Presentation in K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. 13 November 2007.

1. Designing a web community for
collaborative authoring of open
educational resources
Hans Põldoja
Tallinn University
University of Art and Design Helsinki
hans@tlu.ee

2. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San
Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

3. http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja/

4. Context of my research —
LeMill

5. http://lemill.net

6. What is LeMill?
• Web community for finding, authoring and sharing
open and free learning resources
• Open source server software developed in EU 6FP
project CALIBRATE
• Learning Mill

11. All learning resources in LeMill
are web-based

12. Learning resources
Multimedia page
Presentation
Exercise
PILOT

20. Advanced editing features

24. Media pieces

26. References

28. More than content
• Methods
• Tools
• Collections
• Teaching and
learning stories

36. LeMill as social software
• Linking people by
location, skills and
interests
• Groups for
collaborative
authoring
• Group forums

42. http://lemill.net

43. Theoretical background

44. Pedagogical background
• Social constructivism
• Progressive inquiry (Hakkarainen et al, 1999)
• Communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1990)

45. Progressive inquiry
(Hakkarainen et al, 1999)

46. PILOT’s
Põldoja, H., Leinonen, T.,Väljataga, T., Ellonen, A., Priha,
M. (2006). Progressive Inquiry Learning Object
Templates (PILOT). International Journal on E-
Learning. 5 (1), 103-111. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

47. http://lemill.net

48. http://lemill.net

49. Legal and economical
background
• Open educational resources
• Commons-based peer production (Benkler 2005;
Benkler, 2006) and open source development
models
• Free culture and open content (Lessig, 2004)

50. Simple licensing scheme
All resources created in LeMill
are published under Creative
Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 2.5 license
Media pieces can be also:
- CC Attribution
- Public Domain
- GNU FDL

51. Technical and design
background
• Online communities and social software (Preece,
2000; Shirky, 2003)
• Interaction design
• Information architecture
• Scenario based design (Carroll, 2000)
• Agile software development methods (Schwaber &
Beedle, 2001; Cohn, 2004)

52. Design process

53. Designed for teachers
• Scenarios
• Design sessions
• User stories
• Prototypes

54. Design session results
• Teachers are not very
interested in raw text
material
• Teachers are
interested in activities
and methods
• Learning resources
can be divided to
content, activities and
tools

55. Distributed design and
development

56. Evaluation and current findings

57. Evaluation activities
• Think aloud test and international focus group in
May 2006
• International school testing January–May 2007
• Estonian focus group in May 2007
• International focus group in August 2007

58. How often do you visit LeMill?
How did you find out about LeMill?
Do you follow what's going on? How?
How easy or difficult was it to get started with LeMill?
Have you made new contacts in LeMill?
Getting started
Community
Have you read LeMill FAQ or other documentation?
How do you feel about working together on a content with other teachers?
What kind of support material teachers need?
Have you thought to invite somebody to work with you?
How much would it mean to you to know that someone is using material that you have created?
What kind of other software you are using to create learning resources?
What kind of Web 2.0 environments you are using in your teaching and learning?
What should we do to get more teachers to LeMill?
What kind of software you use to communicate with students, parents and friends?
LeMill focus group What is missing from LeMill?
Future needs
Other software
Do you use any learning environment or learning management system?
Do you need additional learning resource templates? Which?
How do you see the roles of LeMill and the Portal in CALIBRATE project?
Are LeMill and the Portal supporting each other or are they competing for attention? Do you turn your attention to copyright issues related to learning resources?
Have you found from LeMill useful content made by other teachers?
Have you ever got lost in LeMill?
How did you use the content you found? Did you modify it according to your needs?
Content
Is there something confusing in the user interface?
What motivates you to publish your learning resources in LeMill?
Usability
Are there operations that require too many steps to be completed?
How do you use LeMill content in your lessons?
Do you find on-screen messages understandable and helpful?

59. Current finding
• A lot of technical and usability problems :)
• Some features of LeMill are not used
• Different kind of learning resources are created in
different countries
• Different attitudes towards copyright issues and
sharing
• Collaborative authoring required a critical mass of
users and content. That is not achieved yet.

60. LeMill community
• 1368 members
• 136 groups
• Top countries by members: Estonia, Hungary,
Georgia, Finland, Lithuania
• Top countries by visits: Estonia, Hungary, Georgia,
Poland, United States, Finland, Lithuania,Czech
Republic, Colombia, United Kingdom

61. Published resources
• 912 multimedia pages • 3240 media pieces
• 176 presentations • 290 references
• 57 exercises • 83 methods
• 5 PILOT’s • 211 tools

62. Next steps

63. Next steps
• Community building
• Mapping all existing digital learning resources in one
subject with Estonian national curriculum
• Publishing an open geography textbook
• Setting up local LeMill communities in Estonia and
Georgia
• Making LeMill metadata available to OERCommons

64. References (1)
• Benkler,Y. (2005). Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials. Center for Open and
Sustainable Learning.
• Benkler,Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
Yale University Press.
• Carroll, J.M. (2000). Making Use. Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions.
Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
• Cohn, M. (2004). User stories applied: For agile software development. Boston, Massachusetts: Addison-
Wesley.
• Hakkarainen, K., Lonka, K., & Lipponen, L., (1999). Tutkiva oppiminen. Älykkään toiminnan rajat ja niiden
ylittäminen. Porvoo: WSOY.
• Lave, J., Wenger, E. (1990). Situated Learning: Legitimate Periperal Participation. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
• Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and
Control Creativity. The Penguin Press.

65. References (2)
• Põldoja, H., Leinonen, T.,Väljataga, T., Ellonen, A., Priha, M. (2006). Progressive Inquiry Learning Object
Templates (PILOT). International Journal on E-Learning. 5 (1), 103-111. Chesapeake,VA: AACE.
• Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability. Wiley.
• Schwaber, K., Beedle M. (2001). Agile software development with Scrum. Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.
• Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. Retrieved 3 October 2007 from http://
www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

66. Thank You!
hans@tlu.ee
skype: hanspoldoja
http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja/
http://www.hanspoldoja.net