2007, Tokyo, Japan.
9. Allington, R. (2007). Keynote presentation to Interactive Innovations Conference,
Vancouver, 01 March 2007.
10. Otis, Y., & Slade, S. (2007) Les utilisations du wiki dans la conception et la production de
matériel d'apprentissage. iLearning Forum. Paris. 31 January 2007.
66