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.

Technorati Tags:
OER,
OpenEd