Participating

Joseph Potvin
Patrick Masson
Wayne Mackintosh

Discussion Notes

1: Text of Short Announcement & Invitation to Participate

• Please add your suggested text to this box:

Call for Participation in OSI's Working Group on Management Education: Let's work together to strengthen the quality of management amongst free/libre/open projects and portfolios, and amongst their governing organizations.
We invite your collaboration towards improving the FLOW Syllabus. This is a peer-curated guide to the domains of knowledge that anyone involved in creating or maintaining Free/Libre/Open Works (FLOW). It is designed to help stakeholders to optimize value, to control costs, and to manage risk.

Points discussed:

• The announcement/invitation should be promotional and perhaps even somewhat provocative
• OSI has several conferences coming soon, and this can be highlighted
• Useful to have a twitter link, wiki link, presentation link
• Touch on different perspectives of Syllabus use (by educators; self-directed learners; specialist advisors whether software architects, lawyers, business strategists, etc.)
• For the educators, emphasize that the resources are optimised for re-use in, say:
  • http://www.merlot.org
  • http://www.ocwconsortium.org/courses/
• That's to say, the FLOW Syllabus is not a course or a curriculum in and of itself, rather it is a venue for the community to identify the salient topics to be successful in the coordination of free/libre/open works;
• Keep the intro/invite short, link to a more complete statement
• Situate the FLOW Syllabus as one of the results of the direction that the OSI Board has decided to go

Action: Patrick will draft somethinga and circulate for input

2: OSI-EDU-WG Meeting Venu

Discussion about the media of participation, and the Useful Coordination Links section http://osi.xwiki.com/bin/Projects/draft-flow-syllabus#HUsefulCoordinationLinks   Some options for the primary meeting venue currently being looked at:

• https://togetherjs.com/
• http://openmeetings.apache.org/
• http://bigbluebutton.org/
• http://www.ekiga.org/
• others?
  ...Let's continue to assess, but make the decision next week about the primary venue for OSI-EDU-WG weekly meetings.

Some criteria are:

• respect freedom of choice of users
• people in other fields will want other tools they are familiar with
• best if the solution does not requre yet another registration to something (nice example: http://www.openetherpad.org )
• the venue we choose for OSI-EDU-WG will thus be getting an implicit thumbs-up

3: Management of Open Access; Open Learning, as a Topic

Thoughts on a sub-section to the syllabus about the effective management of open learning intiatives, open access journals

• http://wikieducator.org/OERF:About
• http://oeruniversitas.org/terms-of-service
• Governance tagged items at http://www.evolllution.com/category/institutional_governance/

Possibly a sub-section of "Methodologies Inspiring Our Approach"
http://osi.xwiki.com/bin/Projects/draft-flow-syllabus#HMethodologiesInspiringOurApproach

Yes this would be useful, BUT

• stick to FLOW Syllabus scope
• not more than a sub-section 
• point to some best sources
• keep in mind that the audience is different than the main FLOW audience
• highlight similarities with free/libre/open, but realize that the starting point for most educators is different

4: Resource-Based Learning

Thoughts on: "Resource-based learning" http://www.reusability.org/read/chapters/hannafin.doc

• Generally there's an inverse relation between reusability and substantive focus
• FLOW Syllabus should point learners to resources, let learners and educators structure "their courses"
• This implies emphasis on primary sources, not on "learning activities". Let users of the syllabus design learning activities.
• Probably best to remove the "education philosophy" content (andragogy, case method, problem method) since this is out of scope for the FLOW Syllabus per se, and yet would attract a lot of debate amongst educators. It's interesting, but provides no specific net benefit for the FLOW Syllabus' explicit objectives.
• Reminder to provide points for each section on "learning outcomes"