1. Resource Sharing in a Self-Organizing Online Forum
Shelley Henson
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning

2. 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
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3. MIT materials
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4. 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
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5. OLS Overview Based on research funded under an NSF CAREER award
Threaded Discussion
Kudos
Fire Alarm
Reputation System
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6. 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…
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7. Resource-sharing in OLS
Personal/Expert opinion
Offer to connect
Online referrals
Materials referrals
Refer directly to course
Personal experiences
GOTO WEB EXAMPLES
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8. Methods Pull all discussion items from database
Dump into qualitative analysis software
Identify nodes/themes
Code ‘em and count ‘em
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9. 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
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10. 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
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11. Open Learning Support V2+
myOCW
OCW consortium-sponsored project
MOSCL
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12. 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
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13. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
To view a copy of this license, visit
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
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