Openness in higher education: Open Educational Resources

Editor's Notes

• #2: Presentation: Openness in Higher Education: Open Educational Resources (OER) By: Glenda Cox Presented at: University of South Africa (UNISA) on 17 March 2015
• #3: Hello, my name is Glenda Cox. I am senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT). I am also a researcher with the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) My current work, which this presentation emerges from, explores the role of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the higher education sector in South Africa. I am also a PhD student at UCT where my dissertation focuses on academics’ contribution and non-contribution of OER, and I’m a member of GO-GN (Global OER Graduate Network).
• #4: The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project aims to provide evidence-based research from a number of countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South / South East Asia. The primary objective of the programme is to improve educational policy, practice, and research in developing countries by better understanding the use and impact of OER. I conduct research in one of the programme’s sub-projects, focusing – with my colleague Henry Trotter - on OER in South Africa. For more information, see: http://www.roer4d.org
• #5: But we are also comparing our data with that from another sub-project based in India which is running a similar research study.
• #6: What is the meaning of “open” in education? Open in the sense that there is access to education eg. The Open University in the UK. It is not free but anyone can sign up. Open education and OER are taking this further to mean access and free Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are accessible to everyone, not always free and many materials are copyrighted and closed
• #7: The key aspect of an OER is that it is both discoverable online – so that people can find it AND openly licensed - so that people can legally make use of it. OER includes texts, different forms of media, ideas, as well as documented teaching strategies/techniques or practices. Advocates of openness would suggest that the value in OER is in its potential to support learning in many ways and in many contexts.
• #8: The Commons Movement includes various “open” initiatives such as Open Source Software – which really kicked off the open movement – followed by Open Licenses (exemplified by Creative Commons), Open Access (of academic research), Open Data, Open Science, Open Society and of course Open Educational Resources.
• #9: So let us now consider the OER movement at an international level
• #10: How is OER emerging around the world? In the late 1990s MIT was considering how it could use the Internet to potentially increase their revenue, but after a lengthy study which concluded that for a campus-based university such as theirs where the key was the hands-on engagement of students alongside researchers that it would not be possible to simulate this environment online. The then president of MIT, Charles Vest, is reported to have thought: … “is we are not going to try to make money from our educational material, maybe we should just give it away” (Attwood 2009) To date they have 2000 of their courses as well as specific introductory courses that are suitable for high schools available on their site free of charge to use. This of course does NOT mean that you can get a qualification from MIT this way – these are merely the teaching resources, not the complete educational experience that MIT offers. This MIT development has spawned the Open Course Ware Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/members/consortium-members.html) which now boasts members from _____________
• #11: There are more than 250 institutions and afflilated organistations in the Open Education Consortium: http://www.oeconsortium.org/
• #12: In Africa we have the newly developed OER Africa specifically catering for OER for African Academics, called OER Africa: http://www.oerafrica.org
• #13: OER Commons is a portal which links to other OER sites – e.g. MIT, OU and even UCT. See: http://www.oercommons.org
• #14: At the University of Cape Town (UCT), the push for a platform to provide open educational resources began in 2007 and has recently culminated in the established of OpenUCT, a open repository for UCT academics’ research and teaching and learning materials.
• #15: The teaching and learning aspect of OpenUCT was first hosted in the UCT OpenContent site, but has since moved to OpenUCT. See: http://open.uct.ac.za/
• #16: In June 2014, this was the breakdown of types of open teaching and learning materials profiled on the UCT Open Content site.
• #17: In June 2014, this was the number of unique visitors finding open teaching and learning materials profiled on the UCT Open Content site. We were surprised by how many Americans were finding our work on the site, but were thrilled that so many South Africans were also finding content there.
• #18: As part of the initiative, I received a lot of wonderful feedback messages from users around the world who found our open content useful for their own work.
• #19: Here is an example of an open resource that has been widely used across South Africa for helping first year students acclimate to university life. These are for the many students in South Africa who are the first in their families to attend university and need practical information for understanding what opportunities await them.
• #20: Here is an example of an educator – Matumo Ramafikeng - at UCT who created an open educational resource which a Spanish journal found online and liked so much that they asked her to write it up in an article format for publication in their journal. Thus, something released as an OER led to a publication for this educator, a valuable outcome for both her and the journal’s readers.
• #21: At UCT, we provide a number of small grants, typically around R10,000 each, to assist academics with taking their teaching and learning materials and turning them into OER.
• #22: In July of 2014, we ported all of the content from the old UCT OpenContent site into a new repository called OpenUCT, which includes both academics’ open research publications and their open teaching and learning materials. It hosts over 5,000 downloadable items.
• #23: So, what enablers and barriers to OER can you think of? [groupwork exercise]
• #24: Here are four areas where we can see various innovations enabling the use and creation of OER, in the technical, legal, financial and social spheres.
• #25: Philosophy: The Open Source Software movement led the way in showcasing the value of openness and the ‘architecture of participation’ (O’Reilly 2003) OER is based on the philosophical view of ‘knowledge as a collective social product and the desirability of making it a social property’ (Prasad & Ambedkar cited in Downes 2007:1)
• #26: Technical: OER is premised on the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge’ (Hewlett Foundation)
• #27: Financial Donor funding – e.g. Hewlett Foundation Marketing budget – e.g. Open University Commission – e.g. MIT and Amazon Endowment – e.g. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Membership – e.g. Sakai Consortium Government – e.g. UK £7.8 million grant
• #28: Legal: Creative Commons is a “copyright management solution” that clarifies how resources can be used. As one of my colleagues stated to me: “So actually I think you’re more protected if you make something legitimately an OER and then somebody else uses it.”
• #29: Pedagogy: the increasing ability to share quickly, widely and cheaply is an enabler, while certain teaching styles (such as an interactive one in the classroom) are a barrier, along with the dearth of OER in certain fields that are relevant to educators (especially in Africa).
• #30: Quality: There is a general feeling that quality will improve if materials are available for peer scrutiny. But there are concerns about the readiness of materials. That some materials may be of poor quality. Different views on a quality check: one says up to author and user /other says a quality check would protect the institution and the individual.
• #31: What are the potential benefits of OER? [groupwork exercise]
• #32: The benefits must be seen in light of the various challenges facing higher education today.
• #33: Challenges for South Africa: Poor performance compared to comparator countries eg. 2007 Sample of Grade 6 reading and maths in the bottom half of 15 African countries. In terms of equity _gross inequalities with poorer kids receiving inferior schooling. Higher Education: Ill prepared first year entrants. Poor throughput rates: low graduation rates ( partially influenced by UNISA the largest institution- rate of 9% in 2008. The total undergraduate rate was at 16% in 2009!
• #34: There are a number of reasons why OER makes sense for academic departments, in terms of: visibility, social responsiveness, learning experiences, recruitment, coherence of courses, archiving, curating and reuse and for life-long learning.
• #35: Lets drill down and talk about what this means to us as academics in the information age. Why is this important? OER allows us to profile and highlight our teaching and pedagogical ideas online (in addition to research) It creates a record of our teaching material and leads to the development of teaching portfolios – essentially building a teaching profile in addition to your research profiles Having our material online may foster connections between other colleagues, departments and even other universities especially cross-disciplinary studies. It can increase the impact of our teaching materials and help us attract the right students by giving them some idea of what we teach at UCT It may also extend the use of teaching materials to high school and life-long learners
• #36: Increasing visibility: for instance, when seeking an introduction to molecular biology, an OpenUCT open educational resource was listed first on Google’s search results.
• #37: In conclusion
• #38: Thank you. Please feel free to contact me anytime regarding the issues discussed here.
• #39: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.