Talk:Course Content Policy White Paper

Questions based on what I have read.

Is there an option for including other curricula (if they are not specifically mentioned)?

Is there any check that a school really is using/ following the curriculum they say they are? Or is it a trust based model?

[Dave McFarland] Aaron, this is great overview, and also presents an important question about the mission of OWEA. I think the key thing is to get as many best practices into Web education. The most successful strategy will be the one that's EASIEST for instructors to adopt. You're right that a "Curriculum Review System" would be VERY time consuming for OWEA to develop. But more importantly, many instructors would simply ignore such a system, because it's TOO MUCH WORK for them. Having to develop a curriculum and then have it reviewed by OWEA would be a hassle that many overworked (and/or underpaid) instructors won't bother with. The same is true with the second option you mention: Best Practices Guide. This again requires an instructor to develop a curriculum then compare it to the best practices guide and then tweak the curriculum to match. Again this is a lot of work. Your final suggestion is spot on: provide the tools for teaching, in a way that is easy to incorporate into a school setting, and you'll have a much wider adoption of Web standards and best practices in education. I think that the InterAct curriculum is a very good model--while the information in the other sources (Opera, Yahoo, Adobe) is good, it isn't formulated in a way that's as useful for instructors who need things like lesson plans, exercises, and homework assignments.

[Scott Fegette] Fantastic job at getting this all wrangled into a very cohesive document, Aaron. In regards to the content ownership model section, is there any reason to not recommend supporting both models, and support for-profit organizations either hosting on their own site - in the cases where the content may be tool or technology-specific in particular - or optionally donating it to the OWEA outright when the content is more 'pure' in regards to specific technology/software/etc? I can see both types of content being important and viable to educators/students.

[Scott Fegette] Updated the content ownership section to make a clear recommendation. Any concerns with supporting this model? (Summary: Core content should be created within or donated to the OWEA, vendor-specific learning modules should be hosted on the authoring party's website and linked to from OWEA curriculum.)