Here are the questions for Week 4 of the Open Ed course:
QUESTIONS: What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report? Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did? Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?
The first reading, Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provided a good basic introduction to the field of OER. The objective of this report was to explore the issues of sustainability, IP, incentives and barriers, and areas for improvement in OER. This report did a relatively comprehensive job of concisely summarizing the relevant information. (It didn’t provide a lot of new information for me personally though, since I’ve done a fair amount of reading in this area prior to this course.)
Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012, the second reading, was put out by OLCOS, a consortium funded by the European Union’s eLearning Programme. The stated objective of this report is to provide an overview of “current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed.” In reading this report, I found myself several times looking back at the title and table of contents to try to remind myself what the focus or unifying theme was. The report seemed to digress into many topics that were tangential to OER, and I found the lack of continuity to detract from the overall usefulness.
This group has a very strong orientation toward a specific pedagogical approach, constructivism, and much of the report had more to do with that than with OER. The linkage in their minds is that “If the prevailing practice of teacher-centred knowledge transfer remains intact, then OER will have little effect on making a difference in teaching and learning.” They then go on to say that “OLCOS’ approach is different in that it does not primarily emphasise open educational resources but open educational practices.”
While many seem to tie this pedagogy to OER (among them the OLPC project), I don’t see the connection as being necessarily essential. In many cases, I think that tying extremely progressive pedadogy to educational technology/ICT has hindered technology’s widespread adoption in schools worldwide and thereby constrained its potential benefits. I’m very supportive of constructivism, but I don’t think ed tech should be tied to it as a condition for success. (I have a very personal perspective on this having spent several years of my life developing a very progressive technology-integrated curriculum, which was in the end not adopted widely as a result of the pedagogical approach. Ed tech blogs, like those heralded in the OLCOS report, echo this story bemoaning the state of education in which these wonderful progressive approaches are not adopted by the majority. Perhaps there is more to be gained in the long run by starting at a point closer to most people’s comfort zones.)
While Web 2.0 technologies (which were covered superficially by this report — The Hewlett report, I thought, did a much better job of talking about Web 2.0 participatory learning and its relation to OER without immersing itself in controversial educational philosophy issues.) do enhance an inquiry-based constructivist approach, they are also extremely useful tools for other approaches to learning. The same is perhaps even more true for OER, which has as much to offer for traditional instruction as it does for inquiry-based learning. Free high-quality content enriched by interactivity can make a real difference in revolutionizing all types of learning. In my mind, tools not content are the center piece of the constructivist learning environment. There are a plethora of great free tools; however, in the content realm, there is a paucity.
[Sidenote: I wonder if the debate of content vs. knowledge is in part related to this. “Content” is often viewed as an anti-constructivist notion. In actuality, it certainly needn’t be. The world would be better served if people just built useful “stuff” (whatever you want to call it) and then let the learning communities decide how they want to use it.]
At any rate, this report seemed to be more concerned with the authors’ preferred pedagogy than about OER, and for that reason, I think it was not as strong of a piece for the purposes of this course.
Finally, the third reading A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities is a report commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation to serve as an overview of the OER movement. As such, it is focused on and colored by looking primarily at Hewlett projects and interests. Despite this, however, this report addressed many important issues in OER, including sustainability, object definition and format issues, IP issues, and others in a straightforward and understandable manner. Because of this content and the clear writing, this report spoke most clearly to me. (This report had many interesting points that merit further thought and discussion, and I cannot begin to cover them here in this already-too-long post. I will save some of them for future writing.)
One strength of the Hewlett report was its attention to the international opportunity for OER, which was not emphasized in the other reports. While much of the OER activity to date has been in the developed world, clearly the opportunity to make the most substantive difference in achieving goals such as expanding universal education is in the developing world. The Hewlett report was the only one of these readings that bridged the gap between our first week discussions of education as a human right and current OER initiatives like OCW. The report concluded that not enough is being done in the developing world, but at least it acknowledged it as a priority.
One thing that all three of these reports had in common was a focus on higher ed. In fact, this is not just true of these reports, but of the OER movement as a whole. Most of the activity is at the post-secondary level. (I’ll come back to this when I talk about my own interests in answer to the final question this week.)
One contrast I found interesting across these three readings was how they licensed their own reports and how “open” their approach and methods seemed to be. The OECD report was issued under a traditional copyright. Their process did not seem to be very open either, as their methodology included “meetings, small in size and by invitation only.” I felt better about the OLCOS roadmap, which was licensed under a Creative Commons license. The third report was also licensed under Creative Commons, probably in part because it was developed with Hewlett funding. I think that reports like these should be licensed under open licenses and that funding agencies (including governmental groups) should require that.
I’m going to answer the last part of the question for this week in a separate post.