Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Version Management in a Distributed Infrastructure for Open Educational Resources

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This article is on the right track but doesn't investigate the subject to sufficient depth. Nadine Schroeder correctly identifies a need for version control in open educational resources (OER) and suggests that a mechanism similar to that used in GitHub, a software versioning platform, might be the answer. There are two issues, to my mind. First, it's not easy to learn how to use GitHub; even simple operations (such as uploading a recent version to the platform) require a sequence of steps. Second, the version numbering system in GitHub, which is described in the article, is superficial. What is actually keeping track of updates and versions in Git is a combination of content-based addressing and a directional acyclic graph (DAG). That's what I propose for OERs in my 2019 article. Either way, though, for such a system to be useful to academics, it needs to be as near to one-click submission as possible, with the mechanics hidden behind the interface.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 29, 2024 12:14 p.m.

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