Resource Sharing in a Self-Organizing Online Forum Shelley Henson Center for Open and Sustainable Learning http://cosl.usu.edu

The Problem Once upon a time there was MIT OCW They had loads of great educational materials, video, lecture notes, etc. But there was no one to help when you had a question February 21, 2019 ::

MIT materials February 21, 2019 ::

One Solution We proposed Open Learning Support http://mit.ols.usu.edu/ Forum software designed on the assumption that no faculty / moderator would be present The features facilitate self-organization - people find each other and ask / answer questions Philosophy: Start with a few features as possible and implement more only as needed February 21, 2019 ::

OLS Overview Based on research funded under an NSF CAREER award Threaded Discussion Kudos Fire Alarm Reputation System February 21, 2019 ::

Some OLS Demographics Approx 2 years old Covering approx 1/3 of MIT OCW 4098 Registered Users 1065 Messages Posted And on it’s way to retirement… February 21, 2019 ::

Resource-sharing in OLS Personal/Expert opinion Offer to connect Online referrals Materials referrals Refer directly to course Personal experiences GOTO WEB EXAMPLES http://mit.ols.usu.edu/news/shownews?NewsItemID=6 http://mit.ols.usu.edu/courses/showthread?ForumID=3&RootPostID=366 http://mit.ols.usu.edu/courses/showthread?ForumID=183&RootPostID=864 February 21, 2019 ::

Methods Pull all discussion items from database Dump into qualitative analysis software Identify nodes/themes Code ‘em and count ‘em February 21, 2019 ::

Findings Personal/Expert opinion 144 Offer to connect 139 Referrals (online) 117 Referrals (materials) 51 Refer directly to MIT course 37 Personal experiences 21 Total 509 February 21, 2019 ::

So why retire OLS? Social software has matured… think web2.0 flickr Blogs RSS RDF Tagging Aggregators Community Feeds Collaborative Filtering Folksonomies agents del.icio.us Semantic Web Social networking February 21, 2019 ::

Open Learning Support V2+ myOCW OCW consortium-sponsored project MOSCL http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/mocsl/ February 21, 2019 ::

Questions? shelleylyn@gmail.com http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/mocsl If those don’t cover it, try yahoo answers in fact, try yahoo answers anyway because it’s cool February 21, 2019 ::

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