How can schools, colleges, and universities offer sophisticated, up-to-date, and effective curriculum across diverse disciplines without relying on Publishers? While this is sometimes an informal faculty role (e.g., creating presentations, sharing original research), it is rarely a formal one. Could it be an administrative or library responsibility? Or is it just too hard to pivot away from Publishers?
My current role at Pace University has me thinking about multimodal curriculum on a daily basis. Using Open Education Resources (“OER”) is one response, but it is problematic (or, at least incomplete) in several ways. For one, if institutions rely heavily on open content, how do they distinguish themselves in the marketplace? (Maybe they don’t, but that’s another discussion.) And another issue: what kind of systems are in place to keep underlying resources up to date and accurate? And how are they jig-sawed together into a coherent whole? A university’s response must either be ad hoc, or rely on intermediary companies that prepare and deliver these open resources.
But the obvious alternative to using open educational resources as curriculum is for colleges and universities to produce their own. Assuming faculty have the appropriate expertise, the primary hurdle is the sheer time involved in producing and maintaining content. I think multimedia – and multimodal curriculum – will be the game changer here. I will be writing about new approaches to the development, production, and maintenance of multimodal content in the future.