This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will determine the scientific, technical, and commercial merit, and feasibility of building an innovative set of tools and web-based services called Open Educational Resources Glue (OER Glue). The National Science Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Wikipedia, and other organizations and individuals have developed a plethora of high quality open educational resources (OERs). In order to use OERs to teach a course, teachers need to find them, adapt them, combine them with other resources, create course structures such as syllabi and quizzes, and integrate them with a learning management system (LMS). Currently this is very difficult. OER Glue will help teachers and learners use OERs and Web 2.0 tools in a cohesive manner. Using OER Glue, teachers will be able to efficiently find, create, adapt, use, and share content and learning structures that utilize OER content and take advantage of existing and forthcoming tools. OER Glue will integrate with tools that teachers and learners choose to provide essential course functionality such as content delivery, course scheduling, assignments, testing, discussions, and grading. Examples of tools that can be used include Google Documents, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and mobile devices.
Broader Impacts: Because most LMSs, such as Blackboard and Moodle, require content to be brought into their system and provide their own fixed set of functionality, it is difficult to utilize OER content and integrate external tools with them. In contrast, OER Glue will be designed to let OER content be used where it resides and to provide most functionality by integrating with tools of the user's choice, including Web 2.0 tools that people use outside of school settings. OER Glue is cutting- edge, high risk, high quality research that has a high potential economic payoff. OER Glue will be capable of being transformed into high-value products for teachers and learners. OER Glue will be used to teach online courses, enrich face-to-face classes, and to support life-long learning. OER Glue will provide widgets and programming interfaces that schools and content providers could use to easily integrate OER Glue into their websites. Potential customers include secondary schools, virtual high schools, colleges, and universities. The commercialization model for OER Glue will be similar to the one used by the popular WordPress blogging software; OER Glue will be open source, and packaged for easy install, as well as offered via a low-cost hosted subscription.
The SBIR Phase I: OER Glue project implemented a mashup platform that enables organization to adopt and adapt open content for their needs. OER Glue technology enables: Discovery – OER Glue’s search and recommendation tools help you quickly find relevant content on the Internet and inside of your organization. Assembly – OER Glue’s drag and drop mashup tools make it easy to assemble learning by grabbing images, videos, and other content out of any web page and dragging it into any other. They also make it possible to insert interactive widgets such as discussions into any web page. Deployment – Once assembled, you can easily deploy OER Glue content to learners via an organizations instance of OER Glue or via widgets that can be embedded in any web page. Tracking – During the project, the requirements and designs for OER Glue analytics were developed that will allow teachers and content administrators to view information about how students use OER Glue content wherever it is located across the web. OER Glue has created a free community website where anyone can go to search, use, create, and share OER Glue courses. In the first two months since that website was set up, over 600 people signed up and over 3,000 courses were made available for adoption. OER Glue’s business model is to provide custom instances of OER Glue for adopting organizations. Organizations that adopt OER Glue pay a setup fee to have OER Glue branded for their organization and integrated with their content and systems. Once set up the organization pays a recurring Software as a Service fee based on the number of transactions processed.
