Transcript Opening Up Education M.S. Vijay Kumar, MIT Toru Iiyoshi, Knowledge Media Lab, Carnegie Foundation Educause Webcast Oct 17, 20081

Opening Up Education
M.S. Vijay Kumar, MIT
Toru Iiyoshi, Knowledge Media Lab, Carnegie Foundation
Educause Webcast Oct 17, 20081
A Collaborative Publication Project
• “How can we advance teaching and
learning by taking full advantage of open
education?”
• A hardcover book + free online distribution
with Creative Commons
• 30 chapters by 38 prominent leaders and
visionaries (Foreword by John Seely
Brown)
• Lessons learned and visions of the future
from: OKI, IMS, CNI, Sakai, Moodle,
ETUDES, iCampus, VUE, Mellon
Foundation, OCW, Connexions, OLI,
MERLOT, OpenLearn, SOFIA, Creative
Commons, LAMS, Hewlett Foundation,
CASTL, VKP, ISSOTL, Open University,
Carnegie Foundation, and more
The Carnegie Foundation’s Book on
Open Education (Winter 2008, MIT Press)
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Opening Up Education: Key Dimensions
The educational value proposition and implications of open
education initiatives
The micro and macro factors that would accelerate these
initiatives towards having a larger impact on education
The means and mechanism for iteratively and continuously
improving the quality of teaching and learning through effective
development and sharing of educational innovations and
pedagogical knowledge
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Understanding and Promoting the Impact of
Open Education: Big Questions
How can we enable and encourage learners and educators
to productively participate in open education?
What does open education mean as an agency for change
both in formal and informal education?
How can niche learning communities take advantage of open
educational tools, resources, and knowledge of practice?
What support needs to be provided?
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Opening Up Education: A Framework
Open
Technology
Open
Content
Open
Knowledge
Section Editor:
Owen McGrath
Section Editor:
Flora McMartin
Section Editor:
Cheryl Richardson
Trent Batson
David Kahle
M. S. Vijay Kumar
Stuart Lee
Steve Lerman
Phil Long
Clifford Lynch
Christopher Mackie
Neeru Paharia
Edward Walker
Richard Baraniuk
Tom Carey
Catherine Casserly
Gerard Hanley
Diane Harley
Andy Lane
Anne Margulies
Shigeru Miyagawa
Marshall Smith
Candace Thille
David Wiley
Randy Bass
Dan Bernstein
Barbara Cambridge
James Dalziel
Bernadine Chuck Fong
Richard Gale
Mary Huber
Pat Hutchings
Toru Iiyoshi
Diana Laurillard
Marilyn Lombardi
Diana Oblinger
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The iLab Vision
• Order of magnitude more lab experiences
• More lab time to users/researchers
• More sophisticated labs available
• Communities of scholars created around iLabs
sharing educational & research content
Campus
network
Client
Internet
Service Broker
University Databases
Lab Server
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Accelerating Global Movement
Higher Education
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Making a Difference – Educator Use
Professor Richard Hall
LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, now teaching information systems, beginning
microprocessors, and advanced computer-aided software engineering.
OCW saved him “an enormous amount of time and stress.”
“I was delighted by the way the material is so coherently presented. It is truly
inspiring to see this level of excellence.”
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Making a Difference – Student Use
Kunle Adejumo, Engineering student at Ahmadu Bello University
in Zaria, Nigeria
“Last semester, I had a course in metallurgical engineering. I didn’t have notes, so
I went to OCW. I downloaded a course outline on this, and also some review
questions, and these helped me gain a deeper understanding of the material.”
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OER Value Proposition

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Open high quality digitized educational
content, tools and communities
Available anytime, anywhere for free
Localizable and re-mixable
Allows for collective improvement and
feedback
Alternate way to learn: Accelerate/deepen
learning
Scaling excellence
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Opportunities and Challenges
in Open Knowledge Sharing

Ability of learning technologies to be integrated together into an
educational infrastructure.

Easier sharing of applications and content among institutions that
can be a catalyst for cooperative and commercial development.

Lower long term cost of software ownership, as well as increased
stability and reliability for example through
replacement/upgrading of single components, rather than entire
systems,.

Making tacit and local knowledge of effective teaching and learning
visible and useful to others (both globally and locally) .

The commons must serve both as a repository and a seedbed. Open
knowledge is not simply about making new pedagogical work
available. It is about creating the conditions in which ever better
ideas and models can come forward.
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Recommendation #1
Investigate the Transformative Potential and
Ecological Transitions
Does open education shed new light on the persistent, hard
problems of education with respect to access and quality,
and perhaps offer new solutions?
Does it provide a fresh new look at the practice of
education, necessitated by that flatness and fortunes
expected of the new global dynamics of mobility and
emerging economies?
What new pathways does open education offer to improve
education as a whole?
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Recommendation #2
Change Education’s Culture and Policy
What fresh perspective on resources and relationships does
open education demand?
What would be a good model(s) for building receptivity to
open educational resources at many levels through effective
professional and leadership development?
How can we help educational institutions allocate resources
towards building support necessary capacity for faculty and
students in fully utilizing open educational resources?
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Is Education Ready
for Opening Up Education?

Inertial Frames

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Scarcity vs. Abundance
Pundit-Pupil vs. Peer-Peer
Outdated premises (Historical Evolution)
Enabling Structures

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Sense Making
 Ordering the digital disorder
Teacher education
Facilitative infrastructure (Technical; Organizational;
Financial)
Accountability and Accreditation
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Recommendation #3
Make Open Education Solutions Sustainable
Programmatic and technical integration
How can we tightly integrate open education efforts with
educational program priorities?
Synthesis and synergy
How can we look beyond institutional and other boundaries
and connect efforts among many settings, and seek
complementarities and productive combinations?
Governance
•
How can open education initiatives take advantage of both
widely distributed nature and collectivity in leading their
efforts?
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Influences

Collectivity

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Design
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Participatory, Collaborative practices for developing and
sharing educational materials
Social Software, networks…..
Virtual Environments: Second Life.
Remix
Agency
Sustainability
Enablers:
Open & Community Source; Creative Commons
Open Architecture; Interoperability (OKI; eFrameworks.)
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Recommendation #4
Make Practice and Knowledge
Visible and Shareable
How can we facilitate community inquiry and discourse,
making diverse pedagogical know-how visible and
transferable in intellectually engaging and rewarding ways?
How can we help educators and educational institutions
build their intellectual and technical capacity to create and
share quality educational knowledge, and transform “tacit
knowledge” into “commonly usable knowledge”?
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All of these are freely
available to the public!
Web 2.0
Niche CoP,
Social
learning about
T&L
http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org18
A Circle of Knowledge Building and Sharing:
Promoting the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
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Recommendation #5
Build the Commons through
the Collectivity Culture
What kind of mechanisms do we need to devise to harvest,
accumulate, and distribute locally created educational
assets, pedagogical innovations, and wisdom of practice in a
way that can be reused effectively in different local contexts?
(e.g., “Education Concierge”)
To foster the spawning and sharing of new ideas and models
for innovative learning and teaching, what conditions need to
be created through the collectivity culture?
How can we create a vast network of educational knowledgebases that inspires and helps to inform future efforts?
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Three Dramatic Improvements in Education
By openly sharing educational tools, resources, and knowledge,
we could:
increase quality of tools and resources;
promote more effective use; and
advance individual and collective (and local and global)
knowledge of teaching and learning.
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Open Education Vision Elements

Blended Learning
– Intelligently combine the physical and the virtual
– Integrate conventional pedagogy with net-learning
to deliver quality
 (relevant) educational opportunities

Boundary-less Education
 Beyond geo-political
 Across Disciplines
 Thematic Education
 Research-Education/Learning
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We are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university—a transcendent, accessible,
empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and
platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or
enhanced.” --Charles M. Vest, President Emeritus, MIT, (p. 30).
(Vest, C. (2006). Enabling Meta University, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June, (41:3), 1830, http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0630.asp)
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Related Online Resources:
MIT Press:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11309
Book Release WebEvent:
http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/openingupeducation/
Opening Up Education Discussion Forum:
http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/openingupeducation
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