Personal Blogs

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!

Technologies for openness

I believe open educational resource repositories will become more and more important for open education in the future because they are not only a source of materials that are vital for the sustainability of open education, but they are a starting point for those who wish to become providers of OER.  It is also vital that the quality of the materials provided by these sources remains high, and this is another important role that can be played by supporters of the OER movement.  

When we define open learning, it is not always effective to do so in terms of the principles that underlie open education – education for all, empowerment of the disenfranchised, addressing inequality and stimulating educational achievement for individual self-efficacy and self-development  and economic development through education (i.e. a more able and employable workforce), especially among women, the disabled and discriminated-against minorities.  Nor should we just define open education as being education that is free, globally accessible and fulfilling the 5Rs of (able to) Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute.   We should also define OER in terms of its resources and technologies – ‘the 4 Qs’ (Robinson 2020) Where can we create it? How can we create it? Where can we get it and How can we get it?

Today, I want to focus on these in terms of the technology. To quickly summarise some of these….

HTML allowed the enriching of any site with the capacity to link seamlessly content with other content, whilst remaining in simultaneous touch with the source. One of the main components of what we call ‘web 2.0’.  HTML coul be especially useful in edu-blogs for sharing educational content.

Blogs and its community of ‘edubloggers’, attracted to this format as a way of bypassing formal, rigid and it could be argued, antiquated forms of publishing on a global level to establish an academic identity. Blogs became popular as an OER because of its similarity to print sources – through which most educational materials were shared.

Social networks enable users to share personal ideas, thoughts, news and information through virtual networks and communities through messaging. One of their features is combining of multimedia to distribute documents, videos, and photos via computer, tablet or smartphone using downloaded to your devices or via web-based software or web applications.  Beyond blogs, social networking tools exist in many more formats.; for example, Slideshare and YouTube each represent a different visual format extension of educational print dominated sources such as Twitter or Scribd.

MOOCs and VLEs can act as explicitly open education sources because they act as virtual classrooms or academies, while all the others are often used for many different purposes – not just educational, like entertainment. They can combine with any of the above to enrich the educational or training learning environments they represent.

OER repositories are an additional technology that is important for open education, from the role of both learners and providers because they can help establish academic identity like a blog, as they give a voice to the provider to express their philosophical basis for providing the source and the materials in the source itself can be tailored to a specific audience, that the provider wishes to speak to.  This can be enhanced if the provider is a producer him/herself of the materials, not just a conduit for the creators.  A network or academic community of creators and users can be established via the repository.  Some examples of OER repositories include: Citizendium, CommonSpaces, Curriki (K-12), Gooru (K-12), Internet Archive’s OER Library, Knowledge to Work, MERLOT, OER Commons, WikiEducator (Open Education Global 2020). As, in many circles, education becomes more and more commercialised and less accessible, it is important to mark the distinction between education in general an open education.  As an example, Open Education Global (the provider of my edited list of repositories it names on its website) states its mission ‘improving education access, affordability, success and quality for all’ (Open Education Global 2020).

HI!

Happy Nauryz everyone. I hope you all found time to spend time with your mothers on Mother's Day!

This week, we were asked to imagine we were constructing a five-week, online course aimed at providing a set of learners with resources for developing their ‘digital skills’, with a different subject each week.  For me, it would be for young learners - pre-undergraduates.   We were asked to visit a set of Open Educational Resource (OER) Websites (sources of materials that can be reused, repurposed, redesigned freely) and evaluate them in terms of how they were able to cater to each of the topics of our imaginary courses. 

I devise a broad outline of the topics to be covered every week (see the grid below).  The OER repositories we were given are the following:

Solvonauts

Merlot

MIT

OpenLearn

OpenStax

Saylor

I used the topics listed below and added the word 'training' or 'skills' for my searches and looked for teaching or readily adaptable for teaching materials in my results.   Overall, I did find a few of them useful and some of them not very useful at all.  I am happy they are there and the ones I liked I will probably use again. 

Have a look at how each of the sites did:

 As you can see, generally I was quite satisfied, but one or two of the sites fell below my expectations.  There is a possibility that is because the sites just were not suitable for my course and/or my lack of knowledge of them meant I was unable to use them properly in the limited time I had to search.  As our course tutor points out:  Different sites have different requirements, follow different 'regulations', and restrictions.  'Some make accessibility a requirement, while others offer guidelines' (Open University, 2020). 

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.