OER as ecosystem

Posted on June 22, 2012 by

Occasionally you hear something that pops a cork in your brain, lets out some confusion and makes room for fresh insight. That happened to me at the UNESCO World Open Educational Resources Congress in Paris, when Neil Butcher of OER Africa responded to a question by suggesting that reuse of OER is in fact a form of new knowledge construction. That was a clarifying moment for me.

The very act of finding, validating and incorporating existing OER into a program or course requires skill, patience and dedication. Working through licensing and formatting issues is not easy. Either revising OER or building contextual content or learning activities around OER, or even providing translations, are themselves creative acts and contributions of value to learners and to an OER ecosystem at large. By undertaking these activities, reusers of OER are making a contribution to the OER movement.

As noted by several presenters throughout the congress, collaboration and constant improvement are key to the development of high quality OER. Every individual or agency that reuses OER is contributing to its improvement and extension. Even by the acceptance of OER as-is and reusing it without further modification, a vote of confidence is being placed in the resource, giving it more credibility for other reusers. Beyond that, the reuse of OER inherently expands the reach of the original development to new learners, a credit to the intentions of the OER originator. And the lessons learned by undergoing this process can be shared with others at events as large as the OER Congress, or as small as a local capacity development workshop.

I like to think of OER as surrounded by a community of users who continue to reuse and improve them, rather than as packages that are developed and then moved down a supply chain to the next user in a linear manner. I don’t think a producer-consumer concept of OER is compatible with the ecosystem model.

To those who get past the barriers we all face to create content and release it to be reused under an open license, even as a small, tentative experiment: well done. Not only are you addressing the needs of your own learners, but also you are providing an opportunity for others to build on and extend your work; and you are an inspiration for all of us.

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The challenge of OER

Posted on April 30, 2012 by

OER definitions vary greatly, but there are themes. The original UNESCO definition from 2002 (just celebrating its 10th anniversary!) includes ready access to educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies. Other definitions emphasize other aspects such as the famous 4 Rs (reuse -redistribute-revise-remix), open licensing, and tools for interaction and collaboration. Elements can include full courses and components, textbooks, media, tests, and software as well as tools needed to access and reuse them. One proposed model supports courses delivered as a type of textbook that is based on self-study without a human instructor, with the use of automated support and feedback, quiz marking, and other bot-type support systems. When you add all these ideas together (and there are many more), the project becomes huge and can in fact overwhelm both the providing institutions and the re-using institutions.

It’s well known that there is a rising flood of openly available course material out there – the litany of providers read not be repeated here. But now the question arises: to what extent are OER (and specifically full courses) being created for the institutions’ existing learners, programs and other contexts, and alternatively how many are being developed to meet criteria for the various aspects of OER as described in some of the definitions? How open are they in the wider sense? For instance, are they accessible in their latest versions? Are the source files available? Is all the copyright information available for the resources used? Are the referenced texts open, or at least current? Are pieces of the course (e.g. forum discussion topics, quizzes, activities) freely available, not locked up in LMSs? Is the course in a transferable format, rather than trapped in presentation or PDF files, or in classroom capture videos with references such as “make sure you hand in your essays by Friday” or other highly localized references? Are source files available for media and can it be assumed that the re-users have access to the tools to revise them if necessary? Does the course avoid embedded language throughout referencing the existence of markers, instructors, and peers? Are marking grids and rubrics available? The answer is probably not – and for good reasons: it’s enough work producing courses for our own learners let alone create other versions for open provision. I’m pretty sure that very few of us can answer in the affirmative.

“Doing OER” is complex and hard work, but at the same time the concept is right and we need to keep doing it and learning and sharing as we go. Hopefully we’ll get it right, at least enough to start building new opportunities for so many learners worldwide for whom the words “open” and “education” are as far apart as the North and South poles.

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Open Education Week – special event

Posted on March 5, 2012 by

Live Streamed Event: Designing and Assessing Engaging Learning Activities

In recognition of Open Education Week, Michelle Harrison and Melissa Jakubec from the Thompson Rivers University, Open Learning Instructional Design team will discuss their research on designing and evaluating engaging learning activities in the online environment.

As part of their departmental goal to develop learning experiences that are engaging and meaningful to students who are working in a distance learning environment, they have undertaken a research project to: (1) Create a set of promising learning design patterns that work in the organizational context and (2) Develop a methodology to evaluate learning activity designs/patterns so that they can be improved.

This presentation will describe their research context and learning design, results of early workshops and focus groups with instructional designers about learning activities, and survey results from learners on the effectiveness of learning activities in online courses. They will also describe their proposed methodology to help evaluate learning activity effectiveness and course designs at Open Learning and will relate this to research activity that could be done in blended or face-to-face environments.

There will also be an opportunity for live chat questions and comments.
Time: 11:30 AM Pacific time (UTC-8)

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Caution: Open course developers at play

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

Much has happened at the OERu since the formal launch meeting in November. In the open curriculum project, a series of public consultations through the SCOPE forum at BC Campus and subsequent discussions among partners have led to the selection of eight prototype courses for initial development. In order to support the open development and design stages, two online workshops were recently conducted through WikiEducator, OERu’s virtual home. The courses provided hands-on practice and experience with Creative Commons licensing, and with developing and formatting content in WikiEducator. The purpose of going though these steps is building capacity among partners and supporters in setting up prototype courses in an entirely open environment. We were fortunate to have leaders of such reputation as Cable Green of Creative Commons and Wayne Mackintosh of the Open Educational Resource Foundation.

WikiEducator provides the ability to revert, fork into different versions and collaborate in various ways in content development. And of course good coders can go under the hood and do a whole lot more. However, there are some helpful tools anyone can learn such as simple pedagogical templates, mechanisms for importing and/or creating Creative Commons licenses, and an Open Office plug-in that permits the export of basic document formatting properties into WikiEducator syntax. At present the LMS is always available for delivering the content extracted from the wiki, but a flame of hope continues to burn that we can either make better LMSs or move beyond them in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime we make do.

Equally interesting are emerging discussions and proposed models around learning design factors for open pedagogy. This is the next big challenge. While open and distance education has a long track record of practice in independent study, the past 20 years of collaborative and networked learning concepts and practices confront real challenges in the face of the “lonely” distance learner working through open courseware. Support networks of peers as well as potential volunteers and mentors are on the radar as well other creative ideas.

There are many challenges to “open,” not only legal but also in terms of technical issues as well as deeply embedded concepts of quality and governance in higher education that deserve careful consideration and dialog. We have much to learn from the free and open source software movement in terms of building powerful and sustainable communities around major projects.

A little over a decade ago, Eric Raymond wrote in The Cathedal and the Bazaar, “It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.” So far the work of OERu does feel like play, and if having fun is a good thing – then we’re not doing too badly!

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Unwrapping the OER package in 2012

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

#oeru In one of the highlights of 2011 for me, I had the privilege of attending a two-day meeting at Otego Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand to participate in formalizing plans for implementation of the Open Education Resource University (OERu). The meeting was attended by representatives of 13 tertiary educational institutions from around the world and 2 non-teaching institutions, together known as Anchor Partners. The Canadian partners attending were Athabasca University and Thompson Rivers University (where I work).

In addition, there were 148 registered virtual participants from 41 countries participating through live video feeds and microblogs, as well as others who were unregistered. Planned by the OERu Foundation in New Zealand and BC Campus in Canada, and sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO, Pacific States, the goal of the meeting was to outline the first steps in the implementation of an OERu concept that had been incubating in various forms over the past few years. An earlier meeting in February 2011 had established the foundational concepts and “logic model” for the OERu, with preceding public discussions and consultations with the higher education community worldwide including open seminars conducted on BC Campus’s SCOPE site (SCOPE, 2011). The underlying reason for the establishment of the OERu was the expanding world of open educational resources (OER). The Open Education Resource University (OERu) foundation, a not-for-profit entity, was established to assemble a consortium of universities that could support and accredit learning undertaken through OER courses. That is, they determined to make low-cost education and credentials available to learners worldwide by contributing their own OER courses as well as repurposing other OER. This “parallel learning universe” (from Jim Taylor, 2007) was established on a logic model based on collaboration among partner universities; i.e., the provision of education institution services and support infrastructures.

The establishment of the OERu signifies a shift in the focus of OER from only content to include processes, both in the repurposing of OER as well as in the support mechanisms undergirding the learners’ engagement with the OER. While many OER are in essence publishing initiatives (although this is beginning to change, e.g. MIT), the OERu is focused on the multiple processes associated with online learning at the university level. The processes include curriculum planning, course design and development, pedagogy, student support, assessment and credentialing. Supporting these processes are community service by institutions and volunteers, new business models for OER education, technology infrastructure and student administration.

The OERu is not in itself a university. Rather, the intent is to build collaboratively, among the Anchor Partner institutions and others, a system of access to free open educational resources in the form of courses and programs offered through the university network, alongside possible user-pay optional services provided by the institutions including tutoring, accreditation and assessment of learning, and credible credentials. The OERu Foundation is structured not to provide courses or develop and administer educational policies. Instead, out of consideration for institutional autonomy, the OERu facilitates the collaboration of Anchor Partners and other participants in contributing their own open education resources as well as other available OERs, along with the application of their own internal educational policies in their interactions with the partnership and participating students who engage with their own universities. Thus it acquired the mantra of a “parallel learning universe” in that it was intended not to replace any of the functions of the partners, but rather to form a collaboration that would work alongside them and in which they can each engage to the extent and in the manner that works best for the individual institutions (Wikieducator, 2011). The seminal parallel learning universe concept was outlined in a paper by Jim Taylor (2007), citing recent studies that indicated a massive growth in the need for higher education worldwide, to the extent that two new universities a week would be needed just to satisfy the need in India alone. The increasing availability of free courseware online worldwide was seen as a vital key to improved access to higher education worldwide.

What does the new year hold for OERu? How will it play out? The model is still emergent and it could go many different ways. I for one am keen to see how this plays out and will provide updates here.

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Sweet convergence

Posted on October 1, 2011 by

There is a sweet scent of convergence in the wind, although the connections haven’t really been stitched together yet—at least not as far as I can see. But there is an underlying pattern of currents that, sooner or later, need to merge into something new and improved for making more learning opportunities available to more people in more ways—which means breaking down those many barriers and silos we all seem to love to create, nourish and defend in higher education. These thoughts emerged during discussions at the CONVERGE-EFQUEL 2011 conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

First, open content is boundless in its availability. It’s wonderful and it’s a mess. But we can’t not do anything about that as educators. More on that later. Next, alternative forms of credit and accreditation that can be given to other forms of learning than that gained in the standard university environment: Discussions that took place on outcomes-based learning made it clear that outcomes approaches are vital to moving beyond content- and credit-driven systems of recognition of learning. Third, user-generated content is receiving growing attention—i.e. content that is developed by students in a wide variety of courses and other learning contexts in such socially-shared areas as blogs and micro blogs, journals, podcasts, social bookmarks, wikis, shared videos and photographs, and many other formats—content of sufficient value that it could form content to be used by other learners. The pool is growing and increasingly we see learning communities consisting of instructor-developer-learner partnerships. Fourth is movements in quality that is defined by fitness for purpose and appropriatness for context; i.e. quality not as an “objective characteristic of a learning resource or a service, but … constituted as a specific characteristic of a context which in turn is made up through the realities of the personal, organizational, social and structural interactions of the stakeholders involved” (Thomas Kretschmer at the CONCEDE – EFQUEL2011 conference in Lisbon). There’s more–we have concepts of learning interactions that proceed on the following hierarchy: data-information-knowledge-wisdom-transformation (Steve Wheeler at the same conference), reminding us that content (data and information) is only the beginning. Up to data and information, scouring the Web is very much up to the task for learner. Building up towards knowledge begins to occur when there are reliable guides available or open courses with inbuilt pedagogical interactions. But when it comes to wisdom and transformation – the praxis of both knowing and doing – that is where higher education can continue to excel, if the convergence is allowed to continue and learning extends beyond the classroom and reaches into the world around us.
That brings us back to OER, the discussion and practice around Open Educational Resources and how they can be developed, discovered, used and revised. There is nothing new in the concept — but with the development of the Open Education Resources university (OERu), there is now a core of committed institutions (including, happily, mine) seeking to contribute a core of OER-based courses toward a coherent combination culminating at the degree level. This is wonderful news, especially for learners in countries that desperately need more higher education but can’t afford it. But to make it fly, we need to find the will and way to continue the convergence.

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Instructional designers on instructional design

Posted on May 31, 2011 by

It was extremely interesting to sit in on a group of instructional designers at a brainstorming session hosted by UBC’s Centre for Teaching and Learning a few weeks ago. Discussion themes centred on instructional design and included innovation and creativity; Web 2.0. and social media; mobile learning; learning environments outside of structured courses; and the future of instructional design.

This was obviously going to be pretty open ended discussion, with no beginning and no end. My impression is that trying to nail things down is a little like trying to survey buildings under construction while perched on the roof of a passing train where the track is being built just in time in front of the train—and no-one has the plans for any of this. Universities are under huge pressure to change, adapt and reinvent themselves out of an age-old tradition where the badges of success are still largely based on narrow definitions of learning and scholarship. Teaching is challenged by the massive influx into the classrooms of mobile devices that can confound the standard model of educational delivery. Distance education and e-learning are swamped with the potential of new tools, social networking and mobile devices. Enterprise systems retain their distinction as lumbering behemoths sucking in all light, energy and sound, and learning management systems keep swirling around the periphery looking for some way to land. Alongside, the very real issues of privacy and copyright legislation in a digital, post 911 era are just beginning to rear up into challenges so big they have the potential to block out the sun.

And yet…who isn’t having some fun with all this! It’s our job to stay with it – keep learning, testing, experimenting and in many cases muddling along to the best of our abilities. Further, we need our own communities of practice to keep us balanced, on track and maybe even sane. I think Tony Bates nailed it with this magnificent wrap-up of the session: “All these problems were solved in the pub after the meeting, but unfortunately no record was kept.”

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Data Soup: A Recipe

Posted on March 4, 2011 by

Tony Hirst of the Open University pretty much left us all with our jaws on the floor as he romped through a variety of methods to pull, claw, scrape, coax, tease and otherwise harvest structured and unstructured data from such varied sources as PDFs, APIs, HTML tables and other screen-scrapable pages, CSVs and other utilities – in a presentation at the Banff Learning Analytics conference – #LAK11. The data is imported/mashed up into Google Spreadsheets. It is cleansed to be consistent and comparable, and then queried, analyzed and visualized. As Tony put it: you then have a “conversation with the data.”

That is a nicely humanizing concept, a cherry on the cake of a home-made and ingenious approach to making a tasty soup from a handful of leftovers and wilted vegetables in the crisper. Assuming that the world will continue to be a messy place for a long, long time, we don’t have to wait for perfect IT systems and teams, along with a semantic web, to do some interesting and creative work in data analysis.

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Eye Movement Tracking and Hermeneutics

Posted on March 4, 2011 by

Who would have foreseen discussions of both hermeneutics and eye movement tracking technology in the classroom at the same conference? It was quite interesting to see this seemingly incongruous blend of concepts presented in the context of learning analytics. Both emerged at the Banff Learning Analytics #LAK11 conference over the past weekend.

Michael Atkinson and David Wiley noted the “impoverished vocabulary” of clicks and key presses and cautioned against a reductionistic understanding of decontextualized information tracked in an online learning environment. For example, a photograph of a student reading a book provides an everyday understanding as to the learner’s engagement in the reading activity – as compared to “time on task” proxied in page visit data online. On another track, Ravi Vatrapu described a fascinating project by the EU-funded Next-Tell project set up to apply an evidence-centered methodology to build a mind-numbing number of models around student learning in a classroom situation. He noted that 4th-generation eye movement tracking was envisioned as part of the data gathering process.

Both quite fascinating – the science and hermeneutics of learning analytics. Ethicists and more broadly philosophers need not fear – there is plenty of work ahead.

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LAK11 conference on Learning Analytics: The Data Science Team

Posted on February 28, 2011 by

The first day of this most interesting and probably seminal (for higher education) conference ended with George Siemens leading a discussion and brainstorming session on what it takes to make up an effective “data science” team within a higher education context. Initial proposals included a stakeholder, who defines the problem or question(s) to be addressed; the data scientist, who is able to manage the way in which different systems work together at a higher level; the programmer, who writes the query; the statistician, who analyzes the data; and, interestingly, the “visualizer,” who is able to portray the data in a way that communicates the key areas of interest. As the discussion developed, additional ideas from participants were thrown into the mix. For example, the team could include the following roles, functions or persons:
A “champion” must ensure this capacity operates as an ongoing strategic resource, rather than as an ad-hoc system only. There is a bridging function – connecting the different specialties, experts or departments to internal and external stakeholders. A project manager needs to pull all this together. And it continues to expand. For example what is the role of faculty—which academic communities are represented along with which other services? Who ensures the quality of data? IT is an obvious resource in this – but do they have the time and resources to give it priority? Do things change when the process moves to the Cloud? Ethics and privacy become critical concerns and can rapidly become a showstopper.
And of course: how does the information get folded back into a process of improvement – e.g. to faculty and instructional designers, among others? That is probably the key question in the end.

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