Pass the SoLT

This week I attended the second OERu meeting in Dunedin where foundation partners came together to discuss and plan their next steps in this innovative open educational resources initiative. You can read more about the OERu initiative on the related Wikieducator website. About 10 partner institutions have signed up as foundation members of the OER network, including Athabasca University, Empire State College, Thompson Rivers University, University of Canterbury, University of Southern Queensland and University of Wollongong, but I was attending as an observer as Massey University has not yet committed itself to the OERu concept.

Based on discussions that took place over the two days, it is doubtful that Massey will join as a foundation partner. However, we wish those people and institutions involved all the best as Massey remains committed to providing access to high quality tertiary education, especially in the developing world. I was grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to the meeting (thanks Wayne) and I will be very interested to see if the partners can overcome many of the challenges confronting such a creative solution to the wider provision of tertiary education.

If you are interested in finding out more information, then most of the sessions are were recorded on uStream. The breakout panels generated lots of interesting discussion and certainly identified many of the opportunities along with a number of serious challenges. I will be watching the initiative with interest over the next 12 months.

A few months ago I posted a comment about an Open Educational Resource (OER) research project that I'm involved in looking at uptake and policy around their use in Australia. My earlier posting shared more information about this project along with a link to a related Slideshare presentation. Since then we have been analyzing the initial responses to a survey on the use and general understanding of OERs, which has led to an interesting line of discussion about the shift in language from OERs to Open Educational Practices (OEPs).

The recent findings of the Open Educational Quality Initiative were explicit about the need to go beyond OERs in current thinking and argued that they have potential to lead to more open pedagogical practices and innovative cultures. Put another way, the focus on OERs per se may be looking for love in the wrong place!

There are important implications for our research from this subtle yet significant evolution of the OER/OEP literature. A major focus of our present study is on policy (macro, mesa and micro) and the language or discourse we adopt is really important. So it was interesting to recently find on Wikibooks a comprehensive User Guide for Organisations and policy resource on the topic of OEPs. The resource covers a number of topics ranging from models to marketing and is a good starting point for institutions wanting to better understand and take advantage of the open movement. Notably, the resource was developed with Ako Aotearoa funding by a team led by Leigh Blackwell.

I was particularly pleased to see a section at the end of the resource with responses from a handful of key individuals which include several critical remarks. In my view, there is a need for more critical debate over the claims, promises and learning futures of the OER/OEP movement as we seek to disrupt more traditional models of education. The unresolved question in my mind is whether the OER/OEP movement can truly become mainstream in an age of where institutions are preoccupied with revenue, rankings and reputation.

This is just a brief entry for anyone interested in the Open Education Resource (OER) movement. I'm currently involved in an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded research project ($220K) investigating the adoption, level of use and current policy initiatives around OERs in higher education.

Over the next few months we will be surveying the Australian sector to help establish the current 'state of play' along with conducting a thorough literature search and discourse analysis of local, national and institutional policies in this area. More information about the study is available on the project wikiresearcher site. In addition, you can view the Pecha Kuch presentation we have prepared for the EdMedia Conference in Lisbon which provides a useful summary of our objectives and intended outcomes.

On a related topic, the recent eLearning Africa Conference included a highly publicized debate on whether the OER movement is flawed and this newsletter contains a useful summary of the arguments. Tony Bates also provides some critically reflective thoughts on the recent debate, which he points out is likely to continue for some years, and Stephen Downes captures the ebb and flow of the debate in a summarising blog posting.

This new open access book on Open Education might be of interest. It claims to give practical guidance on the design and delivery of Open Education courses while wrestling with theoretical considerations of this new and emerging domain. Take a look at the book...

• The Why and How of Open Education: With Lessons from the openSE and openEd Projects

In the book Meiszner (2011) offers the following working definition for Open Education (OE). In the very basic form OE '...might be defined as the free and open access to,the usage of and the right to modify and re-use digital open educational resources and digital educational tools, and the free and open access to the related virtual educational communities,in order to learn, teach, exchange or advance knowledge in a collaborative and interactive way' (Meizner, 2011, p.4).

Many commentators claim the current OE movement was fueled with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative and the Open University's launch of Open Learn. The latter allows you to access hundreds of courses and claims to have 11 million users annually.

Currently there is an interesting debate occurring about the future of OE and Open Educational Resources (OERs) with Sir John Daniel, President of the CoL, releasing a statement preceding what is likely to be a lively discussion at the eLearning Africa Conference. The debate will respond to the moot, 'This house believes that the OER movement is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the false assumption that educational institutions are willing to share resources freely and openly'.

You can post your own thoughts on Sir John's statement, and the moot at large, leading up to the formal debate which takes place on Friday, 27 May (local time).

The following keynote presentation by Martin Bean makes interesting viewing. It comes from last year's Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) in the UK. At the time of the presentation Martin Bean was the Vice-Chancellor Designate of the Open University. He has since taken up this position. A great one liner in Mr Bean's keynote is the quote that 'School is like being on an airplane' as you have to sit in the back and put your trust in someone you don't really know. And of course you have to turn off all your electronic devices!

Apart from being highly engaging the keynote presentation argues that higher education is in danger of suffering from a 'crisis of relevance'. Rather than unplugging higher learning, according to Mr Bean, the future depends on blending digital lifestyles with digital work styles. The video contains some powerful ideas about the future of higher education and the importance of extending access to life-long learning through new technologies.

His comments on the importance of multiple platform and delivery channels and the need to be in the learner's space rather than thinking they'll come to our space (i.e., Stream) have immediate implications for Massey. Equally, the value of investing in new branding propositions such as iTunesU should not be overlooked along with the learning and marketing potential of Open Educational Resources.

This is just a quick entry as I thought it might be useful to provide some examples of various Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives underway throughout the world. The following list contains a variety of projects which illustrate the growing reach and maturity of the OER movement:

• MIT Open Courseware

This was the first official OER university initiative with almost 2000 courses online.

• OpenLearn

This is the Open University's (UK) suite of free online courses

• Peer 2 Peer University

This is a fledging site that provides a small number of free online short courses.

• Flat World Knowledge

This initiative aims to provide repository of free online academic textbooks

• Academic Earth

This site provides a selection of freely available video lectures including whole courses.

• WikiBooks

This is another site aimed at making free textbooks available to educators.

• OER Commons

This site provides a searchable database of OER resources.

• WikiEducator

This site has a strong New Zealand connection through the work of Dr Wayne MacIntosh.

• University of the People

This site is a serious effort to provide free university-level education to the developing world.

Read more »