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Related Projects

Colorado Reed edited this page Oct 29, 2013 · 6 revisions

Global thoughts from related projects

Websites

Saylor has similar goals as metacademy. When possible, Saylor authors create courses from free and open online resources. On the other hand, Saylor operates at a course-based level, and the courses are created by paid professionals. Saylor has a lot of excellent content, and we should definitely consider using it as a primary referral location. Saylor has an excellent interface (e.g. try clicking on the content links) that may help Meta create a more intuitive, and content-rich interface. Some features of Saylor: each lecture/module/course has a "time advisory," an overview, and learning resources preceded with media-type tag, e.g. Activity, Web Media, etc. (side note: Saylor was founded by Elon Musk's figurative little brother: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Saylor).

We hire credentialed professors to create course blueprints and to locate, vet, and organize OER materials into a structured and intuitive format. Our consulting professors also create original OER content and link to freely posted materials to fill in any gaps. Each course culminates with a final exam, and students receiving a passing grade can download a certificate of completion.

http://cnx.org/ (Connection)

a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc

22673 reusable modules woven into 1375 collections.

Anyone can contribute content to the Connexions repository. Once content is entered, Connexions’ lensing system provides a mechanism by which trusted/knowledgeable vetters review and endorse content. Users can then view content through vetted lenses, which provides a simple means of quality control, yet allows for the capture of the intellectual capital of the world. More information can be found under the Lenses tab

  • [Colorado] Mixing cnx with Saylor yields Metacademy since Saylor is based on courses and is not crowd-sourced but references preexisting content, while Saylor is based on concepts and is crowd-sourced but creates its own content.

Provides a concept-map visual interface somewhat similar to metacademy --- though they use a force-directed undirected graph and appear to acquire their content automatically. * [Colorado] The interface was laggy and overwhelming -- I wasn't sure how the use the site even though I watched the tutorial video. Clicking on concepts gives factoids parsed from various locations -- this might be useful for writing a grade-school or middle-school level report. One cool feature, at least in theory, is the difficulty slider in the concept-map. Also, the "journal" feature is interesting. The page has a bunch of ads, but okay, someone is trying to use this site as a business... Overall, it's an interesting idea but it feels overwhelmingly different than typical search engines and educational sites, and I'm not sure why I would return to the sire. <-- I wonder if new metacademy users feel this way. This site provides a good reminder that we don't want to incorporate too many features. Also, this site attests to the general principle that Roger has recounted since the beginning of metacademy: automatically parsing content will lead to a large drop in quality.

Papers/Books

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