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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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Image source: Dynomapper

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

Digital Visitors and digital residents

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Monday, 13 Apr 2020, 07:50


Image: 'Digital literacy disciplines' Creative Commons

Digital Visitors and digital residents

I recall exploring the concept of ‘digital natives versus digital immigrants’ (Prensky 2001) in a previous iteration of my journey into open learning/teaching and education as a now quaint idea that digital technology belonged to the millennials who grew up as Web 2.0 was taking hold and those born to earlier generations were immigrants, needing to pass some kind of naturalisation procedure to gain residency or full digital-age citizenship.  The ageism aspect of it tended to go over our heads, as we realised that digital citizenship was more a matter of exposure and interest than age.  Bennett, Maton, and Kervin (2008) found as much difference in technological know-how between those born during the coming of the full-on digital age of the late 90s to early 21st century as between those born earlier. Take my students, born in conservative Central Asia.  My impression is there is a technology gap between girls and boys and between my students and western students of UK, US and Australia, as my region, emerges from its post-soviet isolation – very rapidly I might add. Kazakhstan ranks highest in terms of internet access of all Central Asian countries, however, behind Russia and much of the world. Internet only appeared in 1994 in Kazakhstan, but it ranks 61st place out of 177 countries for broadband Internet speed. 

The concept of ‘digital natives versus digital immigrants’ has since been modernised and now the terms ‘digital visitors’ and ‘digital residents’ (White and Le Cornu 2011) are in currency – those that only occasionally use a technology and who have not developed much expertise in its use and those who use a tech often and who developed some expertise in its use.  White on his website, and in an accompanying video describes his approach to mapping an individual’s level of acculturalisation to a technology, including the use of his openly licenced software.

I decided to map my own level of engagement with different technologies using White and Le Cornu’s ‘Visitors and Residents’ concept (e.g. including my use of, VLEs, blogs, Facebook, Skype, etc.), cross-referenced with my adaptation of their personal/institutional axis  (I break it into social, professional and educational) as well as the visitors/resident one. I used Miro, the online collaborative whiteboard platform to create my grid. Click on this link to see my visualisation:

Henry’s Visitors and Residents’ concept (public)

Henry’s Visitors and Residents’ concept (course members – editable)

If you can, feel free to adapt the model I created in any way you please and send me an image or link of your version of the model!

I found it a useful way to reflect on my current use and to consider other technologies I do not use, especially when comparing my grid with others’ on my course, whose were often very different, based on their jobs, experience etc.  

 


References

Prensky, M. (2001) ‘Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1’, On the horizon, 9(5), 1–6.

White, D. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) ‘Visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement’, First Monday, vol. 16, no. 9, 5 September 2011 [Online]. Available at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 (Accessed 21 October 2019).


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Henry James Robinson

Technologies for openness

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Monday, 13 Apr 2020, 07:33


Technologies for openness

An open education technology
Here, I summarise some of the key technologies that are important for open education, focussing on one that I feel has been significant and will become increasingly relevant - open educational resource repositories.


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: CitizendiumCommonSpacesCurriki (K-12), Gooru (K-12), Internet Archive’s OER Library, Knowledge to Work, MERLOTOER CommonsWikiEducator (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).


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Henry James Robinson

Student co-creation of wiki's and open textbooks (benefits)

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Saturday, 4 Apr 2020, 08:21

Hello everyone

In this offering, I summarise my findings on the reading of DeRosa (2016), My open textbook: pedagogy and practice, which explores learning through the creation of open educational resources (e.g when students create a textbook and publish online for everyone and anyone to use and learn about the process) in reflecting on my own experience of OER on several MOOCS I've been a part of. 



Image Source: 
Opensourceway / CC BY-SA

DeRosa's (2016), 'My open textbook: pedagogy and practice' is an almost too good to be true example of open educational practice. The course I currently study on (the Open University H817 course, 'Openness and innovation in e-Learning') and other courses I've studied on have utilized open pedagogy, which is why I say 'too good to be true ' - almost. Open Pedagogy is defined by BC Campus (2020) as:

'the use of open educational resources ...with a goal of improving education...inviting ...students to be part of the teaching process, participating in the co-creation of knowledge.'

and my own experience of open pedagogy for me illustrates some of the potential benefits and drawbacks of open pedagogy for some.  But Rosa's experience doesn't surprise me.  It is simply an open pedagogical example of a perfect storm - a serendipitous coming together of the right ingredients - keen students who love their subject, who quickly form a cohesive team, ably aided by an adventurous, knowledgable teacher with a similar zest for exploration and collaboration.  Here are some of the pros and cons most mere mortals will encounter:

Potential drawbacks
if there is no consistent group to begin with (e.g. there is a rolling enrollment where new, uninitiated students keep popping up)
if 'training' is needed pre-task, such as how to use an app or an approach to learning only a few learners are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with.  Using an online platform, students may not be able to find what they are looking for to take part in a group task
if no one has time or opportunity - online courses involve people from all over the world, different time zones and often with previous commitments - unlike a group of college students whose main commitment is the course

Benefits
As DeRosa points out, the benefits of the approach far outweigh the potential drawbacks. It is worth facing the drawbacks because in many ways, even the embarrassing pitfalls (on many levels) aid learners in their search for rich, worthwhile ( you'll get there in the end) and meaningful (transferable realistic) learning experiences: students become independent doers and teachers what they need to be more often - learners.  As roles switch and educator/learner realise their roles are becoming more flexible, a new relationship between teacher/learners evolves and brings them closer together. At the same time, learners see each other more as companions on a learning journey that they need each other to complete.


In our little micro experience of open pedagogy (creating a group wiki) all of the drawbacks occurred. Nevertheless, groups did get it together to create a wiki page with links that each member had worked on to create the site. Some of us question whether the experience had come too early in the course.  Because of the insight it gave me in one vital area of the course content, I was very glad for what it gave me. We immediately felt a group responsibility to do our part or to let others know what we could contribute at the very least, in most cases.  This motivated a lot of us to go beyond to help the group and not lose group 'face'. 

Though some of us (me) had not built a wiki before, I am sure we will be even more interested and engaged the next time we are asked to do something like it again.  Thi sis an example of how a group task can motivate to learn more when working alone, it's possible to just hide and hope no one notices you, which works in many cases.   I am much more motivated as well to extol the benefits of wikis to my learners, asking them to open a free account and set up wikis of their own and of learning how to create open resources such as open textbooks.  


I end with a paraphrase of some of Rosa's tips about what can help  make open pedagogy a success:

  • Rome was not built in a day.  Look at the whole experience as a work-in-progress in one approach to more effective learning. Quote: 'it will continually improve as learners engage with it.'
  • If it connects with the course aims and / or more importantly, with students' own learning goals, it is worthwhile.
  • Nowadays there are resources for learning how to do anything - get with it.  In Rosa's class's case 'Learn how to openly license your book and learn how to get it online so folks can access and share it' (DeRosa 2016). 

Reference

DeRosa R. (2016) ‘My open textbook: pedagogy and practice’ [Online]. Available at: http://robinderosa.net/ uncategorized/ my-open-textbook-pedagogy-and-practice/ (Accessed 21 October 2019).


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Henry James Robinson

OER repositories

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020, 12:26

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:

Week

Topic

Resources

Suitability (G/M/B)

1

Social Media

Solvonauts: The search engine is clunky to use. I needed to enter the search several times. Resources limited to picture, Video and Audio search

I couldn’t find a range of video or audio, so I tried for images. Materials there were fine, as it says, not its own repositories, so suitability criteria of little relevance except that it brought me to an irrelevant page of Flikr.  It can all be repurposed (CC) but audio I found was a bit out of date.

2

Search Engine Marketing

Merlot:  The website easy to use, except the type of material not always clear until you click. Some interesting features like ’create a learning material’ and volunteer to be a reviewer.

A lot of UpToDate materials including eBooks and articles that could be repurposed.  What I wanted could not be repurposed (CC) coz Prezi is online and it was a bit out of date and was focussed on the US. 

3

Analytics

MIT:  State of art; subscription options, links to twitter, FB, WP, and Instagram.

Found two full beginners’ courses on inc this: analytics.  The clear spoken audio also great sound quality and available on YouTube made it readily adaptable. Up to date and highly suitable with loads of additional materials of different kinds.

4

Mobile

Open Learning: Very attractive design and user friendly.

The searches were aided by a warning for materials over 5 years old and I like the pdf, Word format choices. I found materials at advanced called: Accessibility of eLearning and low level called 'Digital literacy succeeding in a digital world' and a podcast a variety of other materials from video to audio to a podcast called University of the Future - very good.

5

Video

Stax and Saylor Clunky, slow and a bit bewildering to use.  E.g click on courses – there’s a limited choice; click on programs and I get a mockup of a Saylor course certificate. I wanted something on books so Stax is maybe not the sources, coz It apparently only has books.

I found zilch that was useful on either site -  maybe it was me but also maybe it’s good that Stax is retiring, to be moved to an archive. However, when I tried the Open University Open Learning site, I found a course on creating open materials including a section on video – great. A start anyway.

 

 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). 

Commons Licence

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Henry James Robinson

Exploring open education resources (OER) issues

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020, 12:36

Image source:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jonathasmello

Based on my reading of the OER Research Hub evidence report (de los Arcos 2014) the three key issues in OER I identified were the following:

1. I agree with the suggestion in the H817 Week 8 material that the accreditation of informal learning is a key issue in OER.  It is significant because a key aim of OER is to provide education to ‘expand access to learning for everyone, but most of all for non-traditional groups of students, and thus widen participation’ (OECD 2007, p.9).  In addition, ‘effective use of knowledge is seen more and more as the key to economic success, for both individuals and nations’ (ibid p.9). In many cases, the only way to transit from poverty to a basic standard of living for the majority can be that important ‘piece of paper’ that someone could gain from their participation in open learning.

In short, my preoccupation in my assessment of the role of OER is critical; it is all about eliminating the gap between the privileged and the disempowered and it is frustrating to me that HE bodies, researchers, policymakers etc. so obfuscate what should unequivocally be the aim of OER – to eliminate inequality of opportunity. De los Arcos (2014, p.33), examining hypothesis K - (Informal assessments motivate learners using OER) is significant in this regard because I want there to be ways soon by which OER can be a route to taking formal exams and gain formal accreditation.

The issue is being addressed by research by the OECD and its work with over 20 countries to recognize informal learning and badges and P2P have been mentioned. What is needed is for us to continue to look forward and to theorize what future tech and non-tech possibilities may be on the horizon for open credentialing.

2. Leading directly on from my previous point, the second important issue I wish to extract from my reading of the OER Research Hub evidence report (de los Arcos 2014, p.17-20) is about how the  Open movement needs to justify itself by being a clear bridge to more equitable access to education.  OER must show itself to be about widening participation in education – which it does not do sufficiently now.

The statement from the report that some ‘Learners are using OER in a number of ways that can be interpreted as leading to greater access to education’ is not an unequivocal statement that it does.  Neither is the statement: ‘Are open education models leading to more equitable access to education?  The emergent picture is mixed’ (ibid p.17 my italics). 

Another statement that tries to make the most of the disappointing greater access issue results so far but really ends up portraying the researchers as clutching at straws is the nonsensical: ‘Some learners are using OER as a replacement for formal education which they might not otherwise have access to’ (p.18). I also find the arguments about retention tangential to the issue of access for traditionally excluded groups.  The research only covers gender and disability - not in any depth - and there are excluded groups in that.

The Sustainable Development Goal, particularly goal 4 (Education for All) to which 193 countries have signed up is one way this is being addressed, particularly through the UNs OER initiatives. We may have to wait until 2050 to see that according to Duc Pham, Professor of Engineering, University of Birmingham.

3. My third important issue in OER is whether participation in OER pilots and programs lead to policy change at an institutional level (p.33) which concerns hypothesis J.  I think the issues I identified (1 and 2 above) can be resolved by policy and practice changes stemming from governments but I feel institutions are slow and reluctant to change. That (the slowness and reluctance to change) is an issue where we need to ask ‘why’ and put pressure because I feel the root is, we do not strongly wish to discuss and address inequality in society.   This is being addressed through organizations like the Commonwealth of Learning (COL)  and the open policy network working at societal, government and institutional levels. 

CC LICENCE

References

de los Arcos, B., Farrow, R., Perryman, L.-A., Pitt, R. and Weller, M. (2014), OER Evidence Report 2013–2014, OER Research Hub [Online]. Available at http://oerhub.net/ research-outputs/ reports/ (Accessed 21 March 2020).

OECD (2007). Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources. Paris: OECD.  [Online]. Available at http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9607041E.pdf (Accessed 21 March 2020).


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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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