Transcript Slide 1

OER as Educational Philosophy
Rob Farrow
18/10/11
The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology
Context
• OLnet / Evidence Hub
• The OER Turn (Thomas, 2011)
http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/09/16/the-oer-turn/
– visible and invisible use (use often not recorded/illegal… Impact)
– the importance of licensing (nb. metrics)
– the role of the university (institutional reform/publicity)
• WSIS OER Debate
WSIS OER Debate 12th-24th October
http://www.wsis-community.org/pg/debates/group:14358/phase/400536/400538
Educational Philosophy
• Normative theory of education
• Pedagogy, curriculum & learning theory
• Implicit/explicit metaphysical, epistemological & axiological
assumptions
• Succinctly: what education should be like / how education
should be persued
Educational Philosophies
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Perrenialism (Plato, 1911)
Behaviourism (Watson, 1913)
Progressivism/Pragmatism (Dewey, 1916)
Social Development Theory (Vygotsky, 1934)
Essentialism (Bagley, 1934)
Existentialism (Neill, 1960)
Constructivism (Piaget, 1967)
Educational Philosophy
1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right
2. Basic factual premises about humanity and the world
3. From 1. & 2., recommendations about the dispositions
education should foster
4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology
of learning and methods of teaching
5. Further conclusions about such things as methods used
Frankena, Raybeck & Burbules (2002)
Questions
• Does the use of OER imply a particular standpoint in
educational philosophy?
• Which values are implied by the OER approach?
• What might follow from adopting a pro-OER model of
education?
ci.olnet.org
12 Key Challenges
• Who and how to create new appropriate Assessment/Evaluation models and practices
for OER?
• What are the costs and benefits of using OER in teaching?
• What can be done to improve OER Sustainability?
• How can we improve the value and impact of OER Research?
• What Technologies & Infrastructure are needed/in place to help the OER movement?
• What Institutional Policies are needed/in place to promote OER?
12 Key Challenges
• What are the best ways to Promote and Advocate educational methods which use
OERs?
• How do we create the right culture of teaching and learning to improve OER
Adoption?
• What evidence is there of Use (and Re-Use) of OER?
• What are the issues surrounding Copyright and Licensing, and how can they be
overcome?
• How do we ensure OER is of high Quality?
• How can we improve Access to OER?
Advocacy Claims:
• Unobstructed licenses expand student access to high-quality, up-to-date, engaging,
and customized content more quickly, cost-effectively, and efficiently than today.
• Unobstructed licenses unlock educational resources that are developed using
taxpayer dollars so they can be shared, customized, and improved, yielding a far
greater return on investment to the public.
• Open educational resources with unobstructed licenses are the path forward to
ensure every student has access to high-quality, engaging, personalized, and up-todate content.
• Ultimately, open educational resources with unobstructed licenses can help
transform our schools by producing better equipped teachers, better prepared
students, and better education outcomes
Context: Summary
• OER movement remains fragmented and not well
documented
• Lack of clear evidence about the best use of OER
• Diverse contexts of application
• Uncertainty about the future
• There is no single approach to OER, and any philosophical
description needs to account for this
OER - Definitions
OER is a term that was first adopted at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the
Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing
Countries
OER - Definitions
“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the
public domain or have been released under an intellectual property
license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.
Open educational resources include full courses, course materials,
modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other
tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
(Atkins, Seely Brown & Hammond, 2007:4)
OER - Definitions
“Open educational resource, (n). Any artifact that is either (1) licensed
under an open copyright license or (2) in the public domain.”
(Wiley, 2011b)
• (1) locates OER within the taxonomy of ‘things-that-can-be-copyrighted’
• Ideas, concepts, methods, people, places, events can never be OER
• (2) suggests that publicity alone can be enough to make an educational
resource open
OER - Definitions
• The (Platonic) form of an ‘ideal’ OER (Wiley):
1. ACCESS: immediately and freely accessible by every person in the world
2. LICENSING: grant the user the legal permissions necessary to engage in each
and every possible usage of the resource with no restrictions whatsoever
3. EFFICACY : effectively support the educational goals of the user
• Access “is in the eye of the beholder”
• Efficacy depends on use
– These can nonetheless function as regulative ideals (Kant, 1929)
• Licensing remains the most tangible/least contentious form of description
OERs - Summary
• OER still typically defined in terms of copyright & licensing
• The convention (derived from funding bodies) is to consider resources
open when produced under a creative commons license
• OERs need not be digital (though typically are)
• The ‘openness’ of OER is contextual
• But what kind of values does the movement espouse?
Ethics/Values
• OER makes education more affordable to ‘developing’ countries (Heller
et al., 2007; IJsselmuiden et al., 2009)
• OER & Human Rights/Public Health (Geith & Vignare, 2008)
• Communities of Practice: sharing resources & expertise (Lee et al.,
2008)
• Continuity with academic tradition (Joyce, 2006)
Bildung
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Markus Deimann
(OLnet Fellow )
Roots in the Enlightenment
(Self-)cultivation
More comprehensive than ‘education’
Unifying selfhood and identity within broader society
Less about acquiring specific skills/outcomes; more about
developing a wide range of abilities
• Kritik: challenging the (political) status quo
OER/Bildung: Tropes
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Freedom
Inclusivity
Autonomy
Reflection
Intersubjectivity
Hermeneutics
Critical Pedagogy
“The priority… is not to establish the case for free and open,
but to find the right place for existing institutions and more
importantly to help develop the right skills to help humanity
progress.”
McAndrew (2009)
Open Educational Practices?
• “Open Educational Practices (OEP) are defined as practices which
support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational
resources (OER) through institutional policies, which promote
innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as
co-producers on their lifelong learning path. OEP address the whole
OER governance community: policy makers, managers and
administrators of organizations, educational professionals and
learners.” ICDE
• It makes little sense to talk about OER rather than (or independently of)
OEP – yet that is how the debate has typically been framed
“Open Educational
Practices (OEP) are the
set of activities and
support around the
creation, use and
repurposing of Open
Educational Resources.
It also includes the
contextual settings
within which these
practices occur.”
Conole (2011)
Institutional Implications
• The copyright status of an educational resource remains abstract… but the adoption
of OEPs implies changes throughout the entire educational system
– Publishing (authorship & review)
– Tenure
NB. Weller (2011)
– Curriculum Design / IP
• Opening up educational institutions and making knowledge public
• Implications for expectations made of staff
The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology
Institutional Implications
• “The philosophy of the COSL team is that all resources emitted by eduCommons
should be covered by an educational” Creative Commons license...
• This philosophy suggests that two different digital course resource systems would
emerge within a university: one built entirely of creative commons material, and
another built within the IP environment of the institution’s digital library/repository
allowing access to copyright material only to authenticated members of community.”
(Atkins, Seely Brown & Hammond, 2007:12)
The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology
Institutional Implications
• OER University #oeru
– free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials
– courses and programs based solely on OER and open textbooks
– pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognised education institutions
– pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credit
– administrative: not a formal teaching institution and does not confer degrees or
qualifications
• OAR (Open Assessment Resources)
– existing assessments neither reusable, revisable, remixable, or redistributable
– Wiley estimates that 1.5 billion OARs are needed
The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology
Conclusions
• Discourse about OERs has reached a point of maturity and needs to be (at least)
supplemented with explicit focus on OEPs
• Focus on OEPs weakens the link between OERs and learning objects
• OEPs are potentially much further-reaching and more radical than OERs
• While OERs themselves are not aligned with a specific educational philosophy, there
are distinct values associated with the OER movement
• The Enlightenment concept of education as Bildung may help to flesh out a distinctive
educational philosophy pertaining to OERs/OEPs
The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology
References
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Atkins, Daniel E., John Seely Brown & Allen L. Hammond (2007). A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER)
Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Menlo Park, CA: The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Bagley, William C. (1934) Education and Emergent Man: A Theory of Education With Particular Application to Public
Education in the United States. New York: Nelson.
Conole, G. (2011) Defining Open Educational Practices [online]. Available from http://e4innovation.com/?p=373. (Accessed
17th October 2011)
Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: The Free Press
Frankena, William K., Raybeck, Nathan & Burbules, Nicholas (2002). "Philosophy of Education". In Guthrie, James W. (ed).
Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd edition. New York, NY: Macmilla
Geith C. & Vignare K. (2008) Access to Education with Online Learning and Open Educational Resources: Can they Close the
Gap? Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks. 0212:1, 105-126
Hansen , K. H. (2008). Rewriting Bildung for Postmodernity. Curriculum Inquiry 38.1
eller, R., Chongsuvivatwong, V., Hailegeorgios, S., Dada, J., Torun, P., Madhok, R., Sanders, J. (2007) Capacity-building for
public health. Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, 85 (12) (Accessed 17th October 2011)
Hylén, J. (2006). Open educational resources: Opportunities and challenges. OECD-CERI. Available from
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/49/35733548.doc (accessed Jan 2010)
ICDE (undated). Definition of Open Educational Practices [online]. (Accessed 17th October 2011)
IJsselmuiden, C., Nchinda, T., Duale, S., Tumwesigye, N., Serwadda, D. (2007) Mapping Africa's advanced public health
education capacity: the AfriHealth project. Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, 85(12):14-922.
References
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Joyce, A. (2006) OECD study of OER; forum report. International Institute for Educational Planning. Available from
http://www.schoolforge.net/IIEP_OECD_OER_forum_report.pdf
Lee, M., Albright, S., O’Leary, L., GeronimoTerkla, D, Wilson, N. (2008) Expanding the reach of health sciences education
and empowering others: the OpenCourseWare initiative at Tufts University. Medical teacher. Vol. 30, No. 2, Pages 159-163.
OLnet. What are the Key Challenges facing Open Education?. OLnet Evidence Hub
http://ci.olnet.org/CILite/global.php#challenge-list (Accessed 17th October 2011)
Piaget, J. (1967). Logique et Connaissance scientifique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade.
Plato (1911) Phaedo. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kant, I. (1929) [1781] Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan.
Thomas, A. The OER Turn [online]. Available from http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/09/16/the-oer-turn/ (Accessed
17th October 2011)
Watson, J. B. (1913) ‘Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It’. Psychological Review 20, 1913, 158–177. Available from
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/views.htm
Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice. Bloomsbury Academic.
Wiley, D. (2011a) OER, Toothbrushes and Value [online]. Available from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2015.
(Accessed 17th October 2011)
Wiley, D. (2011b) On OER – Beyond Definitions [online]. Available from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1780.
(Accessed 17th October 2011)
[email protected]
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
www.open.ac.uk/iet