OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
- Highly and smartly instrumented—learning in OPLI is computer mediated, especially the distributed part, and we must instrument what goes on to get some really fine-grain analysis of what is working and why. More generally, a key opportunity is to figure out how to make learning experiments more powerful and relevant to more people. The openness of the systems and the artifacts and resources in it should contribute to finer-grained, more nuanced assessment.
4.5 Some Thoughts about How
We doubt that this will be a business-as-usual undertaking for the Education Program at the Hewlett Foundation. Careful thought will need to go into the meta question of how to mount this initiative. Here are some of our suggestions:
- Identify and engage representatives from the community of OPLI funders and performers in a series of workshops to build common vision of the opportunity space and to find specific roles for them. Use a combination of face-to-face and online meetings. (We can help identify candidate participants.) This can be supplemented by a series of private meetings with possible funding partners.
- Use input from these workshops, this report, and other retrospectives of the OER to establish a vision document (similar to what NSF did for the cyberscience activities mentioned in Section 3).
- Within the general framework of this vision document develop a set of funding opportunities through: invitation, a venture fund for relatively small unsolicited proposals, and one or more solicitations for major funding. The solicitations could be an open invitations (perhaps worldwide) but multiphase: letter of intent, pre-proposal, full proposal. Proposers could be eliminated at any of these stages. Hewlett could consider outsourcing management of the review process to other places. The NSF, for example, often provides this service to other federal agencies and may be able to do so for private foundations.
- Establish a standing external advisory committee and a cadre of on-call consultants.
- Ramp up program officer staffing inside Hewlett, select and fund a project coordination office at a university or other nonprofit institution., or do both. The project office would handle much of the day-to-day coordination of the OPLI grantee community. Consider models such the relationship between NSF and the National Center for Atmospheric
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