Purity * Truth * Beauty
Here are the slides I presented to at the #ukoerday on the 20th April. These highlight some key points from the funding circular for the second round of UKOER funding.
On Thursday 15th April, the UKOER programme ran an online workshop around issues of sustainability, which included presentations from Simon Thompson at the Unicycle Project at Leeds Metropolitan University, Joss Winn from Chemistry FM at Lincoln University, Nick Greeves from Chemtube3d at Liverpool University and Adam Mannis from the CORE Materials project based within the Higher Education Academy Materials subject centre and network. We are happy to be able to release an audio recording of this workshop for others to benefit from.
First up, the three breakout sessions were presented in the main hall. Notes in detail for the research session are in part 6 of my notes, but I just wanted to note that the UKOU team used Compendium (http://compendium.open.ac.uk/software.html) very well to capture the discussion.
* How can OER change teaching and learning practices to support Deeper Learning?We proceeded with audience interaction regarding what metrics can be use to measure the learning effectiveness of OER. The following is a list of key points, Patrick will have a more complete and organised list on Cloudworks (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/3320)
It was clear that it is only a proxy that we can measure, and there were doubts over causality. Also do we need to prove that we are “as good as” or “better”. Could we use the same material as open and closed as a trial – do we have the appropriate level of control as proper trial? Should we be measuring secondary and quantitative effects and tracking these back to learning outcomes? We need metrics that isolate the effect of OER from eLearning and everything else. Are “stories” enough to convince people of the benefits of OER? Do we need quantitative data for advocacy? Great anecdotal evidence exists – can we measure eg. how enquiring students are becoming? can we baseline this? It may might be easier to look at strategies by which students are learning, by which teachers are using materials and tools. Are materials generating more interaction, new communites of practice? Do learning materials have an impact on learning? Does the “open” make a difference? Can we draw on existing research? Qualitative data – case studies, what is working, what is not? Is learning happening for free? Are there measurable efficiencies? (yes) What materials to students graduate towards? Teacher’s behaviour – differences in behaviour, frequency of OER use? (but is this a focus on use not the outcome of use?) Easier question when using OER “platforms” as we have detailed student traces here (eg OLI). We ended with a plea for OER stories on the Cloud.
Managed through waiting in line behind the world’s most loquacious and angry guest to get delayed checking my bags, so I missed out on the first bit of Vic Vuchic and Barbara Chow’s introduction.
Barbara gave the Hewlett objective as being to support an education system to help high-poverty communities to earn a living wage or more. The Hewlett Foundation’s strategic priorities are: remedying gaps in California Education Policy, Open Educational Resources, and Deeper Learning for C21 work + citizenship Hewlett sees the development of a decentralised OER Ecosystem, encompassing:Another scrappy set of notes for me I’m afraid as I was on the panel at the time. This was an interesting and inspiring overview of global practice, with an emphasis on different structures, models and aims. It was much more practically based than the morning’s more advocacy centred panel. There were a very good range of engaging speakers and despite being an early afternoon/after lunch session a lot of audience interaction.
Panel: International OER Policy: Sharing Goals and Objectives AcrossThis discussion was facilitated by the marvellous Steve Carson at OCWC. I was writing and eating (and occasionally speaking) all the same time so what follows is a collection of random points of interest, attributed where possible.
We were asked to go around the table (well, two tables as this session was so popular) and talk about our sustainability plans. It was generally agreed that government and foundations grants are not themselves a model of sustainability. John Hopkins U are top-slicing other external grants to pay for OER release (I know that MIT are also doing this, alongside a donation model). Wikimedia have a pure donation model. There was a lot of interest in what model of sustainable practice Flat World (a commercial publisher using a Non-Commercial Share-Alike license, http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/about) have. But no-one round the table seemed to know. Another commercial company (didn’t catch the name, sorry) talked about their interest in providing services around OER content (eg discovery). The CC foundation is supported by donations and charitable foundations, but admit that they “need a commercial model” – one element of which could be a publish-on-demand service. They also talked about fund-raising initiatives like “five by five”, and noted that google are co-operating with CC on an OER search. Blossom at MIT admitted that they don’t have a sustainability model, but partners in Jordan have established a public/private partnership model. The OER foundation, dedicated to building a sustainable OER ecosystem, have a number of funding streams including government contracts, donations and commercial partners (which is possible due to their insistence on not using an NC clause). In Holland a combination of EC and Government funding is used, with the expectation of high quality services around the materials being a future source of funding. It was noted that Secretary of the Association of Academic Publishers in Holland is a strong OER advocate (linked to the dutch use of CC-BY) OCWC are interested in both commercial and non-commercial models, depending on material licensing terms. And I talked at little bit about the UKOER model of building release into institutional processes, low initial funding levels and matched funding, and the idea of a distributed rather than centralised model. There was a lot of discussion about the place of commercial publishers within an OER ecosystem, some felt that publishers using CC-BY material could feed funds back into the ecosystem, others questions what obligation publishers would have to do this. Again, apologies that these notes are rather scrappy, I was eating (and talking) at the time! (this text licensed under CC-BY 2.5 (UK) – these are my personal notes from the sessions, and any errors or omissions are my fault)The mid-morning session was a panel on Domestic OER Related Policies: Opportunities and Challenges Across Levels (Moderator: Phoenix Wang, Co-Founder, Startl). This session was very focused on the lobbying at state and federal level of OER, and a clear theme was the need for a consistency in the way OER was described and the advantages put forward. There was always a general belief that tax-payer funded materials should *always* be licensed unobstructively and that funding was a lever to change the dynamics of the content ecosystem. Most of the speakers identified themselves as “advocates” of OER, so most discussion centred around ways of promoting and explaining OER to “non-believers”
* Hal Plotkin, Senior Policy Advisor, U.S. Dept of EducationWe opened with an introduction to the conference and to Yale by Diana Kleiner of OpenYale – Diana’s background is in architecture so we got an excellent overview of Yale’s campus and buildings. We also saw an introduction to the conference cloudworks (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2053) from Patrick McAndrew of the UK Open University. It was announced that next year’s conference will be in Half Moon Bay, about 50m north of San Francisco.
Barbara Chow opened the conference by providing a presentation outlining the central themes and sessions of the conference, emphasising the global and mixed-sector nature of the conference. She noted that the update from the Hewlett Foundation on future work will be first thing tomorrow, and that the themes of today would be around public policy in OER. Vic Vuchic (who has an OER programme management role in Hewlett) offered an overview of OER in 2009 and predictions about 2010. 2009 was a record year for the availability of OER funding, with investment from the Gates Foundation, Lumina, MacArthur, Connexions etc – a lot of activity at the federal and state level in the US, international government initiatives in Turkey, Holland and the UK. He also highlighted the increasing use of OER as monitored by HF grantees, including a 113% increase in searches for “oer”. 2010 sees continued development of open textbook (eg California are currently in phase 2 of a programme, the development of core textbooks for community colleges). There will also be a growth in distribution channels (iTunes U, YouTube Edu), but it is noted that we need to ensure that these offer the benefits of true openness. On a Rogers innovation curve, the OER movement is about to cross the chasm into the mainstream. He concluded with the suggestion that we needed to think about consistency (of quality, approach) as a model for OER advocacy. Hal Plotkin (http://www.halplotkin.com), a senior policy advisor in the US Education Department, gave the opening keynote. I caught up with him yesterday regarding what happened with the $100m 10-year OER programme announced in the early days of the Obama administration. It turns out that due to budgetary pressures, this didn’t actually start last year, but there is still great support from the president and within the Education Department (a number of policy appointees were drawn from the OER community, all of whom had been at one point Hewlett OER grant holders). We shared over dinner yesterday the perils of being in public policy and waiting for permission to make announcements! In his keynote he outlined his belief that we are at a “tipping point” into openness in education from a model of exclusion to a model of wide access, and that the OER movement (in particular the early work of Cathy Casserly and Mike Smith) will constitute the first two chapters of the book that will one day written about this. He started the presentation drawing on his early life as a high school “push-out” (he protested about the term “drop-out”) and his early career in journalism and at Foothills Community College. His early interest in “public domain learning materials” sparked his work (initially in Foothills) in what became the OER movement. The recently passed SAFRA bill on student support which introduced direct lending via institutions to students (http://edlabor.house.gov/blog/2009/07/student-aid-and-fiscal-respons.shtml) was a part of the infamous US healthcare bill and subject to a great deal of commercial lobbying. However, during this process the previously announced OER funds (which were to be taken from the savings achieved via direct lending) were lost as institutions moved to direct lending voluntarily thus dropping the anticipated savings that were to be used in this way. The savings remaining were used to increase the Pell grants to students. $2bn of unallocated funds were identified in the Recovery Act and Trade Adjustment Act: $500m dollars a year for programmes supporting “dislocated workers” (defined as workers who lost their jobs due to international pressure). The Department are still finalising plans for the use of these funds, but Hal noted that materials developed under the Act would also meet the needs of a wider pool of open learners. Because of strong support for OER in the White House other funding will also be identified for OER related work. The US government see the way out of current financial difficulties as to invest in the skills and capacities of citizens, enabling the recreation of shared prosperity. And see OER as an important part of this. The Hewlett Foundation are formal advisers on the creation of the federal OER programme. He asked delegates to share ideas around this with Vic Vuchic – who along with Barbara Chow will be working closely with Hal and his team. He concluded that “we are the people we have been waiting for, and our work has just begun”. (this text licensed under CC-BY 2.5 (UK) – these are my personal notes from the sessions, and any errors or omissions are my fault)