Brainstorm in Progress: Open Educational Resource

Showing posts with label Open Educational Resource. Show all posts

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Opening Up Assessment: Open tools and item banks

"One of the defining characteristics of Open Education has been the widespread sharing of course materials from OpenCourseWare to Open Textbooks to more generally open educational resources (OERs). Unfortunately many OERs are primarily content or course materials and do not include sufficient quizzes or other activities that students can use to check for understanding and that instructors can use to track engagement and performance. Research shows that embedding assessments in texts increases student completion rates and learning. Open Assessment complements existing OER efforts with tools to allow instructors to embed assessments in any OER, and to create shared collections of assessment items.

MIT and Open Tapestry are developing tools and services to allow instructors and authors to embed assessments directly in any content (e.g., in any OpenCourseWare course) thereby providing a richer learning experience. And BYU will be developing validated item banks of open assessments that can be shared (which will be developed by domain experts and psychometricians). Our approach differs from current practice because existing tools require one of two things: either a system that presents both content and assessments together as part of a dedicated system or the the learner is required to leave the content to take an assessment in a separate quiz system breaking the flow of learning. To be able to embed an assessment of your choosing in any existing OER wherever it might be presented will be truly powerful.

This panel presentation will provide conference participants the opportunity to understand how to use the tools, existing and forthcoming open assessment item banks, and how to use open assessment in their OER content regardless of where it's located right away."

http://openassessments.com

Content and assessment are always separate. Typically, you look at content and then go out and take an assessment. This might not be the best way to learn.

These assessments can be embedded anywhere. Focusing on formative assessment. Self-check of their own understanding and eliminates issues around cheating. - there are self-assessments in the materials - a "hide the answer" approach.

Examples are in Saylor.org of static tests. OCW Scholar focuses on self-learners has .pdf questions.

OpenAssessments.com has each item with an embed code much like the embed code that you will find in YouTube.

It will import test questions using QTI format.

Integrated with Open Tapestry. http://opentapestry.com

Open Tapestry lets you edit versions of websites.

David Wiley talked about the creation of item banks. Faculty are sometimes loathe to adopt open textbooks because the commercial textbooks often come with testbanks. A Hewlett grant has funded the creation of openly licensed textbooks.

Assessment and Accreditation of Learners using OER

Photo of Athabasca University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rory McGreal of Athabasca University presents on assessment of OER and OER University.

"This paper examines existing and potential scalable approaches to formal assessment and accreditation to digital learning, comparing and contrasting such uses with more traditional approaches. Unbundling of services, so that assessment & accreditation are separate from teaching and support, makes OER much easier to implement and build upon. There is little requirement for physical space, so it can grow in a similar fashion as that of many Internet platforms. This of course makes OER much more scalable than physical institutions can compete with. While international or even national accreditation & assessment services are not currently widespread or easily accessible, developing a robust system that can service thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students could change the dynamic of access to post-secondary education. All of the technology is already available, such as payment systems, content management systems, and exam taking.

Lessons learned so far from key initiatives in this area are discussed, proposing tentative guidance for policy makers and various stakeholder groups in this area.
Currently, the greatest potential and demand for OER:

is in non-OECD countries;
at non-traditional institutions;
at institutions with PLAR models in place.

Breaking down institutional silos is still a major issue before a large-scale OER/PLAR/RPL system is in place. In terms of cost-effective and sustainable approaches to student support, peer-to-peer learning support models were considered to be the most effective, followed by support from retired academics or other volunteers, and the design of system to enable senior students or graduates to provide support for junior students.

As for the types of assessment methods that would most likely be used in the future recognition of prior learning via portfolio assessment and course-based portfolios were both considered appropriate, as well as automated online assessments.

The greatest barriers to participation in open assessment and accreditation practices identified were the lack of availability of committed staff members to support such activities, and the potential costs of redeveloping courses as open educational resources. Lack of support for OER-based courses from senior management was a significantly greater concern for participants from traditional education institutions than for those from institutions with open policies, and was perceived to be a more significant barrier within public than private institutions. These findings suggest that institutions that already have policies that support open assessment and accreditation practices will be able to easily align the implementation of collaborative OER courses with existing policies and processes.

The key institutional success factors for the provision of open assessment and accreditation services appear to be a strong support base within institutions ? both in terms of leadership and resources, and an existing culture of openness, including policies and practices around the creation and use of OERs, as well as policies that enable either open access or recognition of prior learning via credit transfer or PLAR. Institutions that are already characterized by these features are likely to be best placed for the implementation of assessment and accreditation of OER-based learning, and could provide models for other organizations"

Creating an OER University with 30 partnering colleges.

Coursera owns what is in your head - you cannot use what you learned in Coursera to get accreditation elsewhere. Up until Coursera, we always owned what was in our heads.

OERU will give recognition for prior learning and challenge for credit.

They also do credit transfer. North America uses the three credit system. They use the bologna Process in Europe. It is problematic in most jurisdictions. Standards are lacking and the process is labor intensive.

Barriers
Fear of change - the only ones not afraid of change are wet babies
Fear of losing students and therefore teaching jobs
Copyright issues
Concerns over work load
Conflicts with commercial publishers and SIGs
Lack of committed faculty

The Paris Declaration on OERs has helped in Canada. The US has been leading in open research.

There is too much duplication in the OER movement. Stop talking about developing courses, start talking about reusing and adapting.

Educators are afraid of the cost but the cost to continue as we are is more expensive.

OER Benefits
A culture of openness

We need to find ways to accredit OER learners and not leave it to the status quo.

Athabasca University had to create a "bear and cougar awareness" class because they needed it.

Global Open Textbook Projects: Pathways to Adoption

Open Textbook bill (Photo credit: opensourceway)

"Mary Burgess of the BC Open Textbook Project will discuss how she and her team are working to produce 40 Open Textbooks on a restricted budget and tight timeline. She will describe their work engaging faculty and student groups across the British Columbia Post Secondary System, efforts to make adoption and reuse easier for those groups, and how adoptions are being tracked.

They have seven speakers and three minutes each!
Producing 40 open textbooks in BC - they have done a lot of work on adoptions
4 workshops - on basic Open textoboks
Month long workshops - visited faculty - 15 meetings in departments and met with student groups and college administrators. Working with Libraries as well.
They created an advisory committee.
They have worked wiht communications to do pressreleases

Cable Green of Creative Commons will discuss how open policies, like those in British Columbia and California, are ensuring publicly funded resources are openly licensed. He will describe the global opportunity for governments and projects to collaborate to maximize the quality and quantity of OER.

David Harris, Editor in Chief, for OpenStax College will introduce the lessons learned from OpenStax College. OpenStax College has a rapidly growing adoption base of more than 175 institutions. David will discuss the strategies required for taking OER into the mainstream and the emerging interest in localized OER content.

Creating an ecosystem model - partnering with other groups to provide supplementary content.
Built an extensive database of faculty for communication and adoption
They go to tradeshows, conferences, etc.
Using social networks - faulty testimonials
Earned media - public relations through papers and magazines
Fear motivates but hope sells

Megan Beckett, Content Coordinator for Open Textbooks at Siyavula Education, will discuss their unique position as the South African government has printed the Siyavula textbooks for the whole country, thus jump starting the adoption of open textbooks in the K-12 sector. Megan will also discuss some ideas about engaging the community in the development of open textbooks which in turn feeds back into their adoption and widespread use.

Content creation in South Africa
The textbooks are collaboratively authored and backed by the government. 10 copies of their resources in SA. For some, this will be the first textbooks they will have ever seen. All the textbooks are mobile friendly and available online.Also available in print.
David Ernst, Chief Information Officer, College of Education and Human Development, and Executive Director of the Open Academics project at the University of Minnesota, will discuss common barriers to open textbook adoption by faculty and how the Open Academics project is working to help overcome those barriers.

Faculty often do not understand th cost of textbooks, the nature of the problem. They created engagement strategies - I need to contact him about these efforts. Created a repository.

Ethan Senack of the Student Public Interest Research Groups will discuss how students and other members of the campus community can drive OER adoption and advocacy through grassroots efforts.

Training student activists on campuses with the open textbook tool kit
Hold events to attract attention to the issue
Bring student testimonials to administrators

Connie Broughton of the Washington Open Course Library will discuss the project recently completed in which 81 open courses were created, including many open textbooks. She will detail their efforts to increase and track adoption during the creation of the resources and following the completion of that phase of the project."

Money from Gates and Legislature - hired faculty, instructional designers, and librarians. The outcomes were to produce course materials for $30 or less. They spent $1.5 mil and saved $5.5 mil.
They started a two week online course for finding open resources. Running surveys on faculty barriers to adoption. All CC by.

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Open Ed 13: Emancipating Learning: a Journey to MOOCs and Beyond

"Some may think that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a fad, but they are raising some interesting questions about the scalability, accessibility and quality of online learning, as well as new thoughts about the higher education landscape. While a number of institutions have started to offer MOOCs, many are still wondering if and how to participate, as well as how these learning experiences relate to other online teaching and learning plans.

Are your institutional leaders tasking you what finding out more and determining what they should do about MOOCs? Are you wondering if and how you should get started? Are you curious about what it is like to develop and facilitate a MOOC and if it's worth the effort? Whether you?ve run a MOOC or are considering running one, this participants on the panel will provide the perspective and journey of three institutions which have run one more MOOCs: Cuyahoga Community College; State University of New York; and University of Illinois Springfield; on their MOOC journey. They will share insights, best practices, pitfalls and research results.

- Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) recently became the first community college in the nation to launch a MOOC -- free online classes to help students of all ages, including high school students preparing for college readiness, middle-aged workers returning to college to prepare for a new career and to middle-school students working ahead at Pre-Algebra pass developmental math, also known as remedial math, before they enter college. This course was developed using an innovative design to improve student engagement. The MOOC leverages game mechanics to motivate students? progress through the course. Sandy Moses and Sasha Thackaberry will provide highlights of the design, development and delivery process, along with results of their data analysis into course activity and student performance.

- State University of New York (SUNY) is hosting an open community course on Open Educational Resources and members of the team who designed the course will discuss the collaborative project. The team includes SUNY faculty, librarians, and instructional designers from several campuses who worked on the creation of an open course on OER designed for SUNY faculty and staff. The project has been designed to build critical thinking skills needed for creating, selecting, and evaluating open educational resources in the context of the online environment

- University of Illinois Springfield held a MOOC entitled "The Emancipation Proclamation: What Came Before, How It Worked, and What Followed" in early 2013. This was the second MOOC offered by UIS, following the eduMOOC of Fall 2011. Ray Schroeder, Michele Gribbins, Carrie Levin and Emily Boles will share their experiences and lessons learned in developing and delivering the MOOCs. Discussions will range from the effectiveness of technologies and activities used in the two MOOCs to insights from students regarding their motivation for participating in the MOOCs."

Sasha Thackaberry: Their MOOC is an xMOOC. They are using Mozilla Open Badges and game mechanics - a low-risk failure factor - the students can take and retake tests. MOOC data: 1372 enrolled, 809 participated, 147 successfully completed. Students had to complete a survey in order to get to the content. The survey gathered demographics and learning history.

Michelle Gribbens: Their second MOOC- it is on the Emancipation Proclamation. All of their problems were overcome by using Coursesites. I am interested in the Terms of Service from Blackboard which typically licenses all content. They used a lot of the Blaclboard tools in their courses. The MOOC was 8 weeks but she thinks that a 6 week MOOC would have been better. Most of the participants were over 50. sites.google.com/sites/openedmooc

opensuny.coursesites.com is an online course with a badge system.

Open Ed 13: OERs Rule, MOOCs Drool: MOOCs and DistRibuted Open Online Learning

English: Blended learning methodology graphic

Michael Caulfield discussed how MOOCs are being used.

"The "wrapped MOOC" has gained attention over the past year as a way to integrate MOOCs into traditional education. This presentation will present results of interviews with practitioners of this method to show that in practice most educators are not "wrapping" the cohort experience, but are instead using the MOOC as robust OER. This trend is discussed in terms of "distributed flip" and "distributed blend" models, as well as David Wiley's joking but correct observation that MOOCs are distraction from the potential of DROOL (DistRibuted Open Online Learning). Implications include a hidden but high demand for robust, course-level OER, and the possible desirability of approaching blended learning from the online experience "backwards", as opposed to the traditional model which emphasizes the online refitting of an existing or assumed face-to-face experience."

Caulfield is from WSU Vancouver
Twitter @holden
Web; http://hapgood.us/

Examples of courseware evolution
Publisher resources, OLI (Carnegie Mellon, Stanford)
AASCU
Kaleidoscope Project

There is a history behind MOOCs - it is a progression over time.

What do MOOCs provide above and beyond what blended learning provides?
It is the global community of students going through the work at the same time.
The mythology of the xMOOC is the affordances such as 24/7 peer assistance

What does use of MOOCs for blended look like?
Amy Collier and Helen Chen held wide-ranging interviews with students and teachers.
Not Synched
They found that the local cohort was not linked to the online cohort.
They were using the MOOC purely as a digital resource.
This was because of the differences between course and institutional schedules - professors needed more flexibility in scheduling.
It is difficult for instructors to not fall behind.
Not Conversing
Students were not really using the forums of the MOOC at all.
The students looked at the forums occasionally and only sometimes posted. These students were meeting face-to-face
[It sounds like the learning was not social or truly interactive. and why would you do something that were not assessed?]
Unaffiliated students who watched 75% of the videos viewed the forums

Implications: do MOOCs Made Good Flip Materials
xMOOCs global classroom is not useful for blended learning - the students do not use the forums
The design of the course is mostly influenced by the global cohort
Problems
Data not available
Can't change schedule

Coursera is now working on decentralization.

Most instructors had gone through the MOOC before teaching it. That was a transformative experience for the teachers.

Summary
Courseware is a big part of the future of education
A growing number of options exist for materials
When used in flips, MOOCs often function primarily as content
MOOCs can be used, but think carefully about benefits and downsides of centralization

A community college teacher expressed concern over xMOOC content as content divorced from the local context. I feel the same way about most commercial textbooks.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Inclusive Learning Design Handbook

I am reviewing the "Floe" website today. I am particularly interested in their "Inclusive Learning Handbook." What is Floe? According to their website:

"Learners learn best when the experience is personalized to individual needs. OER is an ideal learning environment to meet the diverse needs of learners, including learners with disabilities. The Floe (Flexible Learning for Open Education) Project supports the OER community in providing a sustainable, integrated approach to accessible learning, addressing the needs of learners who currently face barriers."

I like this approach because it includes a lot of principles of Universal Design but also addresses other access issues - including cost. Their handbook creates a very innovative context for the creation of OER. It includes not just the content itself but tagging that content with metadata, a profile for learners that the students create for themselves, and the use of open formats. Here are the suggestions for the "Technique" section of the handbook:

Label resources to indicate what learning needs the resource addresses
Allow the creation of variations and enhancements
Support learning profiles
Support flexible styling
Support keyboard control of functions and navigation
Provide audio or text descriptions of non-text information presented in videos, graphics or images
Provide text captions of information presented in audio format
Separate text that can be read in the interface from underlying code
Use open formats wherever possible

"Open formats are typically published freely and don't require software developers or users to pay licensing royalties to use them in a variety of applications. As a result, open formats make it easier for content to be used and exchanged freely within different operating systems, applications, and software tools."

This is one of the few platforms that pays attention to the learner - there are tools to help learners assess how they prefer to learn.

Ironically, I find the default font in the handbook almost impossible to read - but fortunately their platform includes an easy preferences button that will allow me to adjust the font, color, and contrast of the text AND it is openly licensed and not behind a pay-wall so I can use what ever font I want to read it.

Floe allows you to customize how you view pages.

This is a very important project: it includes content, instructions, and tools for making sustainable, accessible content that will render all of the questions about $ustainability in OERs irrelevant.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

OER: DE 101 Self-paced version

This is the stand-alone version of DE 101, the curriculum we developed for our student orientation. It is released to the public with a Creative Commons license. Distance Education 101 is a two-week orientation on how to take an online class and how to be a successful online student. In this seminar, students learn specifically about College of the Redwoods' "MyCR" (Sakai) and how to use other tools to manage their time, work with others, and their information online. In this orientation students have an opportunity to create and participate in an online community where they can find help and make their connection to the online college.

We believe that our research shows that the two-week, free online orientation was largely responsible for the increase in online student success and retention. Our research is in the presentation below. I have written about DE 101 here before as well.

These course materials were designed for a student population new to technology, broad-band internet, and online communication. That is why there is such a 90s feel to the material. These materials need to be expanded to include more on online collaboration and personal learning networks. This is one of the reasons why we are releasing this on a wiki using the Creative Common's license - we want to collaborate with others who would also like to share their materials.

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat

For use to open - free- education resources. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am very disappointed in Flat World Knowledge's decision to end free access to students as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was always very suspect of this company from the beginning. I am getting sick of businesses saying that they are a part of the open source movement, OER, or for Open Text Books and then coming up with some lame excuse to go back to business as usual - lets make money on the backs of students in the name of "sustainability"! In the article they admit that they are not really committed to the open license.

We should call companies like FWK businesses then and not advocates or proponents of open education resources. The idea behind OER is that faculty would freely develop their textbooks for students to freely use. I am not against business but lets call it business and not OER. I am really not interested in the content reviewers from commercial publishers because they are not in the business of creating, vetting, and customizing for my students or my college in my community with its unique issues - they are interested in packaging their material for a mass market and getting some Phd's name on the box to make it acceptable to colleges who are not quite ready to take the plunge into OER. I almost wrote a book for FWK but I realized that my content would be at the mercy of the market. I knew that at any time they could change their business model and the students would be the ones to suffer. The business of businesses is business. The business of education should be education. There are great textbooks out there with Creative Commons licenses that students do not have to pay for. We have a moral obligation to make education accessible to as many students as possible. OERs and open textbooks are a way to do that. Freedom as in free to charge the students is not the kind of freedom that I am interested in.

And what does this mean for the Creative Commons license? If a text is really CC, shouldn't a student have access to that text under the same license as FWK?

Look at any of the articles below for an alternative model of commercial businesses managing academic content.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Keeping Open Education Resources Open

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What does the "open" in "open education resources" mean? What it should mean is free to reuse, remix and share. If your open education resources are locked up with a proprietary platform, they are no longer open. If they are converted into "supplements" for a "free" text, they are no longer open. This is the fear behind those who choose a license that says "not for commercial use." That does not make it less open because you are not free to lock down someone else's work and make a profit off of it.

The reason I release materials to the wild with an open license is so that other educators can use them and benefit from them; maybe even modify them (and hey, feel free send me a copy back). I want to contribute to the education community. My intention is not to enrich some business who will repackage and "improve" on my work by locking it down into a closed system and then charging for access. The claim that I am making my work less open because it is not free for commercial use is ridiculous! That is like saying animals are only free if they are also free to be in a zoo. And the only ones who really benefit from the corporate lock-down of OERs and open textbooks are the corporations.

The Creative Commons license warning that an OER is not part of a "free culture" is an unnecessary distraction. FreedomDefined. org is not helping:
"Licenses which only allow non-commercial use are not considered Free Culture licenses. This is because in practice there are many ways that Cultural works can be used and reused which would be considered commercial. Another problem is that there is no generally agreed definition of where the border line is between Commercial and Non Commercial uses with very many cases falling in the undefined area in between. In practice Share Alike or Copyleft clauses provide a restriction on commercial profits since any reuse making excessive profits will soon stimulate a bunch of copycats which will bring prices down while encouraging even wider distribution of the works - which is the objective of the free culture licenses."
That phrase "which will bring down prices" is the funny bit here. My goal is not to keep down the prices of my work but to remove the cost barrier altogether from my work! I want it free as in free of cost to any student, now and in the future.

The claim that OERs will not benefit from corporate modification and promotion is really missing the point. That is not the only way that OERs are adapted, developed, and distributed. OERs belong to the community of teachers and learners. They should remain there. The real work being done in the OER community is by communities of educators

So why do school districts go after corporate materials that are almost, but not quite entirely, unlike open? Because they are still clinging to the old paradigm that says that if it didn't get "vetted" by a corporate press, it lacks quality, legitimacy, the imprimatur and nihil obstat of a "reputable" press. We need to redefine this legitimacy. The corporate presses have not done education any favors: the price of education is outstripping the cost of inflation and healthcare. Each semester, publishers come up with new and interesting ways to justify their $280 dollar textbooks. And the sad truth is that the instructors know these subjects better than the project managers at corporate education publishing houses. The books are not more accurate because they went through their vetting process (see OER: The Myth of Textbook Reliability). Every open textbook that I have encountered that was created in-house or by a community of scholars has been hands down superior in every way to a corporate textbook because it addresses the needs of the teachers who created it and the students who are using it, it is lower in price and more accessible.

There are new models emerging for the development and implementation of OERs and open textbooks. There are a number of models suggested by Stephen Downes in his article "Models for Sustainable Open Education Resources" that I feel have yet to be fully explored. There is also the implementation model suggested by the Kaleidoscope Project that begins with a community of scholars working on shared student learning outcomes and assessments and only then do they adopt OERs or open textbooks. In other words, open textbooks are an opportunity to have education content driven by the SLOs of the local schools, not by commercial interests.

Fretting over whether or not an OER is free to be exploited by a corporation is a huge step backward and a great disservice to the students.

Friday, June 01, 2012

Open Content Licensing for Educators Workshop

Image via CrunchBase

This is from Cable Green:

2012 is a significant year for open education and OER. We are celebrating 10 years since UNESCO coined the term "Open Educational Resources".

In joining the global celebrations, the OER Foundation will host a free online training workshop on OERs, Copyright and Creative Commons licensing.

When: 20 June - 3 July 2012 (to coincide with the UNESCO World OER Congress in Paris).

Where: Online

Cost: Free. Registrations for this celebratory online workshop are now open: Register today to reserve your seat.

We are aiming to break our previous #OCL4Ed record of 1067 registrations, so please share the gift of knowledge and invite colleagues and friends to join us.

Download a copy of the poster for the OCL4Ed Workshop (614KB) and display on local notice boards.
Blog and share the registration link through your social networks: http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/About

We welcome graduates of former OCL4Ed workshops to join our lead facilitators and assist with peer-learning support for educators around the world who want to learn more about OER and open licensing. More info on how you can assist coming soon.

We look forward to welcoming you to OCL4Ed 2012.06.

With kind regards

The OER Foundation team

COL Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic

UNESCO-COL Chair in OER at Athabasca University