Brandon Muramatsu at MIT has a new blog post suggesting the use of plagiarism software to detect OER reuse. Muramatsu mentions the idea originating at discussions at COSL, and was mentioned in Sean Duncan’s recent dissertation on OER reuse. From the blog post:
I propose that a new metric to evaluate the use of open educational resources (OER) is to look for use by running a plagarism-style detector against the web. In this case, Plagiarism is Good™, very good. The idea is to build on the idea of plagiarism detecting software, like TurnItIn, to find occurrences of text that matches the text of documents in open educational resources. Since most OERs are licensed to permit copying and modification (with attribution), it should be relatively easy to find additional occurrences on the web at large.
Thanks to Smart Marbles for the repost.
