Carol Gering introduces a method for comparing OCW implementations (h/t Open Education News).

I’m not entirely sure this is the methodology I would choose to compare courses (at the bottom of this analysis is an itemization of features, and I’m unsure how useful that is as a metric, especially if unweighted). Whatever your take on the methodology, though, the article is well worth the read.

The size of the bubbles here represent the number of features implememented, and the pie graph represents their distribution. The feature categories are:

• Site Structure and Features
• Course Structure and Features
• Types of Content
• Efficacy of Content
• Community of Learners

Go and read the full article (it’s a page and change). As I said, I’d have to look at the feature lists this is based on to get a sense of the meaning of this, but the presentation is striking and worth discussion.

And if you have alternate ways of evaluating courseware, let us know in the comments.