Open Education - Week 4: Overall Reflections on Weeks 2, 3 and 4

The following is a reflection on the following readings from the Introduction to Open Education course:

Week 2: Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Week 3: Open Educational Practices and Resources - OLCOS Roadmap 2012 from the Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS)
Week 4: A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities for the Hewlett Foundation

Questions for consideration: What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report? Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did? Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?

Aims of Authors:

OECD Report - This May 2007 report summarizes a recent OECD study of the OER movement. Per the OECD website, "Work on education at OECD seeks to develop and review policies to enhance the efficiency and the effectiveness of education provisions and the equity with which their benefits are shared." The study's web site provides information about the project, including the case studies and site visits that were compiled during the study. In general, the aim of the project is to assess open educational resource (OER) initiatives in terms of their "purpose, content, and funding." The report includes an analysis of the incentives and barriers and suggests ways to improve the access to and usefulness of the resources.

OLCOS Report: Per the olcos.org web site, the OLCOS project (from 1/2006-12/2007) is funded under the European Union’s eLearning Program and "aims at building an (online) information and observation centre for promoting the concept, production and usage of open educational resources, in particular, open digital educational content in Europe." This Roadmap report, produced at the end of the first year of the project in January 2007, offers a status update of open education initiatives as well as recommendations for the future.

Hewlett Foundation Report: This report is billed as a review of the funded projects within the Education Program of the Hewlett Foundation (specifically, the "Using Information Technology to Increase Access to High-Quality Educational Content" initiate), but is ultimately a recommendation of future initiatives for the Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Initiative.

Similarity in Themes:

All three reports share similar:

• definitions of Open Educational Resources (OERs),
  
• interpretations of the key benefits and incentives to participants, and
  
• observations about the current state of the open educational movement and its hurdles.

Definitions of Open Educational Resources (OER): All three reports share similar elements within their definitions of an OER, including:

• access to content and resources (most often digital),
  
• made available for free to the end user,
  
• for the benefit of educators and learners, and
  
• offered with an open license to use, remix, and share content.
  

Benefits / Incentives: Each report highlights reasons for participating in the OER movement. As noted in the OECD report, these reasons include "technological, economic, social and legal" incentives for participating as creators and supporters of content development. Some highlighted benefits include:

• for governments - promoting lifelong learning and social inclusion,
  

• for institutions - altruism, public relations, and collaboration across research and learning institutions,
  
• for individuals - altruism, publicity, feedback, collaboration, and recognition of ones work.
  

Current Status and Hurdles for OER Movement: Each report highlights numerous OER initiatives and notes the historical focus on: a) copyright issues, b) open content generation, and c) content storage considerations. Each report also observes similar hurdles facing the OER movement, including the need to:

• contemplate sustainability issues and develop economic models to fund Open Education initiatives,
  
• address intellectual property concerns and open content licensing efforts,
• provide incentives for researchers and educators to create and distribute content,
• improve access to content,
• increase the quality and usefulness of content being shared, and
  
• spread the word about the value and availability of Open Education beyond pockets within the developed world.
  

Differences in Emphasis:

While all three reports forward a similar view of the history and current status of open education movement, each has a slightly different take on the future. The reports differ on whether the priority should be on open educational resources, practices, or the entire learning infrastructure. This variation in emphasis is important as it is a sign that there is not consensus on what "Open Education" means, what efforts should be supported, and who (individuals, governments, or educational institutions) should be responsible for open education creation and access. Readers of all three reports are left to contemplate if future efforts should focus on creating and supporting 1) open repositories of content, 2) open communities of practice among content producers, 3) open communities of learners ... some combination of all three?

The OECD report focuses on open educational resources (as content), specifically the "chunks of learning" or learning objects. They emphasizes the importance of creating open digital educational resources and of supporting (funding and sustaining) open repositories. In contrast, the OLCOS stresses the importance of expanding the conversation beyond OERs as products - see p. 44 ...

"What partly hampers a stronger uptake of the open content philosophy is the notion that this is about content as products, whereas, basically, it is about learning practices and processes that among other things need openly shared content to thrive. A product-centric view is a barrier to innovation in the development of content services that can be used in constructive and collaborative forms of learning and knowledge creation."

The Hewlett report recommends a focus on the infrastructure to support open participatory learning. The authors recommend that the Hewlett Foundation play a leadership role in fostering a broad based Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI), or "the platform for a culture of learning". While the authors leave the task of detailing and designing such an infrastructure to the future, they emphasize a set of general objectives as stated on p. 57:

"The proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:

1. permits distributed participatory learning;
2. provides incentives for participation; and
   
3. encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning."
   

Report that Resonates:

All three reports provide many "aha" moments and helped me to understand the current state of the open education movement. However, I was most inspired by the views of the future within the OLCOS report. The recommended future actions consider not only the content, but also the context in which the content is used to support learning. This report focuses beyond static resources to open educational practices and open participation within the learning process.

While the OECD report touches on the sharing of static course content (syllabi, lecture notes), it falls short of contemplating broader open educational practices to support learners. In contrast, the OLCOS report extends the focus as noted on p.29 of the OLCOS report:

 "OLCOS sees a critical lack of educational innovation for learner-centered and collaborative learning practices and processes in which ... individual and groups of learners (including teachers) will actively use tools and content to understand problems, discuss approaches and methods in problems solving, and share study resources and results." 

... and emphasizes the role of the learner and learning communities within which they participate- see p. 24:

"A key problem of current open access educational repositories may be that despite their philosophy of sharing, they see teachers and learners as consumers of content who primarily want to download useful material. A better approach would be to support communities of interest around certain subjects."

The OLCOS report provides a vivid picture of the differences between open education and closed (or canned) education. The examples of "canned" versus "open" education within the table on p. 46 contrast the practices within each system on such measures as:

• the roles of the teacher and learner (dispenser / receiver versus facilitator / active learner),
• services provided to learner (databases versus RSS feeds),
• content management (institutional LMS versus PLEs), and
  
• tools to support learning (desktop tools versus wikis, blogs).

In addition, OLCOS report considers the possibilities of using freely available social software (social bookmarking, RSS feeds, wikis and blogs) to support open educational practices and to create personal learning environments controlled by the learner. Using open source software and Internet based technologies to support learning is something I have been covering with great interest on my personal blog for some time now. While the Hewlett report also notes the explosion of social software as a driver for open participatory learning, I don't subscribe to the notion that there needs to be an "infrastructure" (as in their Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure) designed to support it. It already exists. It is called the Internet.

My Interest in the Open Education Movement:

The aspects of the Open Education movement that interest me the most focus on open dynamic educational practices, communities, and networks. Both practices and online networks to support learning are near and dear to my heart as a student in an online instructional systems technology program. While preparing for the Open Education Conference, Dr. Anne Leftwich and I have been working on a way to diagram our vision of open educational practices and the interaction between those practices and open educational resources. Our desire is to spark a conversation about:

• how open resources can be presented to and accessed by learners,
  
• how learners can openly use / remix / share resources, thoughts and ideas with fellow learners,
  
• how learners can receive support and feedback within an open learning environment, and
• how open resources can flow into and out of this process.
  

In terms of the last point above, we want to discuss ideas to sustain the resources that are created during this open learning process. As we see it, too often the learners efforts are locked up behind a walled LMS garden only to be blipped away when the semester is over. How can these thoughts, ideas and artifacts be preserved for not only the learners involved in the creation, but for those who come after? While still evolving, we attempted to diagram our vision as follows:



Open Educational Practices: As Greg notes, a focus on open educational practices "is where instructional design fits into the big picture of open educational resources." I agree and suggest that, as shown in the diagram above, the key open practices include learners:

1. accessing relevant content,
   
2. engaging in practice, and
3. receiving / giving feedback, guidance and support.
   

Linking these specific practices within an instructional process is hardly a new concept. Within his Instructional Transaction Theory (also published within Reigeluth's famous instructional design theory manual - "The Green Book" ), Dr. David Merrill summarizes Gange's assumptions about these practices:

"Information which does not include presentation, practice, and learner guidance is information but not instruction."

Within this same paper, Merrill shares his concern "with the current emphasis on information and the lack of emphasis on appropriate instructional strategies." I share this observation within the context of the open education movement. Yet, I am fully aware that any link back to instruction, instructional strategies, and instructional design will turn off some who cringe at the words instructional design for the implication of a top / down plan wherein an all knowing hand feeds knowledge to learners. However, I view instruction (and specifically instructional design) as a process that supports learning by contemplating the best possible opportunities and conditions for a learner to take control of his or her own learning destiny.

It is my belief that open educational practices not only connect learners to resources, they also link learners to other people within both formal and informal learning situations. Using myself as an example, as a student in a formal graduate program, as well as an informal learner within the edublogger community, I learn every day from this process of:

• Presentation - when the thoughts and ideas presented from over 300 edubloggers wind up in my feed reader, 
• Practice - when I reflect on the thoughts and ideas of others within my own blog (dare I say, my PLE), and
  
• Feedback - when I read, receive and participate in the back and forth comments and counter-posts among bloggers help guide my understanding.
  

No one at my university set up this process for me. I stumbled upon it myself, but it offers an open process that facilities my learning.

Open Resources: I consider open resources to include both the resources used to support learning and the bi-product of learning experience. In other words, the original source content, as well as new and re-mixed content generated from the learning process. While the reports we read discuss numerous efforts aimed at the creation, presentation and storage of original source content, there appears to be little focus on the artifacts of the learning experience. As Greg observes in his reflection: 

"... producers of open educational resources look at consumers as merely uses of the content. They do not see them as collaborators on the usefulness and effectiveness of resources, or as colleagues who re-share the resources that they have remixed."

How sad and how true. Learning Management Systems are filled with hours of thought and reflection, yet after each semester the content is blipped away or blocked from view when the learner is no longer a paying customer (I mean, student). Attention must be focused on how the bi-products of open education can be saved, categorized and openly stored for use by the learner and those who come after.


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