Sunday, May 8, 2016

The Learning Registry's OE_ Search App

I was in a Twitter discussion recently about just how free certain entities that describe themselves as OER really are. See the previous two posts for more on that.  The Learning Registry's Open Education Search App claims that it "enables educators and other users ... to search for and assign OER directly within an LMS."

The language of the anouncement makes me wonder if the app really does search for only OER. As a curator of OER digital science curriculum I only want material that is licensed with a CC NC SA or CC BY license. I don't want to sift through content that is either not free or doesn't allow me to revise that content.

And, why does the app need to use LTI.  I understand LTI to be a method to connect an LMS to another interactive web application. I don't need to do that. I just want to find the OER that I need and be able to install it in my course in my LMS. I've written previously about why I think LMSs are essential for more widespread adoption of OER. I don't want to use my LMS as merely a portal to somebody else's application that collects information about my 3rd grade students. The use of LTI as a search mechanism to find OER on the Learning Registry seems to me to be an inappropriate use of LTI.

The line that gives me pause to wonder is this : "Creative Commons will continue to work closely with both to integrate CC license choice and content discovery across platforms." That seems to me to mean that it's not now possible to search for only real OER.

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