This article describes the use of Evidence Hub to "to systematically interrogate the Open Education movement on what are the people, projects, organizations, key challenges, issues, solutions, claims and evidence that scaffold the movement." You'll want to view the video describing Evidence Hub before reading the article. The system draws from papers, discussion groups, and the like to identify themes and 'distill claims' made in the papers related to open education. For example, challenges and solutions are presented in an interface that allows people to vote on potential solutions to the problems raised. Or, for example, claims about relevant topics are presented for response.
This is an approach with a lot of merit, yet the challenges are evident when you browse the resource. For example, the question, "Which policies are needed for open education?" (which presupposes that policies are needed, but I quibble) leads to this presentation of solutions and claims. Many of the solutions are irrelevant (and not even solutions!) while the claims bear no relation to the solutions (and are often trivial, such as "open education requires further empirical investigation," "it's difficult to generalise about OER communities because they are so diverse," and "the way that students learn is changing." Of course, that's as much a reflection of the literature as it is the Evidence Hub. You can find the Evidence Hub at ci.olnet.org. This paper is a chapter from the online book Open Educational Resources and Social Networks.
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