Grantees Brainstorm #2: What are the key components needed to effect this transformation?
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One of the many key components needed to enable this transformation is a firm commitment to ensuring compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act in the production of Open Education Resources. This component is essential because its absence makes it impossible to engage public and publicly supported systems of education in the United States as full partners in this transformation. The presence of this component will remove a major obstacle to the adoption and continued improvement of OER and help integrate OER into established systems of public education that are badly in need of this transformation.
I agree with the need to pay proper attention to accessibility issues. Not just through compliance but understanding the need to offer ways for everyone to engage. This means being clearer about what ways things can be used - not easy when serving the world.
Another key is to join in both as a producer and consumer. When someone starts accrediting and building systems that assume open content will meet the needs then we can move to a more demand-led approach.
Absolutely - but “accessibility” also means being able to access and use content for anyone who is access-challenged, such as by poverty. Designing superb content and superb discussion opportunities in the cheapest and most ubiquitous ways - that is a true challenge!
Key components: goodwill, collaboration, humility, and willingness to accept critique.
Key Components to get to a transformed teaching and learning:
1)A culture of cooperation, listening and leading skills
2)A large-scale effort to move away from the age-old lecture format into a research-based learning approach. This means finding and articulating incentives and education for faculty to make this change. I expect younger faculty will come by it more naturally.
3)Open source, interoperable technologies and frameworks that allow sharable components and integration of content into varying contexts.
4)Technology tools for learners to actively intellectually engage with content and each other.
5)Perseverance
I agree with Mara and would like to tease out a tension (in the good sens of “pulling”)between #2 and #4. In my experience, courses designed for great deal of student interaction are often the ones faculty are most reluctant to share, because:
A) They don’t want “recording” to inhibit student engagement
B) They don’t have as much formal “material” to deliver in a class period
C. They are nervous about that it will look like they are not “doing anything” in the classroom.
C is a matter of cultural change—it takes the recognition by faculty peers (often articulated in the shape of tenure/promotion standards) that designing a good exercise for student engagement of content is as (if not more) indicative of content mastery and diligent work as is an excellent lecture. A and B could be handled with appropriate tools designed to approximate the classroom experience rather than record it.
Collaboration,communication and compromise.
Learning objects need to be standardize to allow ALL groups to share and use the resource
We need a network of testbeds to see what OER looks like and acts like in K-12 settings. Not sure that many of the ideas expressed for higher ed will apply in this environment, at least in a transitional period where schools are hamstrung by achievement testing. This would ideally be coordinated by a project separate from groups that are producing OER content and tools, and providing useful feedback on content and tools to these groups.
Better understand of “chunks” of information and how they can be mixed/remixed
Changes in reward structures for teachers to encourage them to mix/remix and close the loops.
Involve students in the creation and improvement of teaching materials
games and simulations. embrace them, don’t fear them
wireless in the “classroom.” embrace it, don’t fear it
interoperability. RSS. RSS. Did I mention RSS?
I received the following responses on my weblog:
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/037107.php
What are the key components needed to effect this transformation?
Wayne Mackintosh A key component is within OER projects is the adoption of a content licenses that meet the requirements of the free cultural works definition and resolution of the incompatibilities among different license types. The other problems will work themselves out through processes of self-organisation. The thing is - built on a phenomenal leverage principle - you don’t need 95% of all educators participation. 5% will do the trick
Keira McPhee The experts at the institutions (not just the profs but people like you) need to be on the ground supporting these networks and connecting people to knowledge they need to make these community learning experiences richer.
We’ve got an ingenuity gap and big problems. Ernest Becker says somewhere, probably in the Denial of Death, that we’ve got all the knowledge we need to tackle the really big problems of human survival. Synthesizing that information and knowledge is the big, perhaps insurmountable hurdle.
But now we’ve got the power of the social web to bring people together- it strikes me as our best shot.
Jim Groom One way to look at this question is to think about the transformation of the educational system itself. What is the perceived value of an education in our particular moment. Is the idea of transformation framing a reactionary response (“prepapredness”) to the pervasive ideas of the inevitability global markets, borderless businesses, and securing intellectual properties (not in the Willinsky sense☺), etc.? Are educational institutions thinking about technology as ways to capitalize on the surface discourse in circulation that is defined by buzzwords like “excellence,” “assessment,” and “marketable skills.” If so, I am not sure this is a transformation at all.
Transformation defines a space for thinking through potential alternatives within the digital landscape for learning that is still itself still being defined? This metamorphosis would, at its core, reflect the possibility for problematizing some of these unexamined assumptions about learning within the institutional setting. Ideally, these questions might lead us to the notion that a university needs be a space (by no means limited to the physical realm) for creating meaning and shaping culture within a community. This community needs to be made up of a nexus of individual’s participating towards an examination, analysis, interpretation, and reflection upon the culture within which their experiences are framed. Education should represent a particularly unique space to create meaning using these various skills for the community to consider more broadly.
A transformed experience wholly depends upon a transformed philosophy wherein the idea of teaching and learning is built around passionate curiosity, the willingness to fail, a drive to create something, and the openness to share it with others. None of this is dependent on the tools, but this list of seeming inanities has become an afterthought for much of the curricula framework in higher education in recent history.
Stephen Downes Attitudes, mostly.
Things that allow people to direct their own learning and create their own resources. Things that allow these resources to be located wherever they are needed (ie., ubiquitous internet resource syndication). Placing control (and hence power) in the learner’s hands - eg., personal identity, not institutional identity; personal resources, not institutional resources; etc.
Brian There is a huge cultural shift required. Understanding what great teaching is may be something of a science, but it is at least as much an art. Perhaps we should ask, “what environments and tools would foster these artists to do their best work?” And we should encourage teachers and learners to make their processes, not just their outcomes, visible, accessible and reusable.
I spoke with an attendee yesterday who said he was struck that there was little in the (excellent) “Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement” that demanded cultural change in our higher education institutions. Even with the dramatic changes in the broader techno-cultural landscape in the past ten years, how much has essentially changed with universities in the western world? Isn’t it all too easy to imagine universities remaining essentially unchanged — or at least clinging to business as usual — ten, even twenty years from now? Given the critique by Downes, Attwell, et al… that the current Hewlett OER vision is institution-centric (personally, I understand why that might be) perhaps promoting change in this culture should be on the agenda?
All educators and learners should have the opportunities to be both creators and users of learning resources.
What comes first? Massive OER resources (supply) followed by open outcome/performance assessments (demand) backed by credentialing entities. Massive usability would need some kind of match or e-harmony type of system.
I agree with Ted’s thoughts on K-12. The lessons from H.E. will not easily transfer to a schools’ context. At European Schoolnet we currently have a number of school testbeds in large-scale OER projects funded by the European Commission and it would be great to hook these into other international OER testbeds.
Having a critical mass of OER resources is key but, of particular concern to us in Europe, is understanding what types of open educational resources/assets have the most potential to ‘travel well’ and be used in different curriculum frameworks and even by teachers and pupils who speak a different language and may not understand all the text elements of the resource. Using our European Network of Innovative Schools, we hope to have a group of teachers looking at the portability of the content (from Ministries of Education) in the Learning Resource Exchange that we will launch later this year. What would be even better, is to have European schools working with others in the US, Canada, Australia etc. examining what works and what doesn’t on a global scale.
Re the various comments on the need for cultural change: for higher education, I think the bottom line remains that we are in a chicken-and-egg dilemma: unless institutions & communities of teaching practice encourage/support/require their faculty to provide the world’s best teaching plans and learning resources for their students, Open Education Resources that provide these will be underutilized. And unless we have OER repositories with exemplary content and compelling demonstrations of this usage and the impacts on student success, there will be less impetus for institutional policy and community practice to move in this direction