Transcript OpenLearn - UNESCO IITE

Making educational practices more
open with OER
Professor Andy Lane, Senior Fellow,
Support Centre for Open Resources in Education
Image by: mag3737,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/1914076277/
The Opportunity: being open to change
Open Educational Resources are “… digitised
materials offered freely and openly for educators,
students and self learners to use and reuse for
teaching, learning and research. “ Giving Knowledge
for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources,
OECD 2007
“The most promising initiative in e-learning is the
concept – and the developing reality, of open
educational resources.” Sir John Daniel (OU, UNESCO,
Commonwealth of Learning)
“There is no point duplicating effort to create content
that is already available and has been proven to
work. Institutions can build on the existing open
educational resources initiative to achieve
economies of scale and efficiencies. In addition they
can pull in the best content and openly available
learning resources from around the world and adapt
them for particular courses.” On-line Learning Task
Force, 2011
Open educational practices:
sharing knowledge through content
The Four Rs of OER and teaching and learning practices
• Reuse – Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
• Rework – Alter or transform the work so that it better meets your
needs
• Remix – Combine the (verbatim or altered work) with other works
to better meet your needs
• Redistribute – Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or the
remixed work with others.
David Wiley, 2007
Open educational practices:
using content wisely
Educational materials can act as a mediating object between
teachers and learners
Educational
material
Teachers
Learners
OER are what you make of them
Spreading ‘wild’
seeds
• OER can be:
– Designed explicitly for educational use
– Other content used for educational purposes
The implications of OER for mediating teaching and
learning opportunities
• Granularity– the size and inter-dependence of modules
• Judging the appropriate mix between:
- Pedagogic support (built into content)
- Personal support (self reflection and guidance)
- Peer support (mutual reflection and guidance)
- Professional support (expert reflection and guidance)
• The use of new social computing technologies in facilitating
support and interaction
• Greater sharing of practice amongst teachers and learners
Open communities as much as open content
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/munroes-map-for-social-networksrsquo-lost-souls-2111356.html
For individuals the greater availability and
accessibility of resources has been found to
help them to:
• Learn new things or enrich other studies;
• Share and discuss topics asynchronously or synchronously with
other learners;
• Assess whether they wish to participate in (further) formal
education;
• Decide which institution they want to study at;
• Improve their work performance;
• Create or revise OER themselves
• But …
• They often need guidance
For teachers, individually and collectively,
OER make it possible for them to:
• Create courses more efficiently and/or effectively, particularly
using rich media resources that require advanced technical and
media skills;
• Investigate the ways in which others have taught their subject;
• Create resources or courses in collaboration with others rather
than doing it all themselves;
• Join in communities of practice which help improve their teaching
practices as they reflect on the community use of new open tools
and technologies;
• Customise and adapt resources by translating or localising them;
• But …
• They must remember that technology only supports not supplants
good teaching.
For educational institutions
OER offers up opportunities to:
• Showcase their teaching and research programmes to wider
audiences;
• Widen the pool of applicants for their courses and programmes;
• Lower the lifetime costs of developing educational resources;
• Collaborate with public and commercial organisations, including
educational publishers, in new ways;
• Extend their outreach activities
• But …
• Improved practices require supportive policies and strategies
For governments and national agencies
OER offer scope to:
•
•
•
•
•
•
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•
Showcase their country’s educational systems;
Attract international students (to higher education at least);
Help drive changes in educational practices;
Develop educational resources in ‘minority’ languages that
commercial publishers are reluctant to do so;
Develop educational resources that reflect local cultures and
priorities;
Cooperate internationally on common resources to meet common
needs;
But …
They need to provide seed funding and supportive policies.
So why did The Open University make some
of its educational resources open?
• A growing momentum behind OER worldwide
and emergence of creative commons licences
• Consistent with the OU’s commitment to social
justice and widening participation
• Helps build markets and reputation
• Bridges the divide between formal and informal
learning
• A test bed for new e-learning developments and
an opportunity to research and evaluate them
• A way of drawing in materials from other
organisations
• Provides the basis for world-wide collaborations
Bridging
informal and
formal
learning
Impacting on
recruitment,
preparation
and
progression
Enabling
collaboration
and
cooperation
Allowing
experimentation
and research