Towards the establishment of an agile method for OERs development and delivery

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) have been emerged as an important mechanism for democratization of access to education. In fact, the free and open distribution of these resources contributes with the dissemination of knowledge and facilitates the access to information, benefiting the society as a whole. Similar to software, the development of OERs requires the application of appropriate methods and practices to ensure the productivity and quality of the resulting products. Agile methods seem to be an interesting approach in this perspective. However, initiatives to foster the development and delivery of quality and reliable OERs, according to agile principles and with reduced costs, are still incipient. In our work we discuss the establishment of an agile method for the development and delivery of OERs. The proposed method is based on the main characteristics, practices and principles of well-known agile methods for software. To illustrate our ideas, the method is discussed in terms of its application in the development of an OER in the FLOSS (Free / Libre and Open Source Software) domain.

Barriers to open e-learning in public administrations

“…In our case, stakeholders were internal service leaders, infrastructure and information technology leaders as well as end-users. According to the concept of Arimoto & Barbosa (2013); , these roles can be matched with for example, roles of coaches and IT-experts among others. For future research, we suggest to elaborate more on the development of roles in agile processes, which types of roles emerge and which requirements their new position evolves.…”

“…Memos from this analysis as well as from the field were matched with the sensitizing framework, in particular, with a prototype of an agile OER implementation process (cf. Arimoto & Barbosa, 2013;. The results of the analysis were discussed with public leaders in the administration to derive an inter-subjective meaning.…”

“…Others consider agile methods as a set of steps in technology development that aim at delivering quick, flexible, user-centered results (Arimoto & Barbosa 2013). As a specialization, agile software development approaches like Scrum or eXtreme programming are well known and applied in practice in the technology domain (Arimoto & Barbosa 2013). Agile Methods have gained a lot of attention in the domain of Public Administration following the need to create 1) more flexible processes and 2) more stakeholder involvement.…”

“…As the overarching concept, Agile Methods (AM) can be defined as 'processes that enable flexibility, forecasting, preparedness, exception handling' in Government (Fishenden & Thompson 2013:981). Others consider agile methods as a set of steps in technology development that aim at delivering quick, flexible, user-centered results (Arimoto & Barbosa 2013). As a specialization, agile software development approaches like Scrum or eXtreme programming are well known and applied in practice in the technology domain (Arimoto & Barbosa 2013).…”

An agile learning design method for open educational resources

“…The OULDI was funded by JISC, a public body that supports and champions the use of digital technologies in education and research across the UK. Our proposal builds on a preliminary version firstly introduced by Arimoto and Barbosa [3]. We validate our method with an experiment involving the design and creation of OERs to teach software testing, a topic within software engineering education.…”