b a t t l e c a t . n e t

PERSONAL RESPONSE

It’s great to see how individuals and institutions have responded to the possibility of shared educational resources over the last 7 years particularly. I’m sure that as more people and organisations (commercial, educational and non-for-profit) become involved, there will be even more developments to write about in 7 more years.

One thing that I’m particularly interested in watching is the development of the Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure.  I feel that people will increasingly view Open Education as something greater than just a licensing model and method of information distribution.

My hope is that participation won’t just mean downloading a video and commenting on a website, but that learning and participating in learning (and teaching) will become a lifestyle choice.  If possible there will be more activity surrounding learning communities, definitely online, but I hope that this movement will transcend the online and move into the true social.

If you’re interested in reading out more about how people are participating with each other (on-and-offline) you might want to check out We Think] by Charles Leadbeater.

My responses to the video and Quest 0/1 are after the jump:

VIDEO

As I’m familiar with the basic history of the FOSS movement (Free and Open Source Software) movement, this lecture reinforced a lot of the history of the alternative types of IP licenses.  It was interesting hearing about the increasing move to share and distribute educational materials.

Having been to one of Richard Stallman’s (potentially divisive) lectures on free software, I can understand that in the educational community there are several definitions about what open and free can mean.

I’ve tried to work out how remixed educational content would work – a lecture from here and a workshop from there?

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QUEST 0/1

Carefully review at least 50 pages of historical information on the open education movement:

I’ve chosen A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (Atkins, Brown, and Hammond, 80 pages). Where relevant I’ve added in links to websites mentioned in the report.

This article reviews the progress made by insitutions receiving grants from the Hewlett Foundation’s education fund, in order to:

equalize the distribution of high-quality knowledge and educational opportunities for individuals, faculty, and institutions (p.6)

1992 – historical ‘start’ of the internet (limited by tools, amount of users and the information available)

2002 – funding from Hewlett Foundation

One of the key goals was to develop a community of creators, distributors and users of Open Educational Resources (OER). As in the FOSS movement, a critical mass of individuals and institutions needs to become involved and engaged in the creation and use of materials in order for the OER movement to be sustainable.

Over US$68 million was invested into various projects by the Hewlett Foundation since 2002.

Overall, benefits of the OER movement have been:

• High quality open resources
• Capacity building in developing countries
• Building a research community looking at OER and Methodology
• Awareness, Voice and Understanding (developing the community which is required to grow and maintain an Open Community)
• Tools development

The best known project recieving funding is probably MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW) Project. As a result of the funding:

• Course material was converted to a consistent, easily readable (PDF) format.
• US and international education institutions committed to make available their own OCW.
• Non-English users would be catered for by translations and foreign language OCW materials
  This has helped drive the up-take of materials by users in the developing world.
• Development of tools (eduCommons , search tools, open source course management tools)
• Increased knowledge about Creative Commons licenses.

The Connexions environment was designed so that small modules of educational content could be made available, rather than entire semester-long courses.  By providing discrete modules with a CC license, there is a possibility of educational “remixing”.

eduCommons was developed by the Utah State University with Hewlett Foundation funding as a tool to develop consistent OCW websites with “scrubbed” (copyright free) content. There are still difficulties working out how to determine which content is clean and what is not.

U.S.U’s distribution of courseware specific to water management is mentioned as an example of OER providing for the ‘long tail’ of niche subjects in the educational market.

Creative Commons, one of the champions of alternative licensing models around the world for many types of media was also a beneficiary of HF funding.

2005 – Open Course Ware Consortium established. 2008/9

Over 200 member institutions list their courses via this site, it’s the best resource for finding available OCW courses.  The range of institutions (from Afghanistan to Japan) help support the “long-tail” of educational content.

2007 – The document under review was written. At that time certain challenges were noted:

• Sustainability
  Courses are expensive to produce and refine . Making them suitable for OER use is also expensive and there is a maintenance cost involved in keeping information relevant. How can smaller institutions afford to put their content online?
• Curation
  How are older materials to be archived?
• Format and granularity
  What is a learning object? How is it best tagged and recorded?
• IP Issues
  How can copyrighted information eg textbooks, videos etc be referenced from within OCW?
  What is fair use?
• Content Quality
  How are courses rated and reviewed? How can content be maintained and improved over time?
• Infrastructure
  tools available, new styles of computing interaction “Web 2.0″
• Increasing participation from developing countries
  The majority of people in the world don’t have access to computers let alone the internet, how can this be changed?
  NB: there is a massive increase in mobile phone ownership in the developing world. Can these tools be used in Open Education?

THE FUTURE

How to create a culture of learning or learning ecosystem such as an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI)?

The next phase is to nurture a culture of learning in which both
intellectual capital (content) and human capital (talent) spiral upward, together. p10

This implies some type of social change about the ways in which individuals and societies view learning.

Conditions encouraging this change are:

• Open code and content
  open source code, paticipatory government, web 2.0 (users as producers)
• Participation
  currently focussed on the “online”, what about in the real world?
• Improvement in ICT infrastructure such as faster servers and better internet access globally.
• Rich media and virtual environments, increasing use of game environments for Serious Games.
• Increased understanding of human learning capacity