OSI-EDU-WG Meeting Notes from 4 March 2014

Participating

Joseph Potvin
Patrick Masson
Wayne Mackintosh
Ken Udas

Discussion Notes

1: Presentation about the OSI-EDU-WG in May 2014

• At "PM-Connect" https://wiki.state.ma.us/confluence/display/projectmanagerforum/Home
  • Massachusetts government employees, project managers
  • OSI was invited to put together a presentation

2. Participation in OSI-EDU-WG

• We'll be preparing a general invite soon, but if you have colleague who may like to participate in the OSI-EDU-WG, feel free to bring them along to the teleconf
• New content on project management in the Syllabus needs feedback, eg the "learning outcomes". Good responses so far

3. FLOW Syllabus Usability

• It's a bit overwhelming
• Being able to tag the modules/items would be helpful 
• Tag at what level of granularity?...hard to say, but that will be an emergent process
• Joseph will communicate with someone involved with Protege Ontology Manager at Stanford for some ideas ...if you haven't seen http://protege.stanford.edu/ take a look. Very cool for the relatively sophisticated folk who organize information. It's been around a long time (it has a quarter million users today, and had 50,000 users back in 2006).  There might be one or more existing Project Management Ontology that the FLOW Syllabus ought to conform to (or at least map to)
• There are a few different aspects:
  • "What my students would learn"
  • "Outcomes"
  • "Learning activities"
• It may be useful to write short "use case" scenarios for using the Syllabus
  • Each use case will have implications
  • This will help the WG to understand the audiences
  • And will help a course designed understand what
    parts/emements of their course would likely be essential/useful to each audience type
• Basically, we now need to provide "tour guides" through the syllabus... By analogy, "Going to Venice":
  • ...for architects
  • ...for culinary arts
  • ...for business
  • ...for etc.
• These can supply some audience-tailored guidance
  • granular (bullet point level)
  • tags would enable the separate views

4. FLOW Syllabus Scope

Question: Should "activities" be in or outside the syllabus?

• This would help to outline the topics and sources
• Courses include activities
• Educators/community can create courses and share those
• Activities help learners engage and practice the use of the information to develop understanding
• What we should not do...
  • We don't want to poorly usurp the role of online learning sites, rather we want to provide them useful resources
  • We don't want to miss engaging those partners by only having the learning activity collection distributed amongst multiple environments
  • Narrow the potential community because learning activiteis are designed for a particular audience (there's an inverse relationship between embedded pedagogy and reusability)

• Learning activities can form a coherent package however
• What is the ideal nature of content developmemt to hand-off from the syllabus and the course designers?
  • Technical
  • Conceptual
  • Operational
• OSI-EDU-WG would structure the syllabus
• Independent educators (including folks on the working group) can contribute supplemental content and learning activites
• One can't quite take the syllabus on its own and say "This is my 7-day course"
• One can take a section and add it to something else, or take specific items

Notes prepared by:

Joseph Potvin
Chair, OSI Working Group on Management Education About Free/Libre/Open Methods, Processes and Governance
jpotvin@opman.ca
 Mobile: 819-593-5983