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Contents 1 Beyond content... 2 ...and beyond the classroom 2.1 The need for 21st century skills 2.2 Student innovation at the forefront 3 Example projects 3.1 Open courses from traditional higher education providers 3.2 Innovative open models from non-traditional providers 3.3 Open learning in FLOSS communities 4 Where next? 4.1 The need for research 4.2 Making a commitment - The Cape Town Open Education Declaration 5 Notes 6 References 7 Further reading

[edit] Beyond content...

While the OER movement has produced a significant amount of content, including secondary materials such as lesson plans, teaching aids and software tools, the term "open education" is starting to be used to describe more fundamental changes in the education sector.

There is a growing sense that the OER movement is part of a broad shift that will change the way we teach and learn (see, for example, Downes, 2005; Keats and Schmidt, 2007; Schmidt and Surman, 2007). It will affect many aspects of the education environment, including how we think of assessment and accreditation, and challenge the fairly rigid structures in which courses and degrees are offered today.

What such an open education environment could look like is uncertain, but we can try to describe it by considering a few of the core areas and concepts of education that are affected:

• Quality: Quality is a primary concern for most people working in education, or publishing educational content. Open models, which broaden participation to individuals other than recognised experts, are developing new mechanisms to assure quality. Initial models seem to be working in software production and for large content projects like Wikipedia.
• Sustainability: Sustainability models for OER projects are still in flux. Initial pilots relied on donor funding, but recently governments and private investors have started to support OER-related work. In addition, there is some hope that - in commons with open source software development - volunteer communities will become sustainable producers of OER. However, few of today's well-known OER projects have the vibrant volunteer communities of contributors and users needed to make them sustainable.
• Assessment and accreditation: In an education environment that breaks down barriers between professors and students, new ways of assessing (and accrediting) students are required. Peer assessment, reputation-based credit and standardised tests open to anyone are just some of the solutions that are being tried out.
• Global perspective: OER enables the southern hemisphere to take a more active and confident role. Barriers to access are lower, enabling the participation of smaller and more specialised institutuions. To create such a shift in global perspective, change is needed both in developed countries (funding imbalances in favor of developed country institutions should be redressed), and in developing countries, where lack of capacity, infrastructure and technical tools and enabling policy can hold back OER production and use.
• Re-use: The ability to adapt OER to local needs is one of the key benefits of open licensing. However, while exact numbers are hard to come by, first reports indicate that there has been very low re-use (not including translation) of resources (Duncan, 2009; CELSTEC, 2009; Wiley, 2009). The low level might be related to imperfect methods for measuring "re-use" but it challenges assumptions about the value of OER and warrants further investigation.

[edit] ...and beyond the classroom

If we consider OER as content only, pertinent questions are raised, such as "What is the difference between OER and traditional textbooks?" and "What is the difference between assessing students' blogs and assessing their hand-written papers?" These are valid questions that assume that technology and OER instigate changes in the traditional student-lecturer relationship. But we also need to take a step back from existing notions of institutional, discipline-based, top-down learning, to consider how online communities (often outside the education system) benefit from bottom-up, just-in-time, lifelong learner-driven practices - and how OER can be of benefit to these communities.

The following developments also feed into this broader community-based open education environment.

[edit] The need for 21st century skills

The use of well-established, traditional instructional practices may not be effective for developing the new skills that are required. More and more of our work, social communication and collaboration takes place in digital environments, which demand new and different skills: 21st century skills (Autor et al., 2003). In a society in which the ability to access and use dynamic knowledge becomes more important than building up a large stock of static knowledge, core competencies such as self-direction, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork and effective communication become vital (OLCOS, 2007).

"[T]he key issue with respect to OER is whether or not they are useful and effectively used in equipping students with the competences and skills for personal and professional achievement in the current and emerging knowledge-based societies and economies." (OLCOS, 2007)

Creating, adapting, evaluating and sharing OER within communities of learners require practices that embody these new competencies.

[edit] Student innovation at the forefront

Information and communication technologies have enabled students to develop new ways of collaborating that surpass traditional education practices in terms of innovation. Students already use technology to create social networks, share information and collaborate in ways that are more sophisticated than many traditional e-learning approaches. Institutions trying to innovate find themselves outpaced by their students, who invariably respond with little interest to "innovative" practices that are old-fashioned by their standards.

[edit] Example projects

A growing number of individuals, groups and institutions are experimenting with a variety of models for open education. The following examples give an idea of how the use of OER could change teaching and learning practices both in and out of the classroom.

[edit] Open courses from traditional higher education providers

David Wiley's course, Introduction to Open Education, was taught entirely online using a central course wiki and a network of personal blogs. Participants were either registered students who were taking the course for credit, or individual learners, who were interested in the subject and the community. The "class" looked very different from a traditionally taught group of students. Participants came from all over the world, from diverse backgrounds, and ranged in age from their early 20s to their late 50s. David Wiley provided a weekly set of open content readings and questions. Students posted responses on their personal blogs, using a common "tag" to differentiate course-related posts from other content. RSS-feed reader software was used to gather all relevant posts, rather than having to visit dozens of web sites to follow the class discussion. Discussions took place within blogs (by posting all comments on one blog) or between blogs (by posting a response on one's own blog, that would automatically alert the original blog). The sheer amount of posts created and the fascinating, insightful conversations that became part of the course are great examples of how open content, in the hands of a community, created a distinctly innovative educational experience. All content from this course still exists and is available online (Stephenson, 2005).

[edit] Innovative open models from non-traditional providers

• The Peoples-uni is a pioneering project that offers OER-based education with some form of accreditation. It began in 2007, offering public health courses that make extensive use of OER and are developed and delivered by teams of volunteers. The UK Royal Society for Public Health has accredited the Peoples-uni programme, which is an important first step towards further recognition of open learning.
• The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) uses OER for short, university-level courses. It helps self-learners navigate the wealth of OER available and facilitates open study groups. Finally, P2PU is developing open source models for recognition of learning and building pathways to formal credit.
• Wikiversity is a sister project of Wikipedia. In addition to its repository function, Wikiversity is home to open learning groups.
• WikiEducator is a community of educators and open education proponents. It champions the use of wikis in teaching and learning.

[edit] Open learning in FLOSS communities

In recent years Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities^[1] have become an interesting field of study for education researchers. Their community production and support models and innovative approaches to knowledge creation hold some useful lessons for open education. FLOSS communities have developed many practices that could be applied to learning in fields other than software:

• Sophisticated support systems enable recruitment and education of new community members.
• All learning is open and recorded. The creative process - all steps, discussions and decisions - is captured and stored in mailing list archives, wiki pages and other electronic records. This makes it easier for newcomers to join the community and get up to speed.
• The distinction between teachers as creators and students as consumers is blurred in communities of practice, where everyone creates and consumes at the same time.
• There is continuous and ongoing engagement with the subject matter, beyond the duration of a course or educational programme.

NetGeners.Net, a space for free and open community-based education, applies some of these lessons. The NetGeners.Net course is designed as an open and participatory learning experience. It includes practical "hands-on" sessions, after which learning activities and works created by the students become part of the course.

[edit] Where next?

[edit] The need for research

A research community is starting emerge that connects OER to existing literature on participatory and constructivist learning theory (among other pedagogies) and e-learning practices. Until now, evidence to support the positive impact of open teaching and learning has been mostly anecdotal and shared within a community of insiders. This is starting to change, however, as institutions begin to set up dedicated research projects to assess the value of OER^[2] and academic journals publish OER-focused research papers. For example, early in 2009, Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning published a special issue on Open Educational Resources (Volume 24, Issue 1). The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning is also preparing a special open education issue.^[3]

[edit] Making a commitment - The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

In January 2008 the Cape Town Open Education Declaration was released to describe the principles and strategies of those working on open education. Individuals and organisations can sign the declaration. The fact that more than 1,500 have done so in the first eighteen months is indicative of the size that this community has reached. The declaration makes concrete suggestions for change in the areas of materials (OER), communities (teachers and learners) and policy.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

Autor, D. H., Levy, F. and Murnane, R. J. 2003. The skill content of recent technological change: an empirical exploration. Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 118, No. 4, pp. 1279-1333.

CELSTEC. 2009. Wiley calls it "dirty secret" of OER. CELSTEC Staff Blog, 22 June 2009. http://celstec.org/content/wiley-calls-it-%E2%80%9Cdirty-secret%E2%80%9D-oer

Downes, S. 2005. E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine, 17 October 2005. http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1

Duncan, S. M. 2009. Patterns of learning object reuse in the Connexions repository. Ph.D. thesis, Utah State University, USA. http://www.archive.org/details/PatternsOfLearningObjectReuseInTheConnexionsRepository

Keats, D. W. and Schmidt, J. P. 2007. The genesis and emergence of education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa. First Monday, Vol. 12, No. 3. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/keats/index.html

OLCOS. 2007. Open Educational Practices and Resources. OLCOS Roadmap 2012. Salzburg, OLCOS. http://www.olcos.org/english/roadmap/

Schmidt, J. P. and Surman, M. 2007. Open Sourcing Education: Learning and Wisdom from iSummit 2007. http://icommons.org/resources/open-sourcing-education-learning-and-wisdom-from-isummit-2007

Stephenson, R. 2005. How to make open education succeed. Paper presented at OpenEd 2005, Logan, Utah, USA, 28-30 September 2005.

[edit] Further reading

• Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (Geser, G. (ed.), 2007, Salzburg, Salzburg Research/EduMedia Group) elaborates the pedagogical and institutional background within which OER can transform teaching and learning. See especially Chapter 4, Competences for the knowledge society (pp. 37-49).
• Parts of the comparison with FLOSS communities are taken from Report on the Effectiveness of a FLOSS-like Learning Community in Formal Educational Settings (Weller, M. and Meizsner, A., 2008, FLOSSCom).
• The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) and Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning are both good resources for emerging research in the field. Open Learning had a special open access issue on OER: Vol. 24, No. 1, February 2009.