I want to welcome Andy Lane and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. In his posting Andy will be referring to Open Learning and Open Educational Resources activities and projects at The UK Open University, while asking some critical questions about what it means to talk about Open Teaching, whether using OERs or not, and how might that teaching be organized so that it is supportive of informal and/or formal learning?
Professor Andy Lane has a BSc in Plant Sciences and a PhD in Pest Management from the University of London. He has been at The Open University since 1983 and held various offices in the former Technology Faculty (now Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology) including being Head of the Systems Department and Dean of the Technology Faculty. Promoted to Professor of Environmental Systems in 2005, he was appointed as Director of The Open University’s OpenLearn Initiative in 2006. He has authored or co-authored many teaching texts and research papers dealing with systems thinking and environmental management, the use of diagramming to aid systems thinking and study, and more recently the development and use of Open Educational Resources.
I have been actively following Andy’s work with Open Educational Resources through the OpenLearn project for a number of years. I also met him twice at Utah State University during the COSL OpenEd meetings and the most recent OCWC meeting. Each time we have meet I have learned something interesting and gained a better appreciation for the leadership that Andy has provided to the groundbreaking work that the OpenLearn initiative represents. Andy’s post is scheduled for November 26, 2008. Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.
It will be interesting to get another perspecive going. Always interesting to learn.
Its fascinating that prof’s have taken up this initiative of open courseware and open source software. While there are many forums with vertical specialization like MBA Forum which provide mba project disseration as a discussion board with faculties handholding business students ( future business guru’s) , research dissemination and e-learning through help of open source by profs with individual blogs is what we’d really love to look forward to in future.
Author - Andy Lane, "Systems for Supportive Open Teaching". Originally submitted November 26th, 2008 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
Here are some ideas that I have been mulling over lately. They also follow on well from the recent contributions from Martin Weller around exploring new ways of being open and Cole Camplese on embedding student expectations.
Education is a process that generally involves learners, teachers and sets of educational resources that can be mediating artifacts in the educational process, arranged in some structured way (see Lane, 2008a). It is a purposeful human activity where education is the main purpose. Learning can also occur in non-educational settings when it is better described as a purposive activity where it is useful to describe it as educational even though that may not be the primary purpose of that activity (lifelong learning or the University of Life?). In the latter case there are learners but no obvious teachers or educational resources as the learners draw upon many different people and things in their social or working environments.
I set out these thumbnail sketches of systems for describing educational experiences to pose the question what are the main properties of the components of such systems and the practices expected of people involved when we put open in front of them? What do we mean by open education, open learning, open teaching and open educational resources?
Open education has got a lot of attention lately with the series of Open Education conferences, the Cape Town Declaration on open education and recent books such as one I have contributed to called Opening Up Education. Wikipedia defines open education as a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared over the internet. That seems to rather dismiss pre-internet activity and I go along with what I say in my chapter in the aforementioned book (Lane, 2008b) that openness has many dimensions but is about removing barriers to education.
Open learning has been a phrase used for some time as well with a Journal of Open and Distance Learning and the Open University in the UK basing its work on a supported open learning model. Again a significant aspect of open learning is about removing barriers to learners engaging with educational experiences and I have talked about that elsewhere (Lane, 2008c).
Open educational resources are even more topical and talked about starting with the definition given at a UNESCO workshop (UNESCO 2002) through to the large funding program from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where they also see OERs as being one way to help transform teaching and learning. A central feature of OERs is an open license that allows and encourages sharing, reuse and remixing (and probably influences the current Wikipedia entry for open education).
What has been less obvious is discussion about open teaching and that is what I want to focus on for the rest of this piece.
So what might constitute open teaching? Is it about creating teaching experiences that eliminate barriers to students taking part in those experiences or is it about (re)using OERs that are available to all? While we could have interesting debates about such definitions as with all aspects of openness, I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching from an essentially individual activity to a shared activity. Stereotypically most teachers work alone in constructing and delivering their teaching experiences.
They may draw upon others similar work in this process and they may involve their students in co-creation or delivery of the experiences, but fundamentally they alone decide on a chosen path or lay out a new route map of resources and activities that constitute the educational experience. However, the arrival of OERs has meant that both teachers and students are able to view in greater depth the teaching and learning experiences of others to inform their own praxis. They are also able to ‘teach’ more easily (and effectively?) around someone else’s resources and maybe activities. But even more than that, it is becoming possible to rework other people’s material and to even co-create such material with colleagues around the world.
The co-creation of educational resources and courses is a major feature of open and distance learning where teams of academics (supported by media professionals) develop and deliver the teaching and learning experiences, including our associate Lecturers who do ‘teach’ around the main, carefully crafted, proscribed educational materials. At the Open University there may be as many as a dozen academics writing for and commenting on other’s work in the same course team to develop these carefully crafted educational materials and associated activities.
This is team teaching that can seriously challenge your thinking and has encompassed some of the most heated academic discussions I have ever witnessed! But it does produce high quality materials, albeit at high cost and in a clear institutional framework. So, can such synchronous or even asynchronous collaboration and co-operation occur between institutions and across borders and will (open) teaching become more of a collective than an individual activity in future?
Of course there are many barriers to open teaching or any changes in teaching practice as well discussed around Cole’s contribution and also discussed by Diane Harley in the Opening Up Education book I mentioned earlier, not least the lack of recognition of teaching compared to research in promotion and tenure. Nevertheless, just as much research has steadily moved from individual to team efforts and still been accounted for largely through peer review by their community of practice, open, collective teaching can be accounted for in similar ways.
The openly published nature of the resources means that such scholarship is as evident as any research publication and the more open nature of the reviews of the resources and associated experiences means there is potentially more feedback than for most research and more ways to assess impact and contribution. In other words the very openness of teaching makes it more accountable than much research, it is just that we have to work out the ways that citation (e.g. numbers of reuse, numbers of reworking. etc), peer and user reviews can be factored into the rewards and recognition that academics receive (and of course eliminating the shameless self citation I did at the beginning of this piece!).
Such recognition and reward for teaching is practiced in the Open University for the same reasons that teaching success can be measured by peer review of the scholarship in authored materials and user reviews of its effectiveness and impact with learners and others. I have argued in Opening Up Education that successful supported open learning depend on the four Ps of support: pedagogic support as built into materials, personal support of the learner, peer support from fellow learners and the professional support provided by ‘teachers’ and that the latter is most important most of the time. But those professional teachers also need to feel, and actually be, supported if they are to make open education a mass rather than a niche phenomenon. The culture change that is needed lies mostly with institutional policies and practices, not teachers or learners. Perhaps, as with OERs, this needs to happen first in the most prestigious institutions or be recognised by the most prestigious learned societies to demonstrate to everyone else that teaching matters as much as research.
Lane, A.B. (2008a) Who puts the Education into Open Educational Content? In Richard N. Katz, ed., The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education and Information Technology Revisited, Boulder: EDUCAUSE, 2008.
Lane A.B. (2008b) Chapter 10 Widening Participation in Education through Open Educational Resources. pp 149-163. In Eds Ilyoshi, T. and Vijay Kumar, M.S., Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. MIT Press. 2008. ISBN 0-262-03371-2. Available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262033712chap10.pdf.
Lane, A.B. (2008c) Am I good enough? The mediated use of open educational resources to empower learners in excluded communities. 5 pp, In Proceedings of 5th Pan Common Wealth Forum on Open and Distance Learning, London, 13-17 July 2008. Available at http://www.wikieducator.org/PCF5/Governance_and_social_justice.
UNESCO (2002) Forum on the Impact of Open CourseWare for Higher Education in Developing Countries, UNESCO, Paris, 1-3 July 2002: final report. Avaliable from http://unesco.unesco.org/images/0012/001285/12851e.pdf. Accessed 23 April 2007
[...] experienced this in CCK08: Systems for Supportive Open TeachingJ: “I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching [...]
2. beth.harris - November 28th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Interesting post! There is clearly incredible value to be found in co-creating educational resources — and moving away from the lone teacher developing their course. At Smarthistory.org — an art history resource I am developing with Dr. Steven Zucker (we recently won an award from Avicom — the multimedia wing of the International Council of Museums — the “gold award” in the web category), we believe that audio and video conversations can be a powerful teaching tool — and the feedback from our students supports this. Students listen to learning taking place — through social interaction — and by opening up our classrooms, we can only become better teachers. And the question is — as Andy points out — how can we best expand this across institutional and international boundaries.
One question for this blog though — and one I have asked before.
Out of 26 guest bloggers — only 5 are women!
Are we really to believe that there are not very many women thinking about open and online education?
Clearly — the values of open education — of open academic discourse — could only benefit from a diverse community of bloggers.
Hello,
First, I am sorry for not getting back more quickly. The Thanksgiving holiday had me traveling and then there was a stack of work when I returned to the Office. Andy, thank you for the great post. I am wondering if you could talk a bit about what you have learned form your experiences with OpenLearn relative to the co-creation, reuse, and sharing of educational materials.
@Beth, it is not always so easy to line up guests to post. I have tired to ensure that there is a diverse international and disciplinary perspective. Believe it or not, I have tried to be quite mindful about gender also, but I have perhaps not been so successful. That said, I am open to recommendations for guests who will help ensure more diversity in the series.
Cheers
Ken
“I am wondering if you could talk a bit about what you have learned form your experiences with OpenLearn relative to the co-creation, reuse, and sharing of educational materials.”
@Ken, there is a lot to say about this although we will be publishing a 80 page research report very shortly which will also cover much of this.
First, some figures. In 2 years we have had 3 million unique visitors to OpenLearn across both LearningSpace and LabSpace, with over 90% visting the LearningSpace. Generally, we push LearningSpace for learners and LabSpace for educators but some use both to some extent. Among other things a major difference is that you can take away or download (often the same) content from both but you can only upload revisions of our content or your own content to the LabSpace (it is also possible to do in situ editing of content in the LabSpace). There are 8 different formats/ forms of taking content away - printing out (as nice HTML formatted document), RSS, Unit content XML, IMS CP, IMS CC, OUXML, Plan zip and Moodle backup - and currently there are about 10,000 study units printed per week and an equal number of downloads in all the other formats. So the content is mobile but we only have a few anecdotes/ cases of what happens to all of it (there is some direct offline use, direct referrals in from online courses at other HEIs etc). We have also provided some folk with DVDs of all the content to load into their own LMS and where internet access may be msiining or poor - e.g. 15 prisons in England.
Second, it is worth perusing the LabSpace to look at the study units for in some instances there are edited versions of them attached as a string (all these versions are badged as public contributions. About 15% of the 500 odd study units have a version(s). In most cases the changes are minimal and people have just been trying out the technology. Also in the LabSpace are areas we call PlaySpace and Collaborations, the former any registered user can set up a unit and populate it with content and there are over 100 of these, the latter are areas we set up for projects/organisations where we can give some folk additional permissions, There are about 35 of these and some are full of content, one has won an award and two are in fact being used as the means to deliver a regular course at another HEI. In most of these areas the people are using it for professional devleopment, learning how to use the technologies and to experiment. In many ways our technology is more demanding than Connexions as a para-community site but there are more sophisticated features like the free videoconferencing and knowledge mapping which many find attractive.
Overall, it is taking time for everyone to get to grips with the ideas and praxis of co-creation and sharing as much as the technologies and we often have to mentor folk as they find their way (but we are capturing and will be writing up what works and what doesn’t work as soon as we can). But momentum is building and usage is growing every week and folk are using stuff in ways we had not imagined and I have not even talked about Laerning Clubs - I will leave folk to look for themselves to see what these are on OpenLearn,
Andy,
Thank you. First, I am looking forward to the report. In addition, I would like to follow-up a bit on your thoughts or plans that you have to elicit more activity or contributions through OpenLearn, particularly through co-development and reuse. That is, it seems that many of us see much more potential in OER and OCW than we are realizing. I know this is a bigger question than OpenLearn, but:
Do you agree that we have a lot more potential to realize, and if so
How do you think this might be achieved – what are some of the factors (are you planning anything relative to OpenLearn)?
Cheers & Thanks! Ken
“I know this is a bigger question than OpenLearn, but:
- Do you agree that we have a lot more potential to realize, and if so
- How do you think this might be achieved – what are some of the factors (are you planning anything relative to OpenLearn)?”
@Ken Yes there is a lot more potential to realize but it will be a long time a-coming. The reasons for delay are changing cultures, the potential stems from the very openness or OERs. Many promises have been made or expected from ICTs, e-learning etc but impacts have been less than expected. While some of that is down to hype I think a major factor has been the entrenched exclusivity of teaching practice - generally only the students see it and through the eyes of a learner, not a teacher. One of the most significant impacts at MIT appears to be the way faculty are now adjusting their courses and lectures in the light of seeing what fellow faculty are teaching (even if that is only the content) . So not only might they be making a little extra effort to make their own content look ‘good’ they are adjusting it to the hoped for benefit of the students. None of this involves direct cooperation or collaboration but it does lead to enhanced coordination through the openness of the content. Then there are the similar inter-institutional effects and the increased scope to draw upon or point to resources from elsewhere. But detailed reworking or mash-ups are still the preserve of the dedicated few at the moment because it is best done as a team and does need that more overt recognition from promotions etc to make people devote the time and energy to it. However, the very openness of the content to all, not just other teachers means that teachers will not be able to ignore it in the way they could pre-defined collection or repositories because their students or others did not know what was available elsewhere.
In effect this is an emerging gift economy played out on the internet and is of a nature not previously seen, slowly changing the relationships between teachers and learners and others in numerous ways in all countries, not just the rich ones.
What are the OU doing about it? We are experimenting and innovating in as many spaces as we can. OpenLearn is content led, SocialLearn which Martin Weller talked about is technology led. Both are trying to understand what people want to do about learning throughout their lives and in different contexts. We aim to do things at scale but still be personal - mass customisation - whether on our own or in partnership with others.
Andy,
Thank you. I suppose that it seems natural that “simpler” activities such as posting and improving ones own content would happen before more complex activities such as revision, reuse, and sharing of others work. It would seem to me that aside from reducing barriers to editing, reuse, and sharing on the part of OER projects, it would be important for universities to incentivize these activities for their faculty. Do you know of a list of practices that address incentives that can be used within an organization?
I am going to change direction a bit, just to get your (or anybody else’s) thoughts. I am currently attending an interesting meeting titled “Rethinking the university after Bologna: New concepts and practices beyond tradition and the market”, and a majority of the meeting sessions have either directly addressed or have referred to some aspect of Open Access (OA). In many cases it has been in reference to OA journals and research. Over lunch though, a colleague from a French NGO pointed out that for most American and British faculty all scientific journals seem open because their universities subscribe heavily to journal database services. This individual’s conclusion is that because there appears to be no access issue (to Journals in most US and UK universities), it is not considered an issue that ought to be addressed. That is, when the problem is out of sight, it is also out of mind.
My question is if you find that American and British OER related projects are working closely enough with OA journal and research efforts? If not, do you think it matters from an impact point of view, particularly for learners interested in self-study outside of a formal university setting or at universities that do not subscribe to journal databases? I would guess that these two groups represent a relatively large part of the population that we would like to benefit from OER efforts.
Thank You, Ken
[...] “Systems for Supportive Open Teaching,” the 26th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on November 26, 2008, by Andy Lane. Andy has been at The Open University since 1983 and, in addition to serving as a Professor of Environmental Systems, has held various offices in the former Technology Faculty (now Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology) including being Head of the Systems Department and Dean of the Technology Faculty. [...]
Interesting post! There is clearly incredible value to be found in co-creating educational resources — and moving away from the lone teacher developing their course. healing remedies At Smarthistory.org — an art history resource I am developing with Dr. Steven Zucker (we recently won an award from Avicom — the multimedia wing of the International Council of Museums — the “gold award” in the web category), we believe that audio and video conversations can be a powerful teaching tool — and the feedback from our students supports this. Students listen to learning taking place — through social interaction — and by opening up our classrooms, we can only become better teachers. And the question is — as Andy points out — how can we best expand this across institutional and international boundaries.
“Systems for Supportive Open Teaching,” the 26th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on November 26, 2008, by Andy Lane. Andy has been at The Open University since 1983 and, in addition to serving as a Professor of Environmental Systems, has held various offices in the former Technology Faculty (now Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology) including being Head of the Systems Department and Dean of the Technology Faculty