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Henry James Robinson

Creating an Open Education website: My contribution to setting the context

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 27 May 2020, 19:44

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The following is my reflection on my contribution to the writing/setting of the context behind a team assignment as part of my master's in online and distance learning.  Our team's challenge (there are 7 teams) was to formulate an online response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We decided to focus on higher education institutions. In particular, to aid the ongoing widespread and partial transition to online teaching, and to support both educators and learners in this. For many who are unfamiliar with this mode of teaching /learning, the transition is a huge challenge, but solutions need to be found in order to secure their short term goals and long term survival. 

Of course, the development of our website is a very long term thing and the preliminaries are still ongoing. 

The site: Higher Education Open Education Resources, H817 COVID-19 RESPONSE TEAM 

My contribution to the context

I think my contribution was substantial.  I created the first draft of the aims, the context, the target audience.  Basically, the idea was the following:

  • To  help educators and learners the world over to respond to the COVID-19 epidemic by aiding the transition to online teaching  by:

    • Creating an online repository for the sourcing of the open educational resources (OER) for independent learning of various subject areas. 

    • In addition to teaching/learning materials in a range of subject areas, we will place materials that support knowledge and understanding of open educational practices (OEP), its technology, tools, and open pedagogy in all its forms.

The context involved describing the pandemic but also the general need for universal education as articulated by bodies like the EU and UNESCO and how this was manifested in the growing interest in OER which gives access to wider audiences cheaper under open licenses.  I noted how COVID-19  had merely added to the momentum. I was one of the first to complete my personas, providing more concrete bases for our design. The context also involved distilling our conversation of the forces and concerns at work in student's lives in a definition of the website design challenge. I was responsible for drafting this definition of the design challenge that enabled us to correctly capture the essence of what the site needs to achieve and to focus on how.

My teammates
My teammates substantially added to and improved my initial draft by bringing more alive 'my concept' (of course repositories of this kind are not a new idea!) of a collaborative creator/user experience by expressing the interactive parts - the site would have a chatbot for queries, for example as well as other things I'd missed. I'd only mentioned that we should host the occasional webinar via the site and that it would contain instructional videos and podcasts we'd create. I was concerned about how much time the creators would have for these activities. 

Most challenging

The things I found most challenging were working to a deadline while working full time and applying for jobs.  Also, I learned more than anything about working with people - you have to be diplomatic and things seldom get off to a rip-roaring start when you don't know each other. I learned how to set up a website, which was important for me. Most important, perhaps, what huge incentive teamwork creates. Is it the competitive instinct? Is it the urge to please and help each other as well as learn together? A bit of everything really. 


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Henry James Robinson

the future of open education: open repositories, open pedagogy and global working

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 13 May 2020, 15:48


Image Source: Global Hands

Macbeth:
"Is this a dagger which I see before me..."
Macbeth (II, i, 33)


Hi! This is my response to a study assignment on the same topic of open learning. See my original spoken version on YouTube. Also my articles on LinkedIn.


We were asked to imagine the future of learning. I didn't need to go beyond the guidelines my course on online learning had already laid down for me. Still, we all have our own unique take on things. And like McBeth, I am in awe of the awful choices involved in reaching out to it and aware of the part my own hands will play in my own future.


The future is probably in the clouds, so long as current trends continue and that is definitely towards universities posting more and more content online to both attract learners to learning and also provide a subsistence through the paid services the university offers. Once learners get hooked by the free services offered, there is more chance they become more general subscribers.


So based on trends (open learning facilitating by open educational resources - OER - are on the up), I think that in the future, most universities will have created repositories for open educational resources; it will be for the purpose of marketing the institution. It will both hook into the current trend for online engagement, educational apps, and more sophisticated hardware - smartphones, laptops, and whatever other mobile and semi-mobile devices evolve.


I think that all universities will have them, I think that artificial intelligence will be the systems that organize them. They’ll be much more discoverable because the current aggregators will have refined. Repositories will be more interactive internally because the functions will be voice-responsive, and they'll teach the skills the user needs to conduct searches, without having to type in the input. This will be within a future of OER, where most institutions of education have gone online and so I see a decline in brick and mortar institutions. There will be far less need for physical resources like paper, and that will be another cause of the cost of education going down.


So, for economic reasons, I think that education will go global in the sense that we'll teach all over the world remotely. That that will facilitate much more face-to-face contact via video - tutors will have to open up their schedule, so they are not working the standard 9 to 5 hours within their time zone if they want to benefit from being able to work. We'll be compelled to be compatible with wherever our clients are. Then they will be doing more like shift work in the future. 

More to the point, jobs will be harder to find and at the moment we are already moving to the commodification of labour. No surprise that OER is one of those things that helps facilitate it more! Being part of the global marketplace is not all negative, what I am suggesting may be one way that more teachers stay relevant and employed and internationalization is surely a challenge we embrace, even if we have to adapt to a different sleep pattern.


I think that sums up my view of the future of education. It's not all negative because we still have at least the chance to work, despite my students repeatedly envisaging a world free of teachers - I'm sure it's personal! See my previous articles on connectivist and rhizomatic forms of teaching because for OER to kick in, so do new ways of teaching and learning.


I'd never have been so cocksure of myself, of course, were it not for COVID-19. It's worth reflecting on how this one little pandemic can change our whole perspective on life!

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Henry James Robinson

Assessing Innovation

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020, 12:55

OER bookshelf

Image: Opensource.com CC BY-SA 2.0
This week, we were asked to again practice our research skills by using them to assess how innovative a project was and how successful OER (open educational resources) had been as an innovation since its introduction.   Our task was structured around the following questions:


1.    How would you judge OpenLearn in terms of your definition of innovation?

I would judge OpenLearn to be very innovative because it incorporates many, if not all, of the features of OL, OEP, and OER in one. These include all that was envisaged since the article McAndrew and Farrow (2013) was published and those envisaged by early writers on open learning mentioned in the section entitled 'OER as the Supporter of Educational Theory', even as far back as the beginning of the previous century.  The OU was one of the pioneers of OL in practice and the OpenLearn has around for more than 20 years and OpenLearn in its current form has already been active for 14 years.   An illustration we get from the article is the use of digital badges, once looked upon as the 'future of learning' (Duncan, 2011, cited in the article).  Duncan, however, argues that 'the badge system cannot work without an open educational infrastructure'  (McAndrew and Farrow, 2013, p71).  OpenLearn provides that. 


2.    What key challenges facing the OER movement can be dealt with more quickly than others?
The article suggests that certain persistent challenges exist - copyright, technology, access.  But I think what they recognise the reality that technology, granting more and more access is advancing very quickly and that the copyright issues have been addressed significantly by Creative Commons (though there is an ongoing problem of 'theft' of ostensibly protected open resources materials).  The evidence suggests, according to the authors, that of the challenges listed on page 68, the first 3 have been addressed the quickest, to some extent, whilst solutions to the others remain in question.  


3.    How do open educational resources challenge conventional assumptions about paying for higher education modules?  
The assumption is that higher education modules are high quality, delivered by experts and that they provide essential revenue for the institutions that produce and purchase the materials and resources the modules are based on and can therefore only be made available for its registered users.  That way they can pay for the use of the resources and for their products and for the faculty to deliver them.  It seems counter-intuitive that they make these modules available free of charge.  The institutions do, however, can valuable 'PR', publicity and promotion from doing it; they also provide fee-paying services within these free programmes.  All this, along with support from the government to expand education provision go a long way to making these enterprises worthwhile.  The challenge is that the academic cultural environment has not yet fully accepted this way of working, as mention on the section entitled 'Research and Scholarship' - the implications of this non-acceptance of open publishing go beyond whether faculty produce and publish in the traditional way, but touch on the whole idea of the purpose of HEIs. 


I found this to be a good way to revise the real significance to education change OER represents and the meaning of its related terms such as OEP (open educational practice), Open Science, Open data etc. OER has gone a long way since its inception with projects started by Rice University, Carnegie Mellon and MIT (Connexions, Open Learning Initiative, and OpenCourseWare respectively, though Connexions has changed its name and is soon to retire).


I noticed I am becoming more proficient at researching. I am using keyword searches and my resources such as the OU library service, EBSCOhost, and Google scholar more efficiently and I am getting my ideas down faster in writing.  These are all benefits of my study with the OU.  I should continue to manage my time efficiently so I can continue to get the most out of my studies, as I have not even begun to make the most of the resources available to us to supplement what I discover myself and to improve my tech skills. 




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