I appreciate Stephen Downes take on OER – that there should be “no significant difference” between classes taught with OER or commercial text as far as outcomes go. I got into education to see that happen. The impact that I have measured in the past is grades, completion rates, and student satisfaction. I completely respect and value his definition of impact, and it would take a very deep longitudinal study to track that. In the community colleges I have worked at, we have had some more immediate problems to solve. There are five areas where OER and open textbooks are critical to the success of community college students:
Cost
Most of our students are working. Money is a huge issue. It should not be this way but it is. It is barbaric that the richest society on the planet can’t take care of health care or education, but that is where we are. The state of Washington has one of the highest homeless populations among its students. There are 40,000 homeless students in Washington. And a study came out that said that across the U.S., 14% of the college students are homeless. How are students supposed to learn, let alone have a transformative experience when they are worried about the next meal or where they are going to sleep? Eliminating the cost of textbooks is an essential step in solving this problem.
Financial Aide
For various reasons, some that the students might be able to control and some they can’t, financial aide is often late. This means that students who are on financial aide are often two weeks behind in the reading. This just adds to the stress of being in college. Yes, we can put books on reserve in the library, but it is not the same experience as having access to a text when work schedules and transportation allows.
Relevance and Corrections
Students are often paying for books, resources, and at least chapters that are redundant with other classes that they will not use. Also, if there are errors in the books, we often have to wait two years, or what ever the publication cycle is, to get corrected texts. With OERs, faculty and students can customize the texts and make corrections instantly.
Student-Authored OER
Even better than making corrections, I have had the honor of working with a class where the students created the text. The assignments in the Communications class were designed to update the text and keep it relevant for the next class. The students had real ownership of the learning and often were available to help the next iteration of students work on the text (which was a wiki).
Student Satisfaction
Each semester, I would survey the students to have them talk about their experiences with the courses and learning materials. The open text book classes always had a greater student satisfaction because the students had immediate access to the materials (sometimes before they even enrolled in the course), the materials were always relevant, and they appreciated the lower cost.
Often the research around OERs is performed at colleges where the students do not have the financial concerns, are highly motivated, and are not under the stress that community college students find themselves. I would find it very easy to believe that for students at MIT or Stanford, there would be no significant difference, but for students in the community colleges, it is all the difference in the world.
Vahid Masrour sent out a link to our Open Education MOOC this morning to Mark Weller’s “Openness and Education: a beginner’s guide” and it got me to thinking a lot about Connectivism. Connectivism is the learning theory founded and championed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. There are a number of components of that theory that I think are important to the discussion of open education. I list some of Siemens’ principles of Connectivism below (my comments in italics):
Learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions.
This should be the very spirit of openness – seeking the diversity of opinion – Alexander von Humboldt once wrote that “truth rests in a diversity of opinions.”
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
This is something that we must do – learning is an activity – not a passive reception of information – or the mere existence of information. Possession of a textbook, OER or not does not mean I will learn from it.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.
This is particularly important as we face unprecedented information over-load, a crisis in information management, and a deficit of critical thinking.
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
Notice that again, this is something that the student does. It might be modeled by the instructor, but the principle demonstrates great faith in student agency.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
I see connections here to the benefits of OER – with OER we are able to crowd-source the creation and updating of knowledge without having to wait for the two-year publication cycle for corrections to textbooks.
I am one of those who come to open education through the humanities. I still see it through that lens. I don’t see it through the technology lens even though George Siemens once called it “a learning theory for the digital age.” I think it is that, but I think what makes it a viable theory and a useful tool is that it answers questions and solves problems that go far beyond the “digital age.” I think that the conversations we are having around Open Education are important. For myself, Connectivism is the pedagogy of Open Education – it has all the requirements for a theory that not only addresses how learning occurs, but it accurately describes what happens in an open learning environment (facilitation, student agency, creating teaching and learning community, etc.). I don’t agree (or maybe understand) every part of this theory. I never liked “learning may reside in non-human appliances” when the very definition of “learning” requires a person to do the learning, but never mind that for now.
One of the things that Education Theory is really bad at is accounting for how people learned, taught, or organized information in the past. When read books about how people are supposed to learn, I always think back to Chaucer’s time and wonder how he became so educated in a day when pedagogues literally beat information into students. Despite the educational theories of the day, Chaucer managed to learn.
I read some criticism somewhere of Connectivism once that made the ludicrous claim that unless Connectivism could account for every sphere of human life, it couldn’t account for any of it. This is a standard that no theory is subjected to – certainly not a scientific one. No scientific theory would be foolish enough to make that claim. Theories are informed by facts, hypotheses, and experiment – not by claims to have answered the secret to Life, the Universe, and Everything. As soon as you have a brilliant mind like Whitehead come out with the Principia Mathematica who proves once and for all that there is an ultimate system of math, you have an equally brilliant mind like Gödel come along in the next generation and prove that any “mathematical system” has to be either incomplete or inconsistent. And despite this, my High School still insisted that I learn the stuff.
While working in the K-12 schools and studying Education for my masters degree, Constructivism was the main theory du jour. In a nut shell, Constructivism says that learning is socially constructed and that folks learn by applying past experience to new knowledge. I still have a lot of respect for it as it addressed many issues in education I was encountering at the time. It also helped shape early online learning experiences. But like most theories, there are some limitations. There are forms of learning and experience that learning theories can account for, but they usually fall short with the mechanisms or tools of learning. The invention of writing, universal literacy, and cheap paper were huge technical innovations that spread information and learning. Unfortunately, Stanford had not been invented yet so there was no one around to finally codify, once and for all, how learning took place in the human mind back then. There has to be a huge connection between the technologies of information and how we communicate as a species, but I have not found a learning theory that accounts for that. But that understanding, making those connections, is one of the things that the Humanities does really well. Lets take one tool or mechanism for learning; something as simple as concept maps.
Concept maps were an important part of my work as a developmental education instructor and are important in my work as an adult basic education instructor today. My students use them as a way to start their drafts of papers, to make connections between ideas and situations we are studying (history of Afghanistan, for instance), and I also use them as a way for students to build presentations. The concept map was also extensively used in the course “Connectivism, and Connective Knowledge” taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. They were used there to demonstrate knowledge of connectivism as both a formative and summative assessment. So are concept maps new? Are they “the digital age”? Of course not, artistic representations of branching and connected information are a human archetype – it is hard-wired into how we think. I used to give a presentation on concept maps that would annoy the hell out of traditional education researchers because the only evidence I gave was artistic evidence and proximity data (if two things or words are close together in context, they must share a similar meaning). The presentation began with a series of images to give the workshop participants the sense of the breadth and scope of the use of the image of the visual branching of information.
The point of the presentation is that through all time and across all cultures, there has been some kind of external, connected expression of what we know. Manuel Lima in his “The Book of Trees” does a great job of expressing this.
My point with all of this is that Connectivism is a viable learning theory because it addresses not only the Digital Age but the past as well. I think it fits in with the spirit and goals of Open Education and should be looked at seriously by any one interested in Open Education.
Most of the readings set for Week Five dealt with research into the use of OERs. A review was covered in a research shorts video from YouTube entitled A Review of the Effectiveness & Perceptions of Open Educational Resources as Compared to Textbooks(based on Hilton, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: A review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(4), 573-590)This review examined 16 empirical studies of courses where OERs had replaced traditional textbooks. The research studies focussed on either the learning objectives and success rates or on the perceptions of students and lecturers regarding OERs. Only one out of the 16 studies found a lower success rate for some students using OERs. The general consensus was that OER use was effective with higher test results and lower rates of failure and/or drop-out. It is noted that researchers appreciated the limitations of their studies and did not attribute direct causality in their conclusions.
Review of Hilton, 2016
The video narrative contained an instance of inaccurate reporting when it stated, “A sizable majority felt that OER were of better quality than traditional textbooks. About half said that they were of similar quality. And only a few thought that OER were inferior”. If you read the original report by Hilton (2016) the statistics are: 33% viewed OER positively, 50% saw OERs and traditional textbooks as of a similar quality, and 17% viewed OERs as inferior. There is no way you can call 33% “a sizable majority”, when a majority implies that it is over half! Still, the results do indicate that both lecturers and students were positive in their perceptions of OER: students valuing the “free” part of OERs, and lecturers appreciating the high quality and flexibility of OERs. My favourite question from Hilton (2016) has to be: “If the average college student spends approximately $1,000 per year on textbooks and yet performs scholastically no better than the student who utilizes free OER, what exactly is being purchased with that $1,000?” This is a question well worth considering.
What is being purchased with that $1,000?
Weller (2012) in a discussion of The openness-creativity cycle in education described the open scholar and the relationship between OERs and creativity. This article comes from the Open University (OU) in the UK. The mission statement from the OU is 'Open to people, places, methods and ideas'. The OU has long been renowned for its open access policies and has been the source of a lot of research into open access.
OU, 1969
Weller (2012) defined a number of related aspects of open education, but the one that was most meaningful to me was the open scholar. The open scholar combines the creation of digital artefacts with a socially oriented distribution network. The open scholar, in my opinion, represents the core of learning in terms of a connectivist pedagogy. I see myself as an open scholar. According to Weller (2012), the open scholar creates, uses, and contributes open content, self-archives, applies his/her own open research, shares, supports open learning initiatives, comments on others, publishes in open access journals, and builds networks. This is the direction in which I have been moving for almost a decade.
Lead educator of SLENZ - my workshop participants
Creativity is high in the list of characteristics of the open scholar. I consider the work I have done creative. I have open research data available on both virtual world projects in which I have taken a lead role. I was lead educator for the foundation build, part of the Second Life Education New Zealand (SLENZ) project. The initial results of this data are available at:Second Life Education in New Zealand: Evaluation Research Final ReportThe initial research for my literacy game, The Mythical World of Hīnātore, is available here:Literacy game in a virtual worldHere are a few pictures of both builds. I have had very positive perceptions from both students and lecturers who have participated in my research. However, the research was not focussed on the aspect of openness but on either the gaming or simulation aspects of the builds. It would be interesting to look further into the impact both builds have made due to the fact they were both created using NZ 3.0 CC licensing.
Koru SLENZ Foundation build
Literacy game, The Mythical World of Hīnātore
Having taught in an open entry foundation course for nearly a decade, I have always been interested in research into open entry, open access programmes. Dr Barry Hodges from the University of Newcastle in Australia reviewed research into open entry/open access courses (reported in a review I wrote (2017) in Mana Rangahau Issue 1). He concluded that the research evidence indicated that open entry/open access courses suffered from the challenge of four deficits: the challenge of achievement with high drop-out and low success rates; the challenge of academic standards, i.e. accepting failure or lowering standards; the challenge of student support – ““Opportunity without support is not access”; and, the challenge of multiple discourses, acknowledging students who are proficient in discourses other than the dominant. He suggested rejecting the deficit model and creating a dynamic university culture embodying a multiplicity of sub-cultures, each imbued with their own discourses, literacies, and processes.
Me surrounded by my wonderful students
The narrative approach to research must be as important as collecting a mass of statistics. It is incredibly difficult to indicate the effectiveness of an approach to education in terms of causality. There are so many factors that impact on our students and their learning. Switching to an OER may seem to make a positive difference to a group of students. But, it could also be attributed to the motivation of increased digital material and less reliance on the printed page. A number of my own students have conducted research into the use of little OERs (as opposed to big OERs – see Weller, 2012). Some have incorporated OER puzzles, games, and video content into their courses and found the students most receptive to the changes. However, perhaps the positive results obtained could be attributable to their own increased motivation and passion and how these characteristics have been passed on to the students. It is easier to identify causality when examining individual stories and how changes have impacted in particular cases.An interesting opportunity for research has been created by the new government in New Zealand, a result of the election held last month. Our new Prime Minster, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, has promised that all new tertiary students will receive their first year of tertiary study for free (see the video link below).
I imagine a priority for the new Labour Government will be to prove, through research, the benefits of instituting this policy at a national level. However, I tend to be sceptical of politically inspired research and believe that individual institutions should look at the effects in terms of their own students.Stephen Downes, in his video, Research on OER Impact and Effectiveness, made a couple of very important points. He questioned the actual meaning of research and the meaning of impact. Stephen recommends that the information that is needed yet not done, is research into how open resources help society. Yes! OEEs should have a long-term impact on a person’s sense of personal worth and their value to society. In Stephen’s own words: “I see research on grades and graduation rates and course completions and crap like that. And I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in how open resources help society”. I am currently working on my PhD in education, examining the effectiveness of my own literacy game. I have already conducted extensive research using numbers and quantitative data. This has all indicated a positive perception of the game and how it has improved sentence structure and grammar in student’s formal writing. Now, I am looking at narrative, and how the game has personally impacted on select subjects, both short and long-term. The results I have obtained are interesting in that the qualitative data supports the quantitative data. My game may not be a very apt example of seeing something change society but I have seen a game change a mother-son relationship, a son’s progress at school, and a student’s decision-making processes in areas unrelated to the original written literacy in the game.
To continue a discussion from last month’s Transparent Educative Experiences (#OpenEdMOOC), I wanted to tease out a few more ideas related to OERs and how OERs and pedagogy differ from a more systematic approach needed when researching OERs in practice. As important as openand educational are in determining how an OER is defined, I find the two terms tend to be too nebulous when it comes to the obligation of narrowing down a researchable topic to something that is S.M.A.R.T.: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
OERs and Pedagogy
The vagueness of OERs is necessary when it comes to employing pedagogy within a formal educational context. “It seems clear… that there ought not to be an a priori stipulation that something may or may not be an educational resource” (Downes, 2007, p. 31). Yet instructors continually consider different resources by anticipating how they might lead to certain student engagement patterns and/or learning outcomes. They probably also look for inverse relationships that take certain learning scenarios that might dictate how resources emerge from the educative experience itself. Instructors then predict what could happen, then report certain results if they decide the share the resource with others, say as an OER. The next instructor to use the OER (whether a process, artifact, etc.) will take this reporting (a stipulation or condition, context, situation, etc.) and adapt and/or adopt it as necessary as the process continues. So, when teacher practitioners are actively using resources to promote engagement and particular learning outcomes, how necessary is it to create a taxonomy of OERs (e.g., types of resources and resource media)? Pragmatically, resources either promote or hinder the educative experience… it either works or it doesn’t. Creating a taxonomy and trying to reach a consensus about what is open or not, educational or not, or what a resource is or not, places too much emphasis on the resource (material or one particular individual) and less about the collective experience that involves the complete network of social relationships, materials, and ideas/concepts. Thus, the act of stipulating comes from understanding context, as in where the OER came from and how it might serve a particular purpose locally. A “negotiation” exists between one instructor stipulating how a given resource is “educational” from experience and another instructor stimulating by predicting how this same resource might serve a purpose going forward.
Research
When it comes to embodying OERs through research, terms like open, educational, and resource cannot remain vague. The challenge is to follow a process of planning a research project that ends up being specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. To this end, Booth, Colomb, and Williams (2008) would consider the following:
From topics to questions
From questions to problems
From problems to sources
Engaging sources
Reflection
My concern with researching OERs is that the vagueness of OERs and pedagogy fail to reconcile with the systematic approach required to researching OERs in practice. Also, I feel too much focus adheres to a singular relationship between an OER and its impact, instead of a more complex stance that views OERs as an emergent cause and effect from a particular experience or set of experiences. For these reasons, I think the only way to approach OER research is through complex-related theories: complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, complex networks, etc.Image Attribution
Week 5 of #OpenEdMOOC is about “Research on OER Impact and Effectiveness”. Certainly, OER adoption would somewhat increase if this research could prove that OERs do function equally well as commercial textbooks. To prove this, the research would have to copy the goals and measures from the traditional expectations that people have. I think there is a danger, then, that such expectations focus too much on how easily stuff can be ingested — a Nuremberg Funnel would be the ideal exchange value for the many dollars of a commercial textbook, wouldn’t it?
But such a measure of effectiveness would be questionable. In my own discipline, math, we have the saying: “A king’s road to mathematics does not exist.” There are, instead, two completely different goals. One is to learn how to apply the rules for the necessary calculations that you may have to carry out in later life. The other one is to learn mathematical thinking. If you focus on making the former as easy as possible (which is a legitimate goal), it is less probable that mathematical thinking emerges. For example, if you always have perfect pictures, visualisations and simulations in your textbook media, you will memorize the concepts and procedures quicker, but you won’t develop the ability to visualize difficult relationships on your own, i.e., if the abstract is made less abstract for you, you won’t learn from it how to cope with new abstract things.
To repeat an older metaphor: If we compare learning to carrying a load upstairs to the attic storage, there are two distinct goals. One is that the load should be stored up there, and the other is to work out one’s muscles. If it is only necessary that the stuff is accumulated up there in our brain, a ‘lift’ would be a welcome optimization.
Picture: ‘Attic storage’ by Flickr user adriane_l CC-BY
So, if measuring the ‘effectiveness’ is mainly about knowledge content and about storing it safely away (in a compressed way, i.e. in isolated chunks that are typical for ‘left-brained’ thinking), it will be very unbalanced.
Measuring OERs, by contrast, offers the opportunity to try out and define new criteria. An obvious new affordance is that you practice your mental ‘muscles‘ more if you have to find your stuff on the web, by navigating and traversing the very connections that ‘are’ the knowledge. But there is much more to research of distributed learning, and much of what I wrote 9 years ago in week 12 of CCK08, does still apply.
Filed under: OpenEdMOOC
I think I understand David Wiley’s frustration with the semantics around “Open Education” – it is a very broad term. “Open” means many things to many people as does “education.” I am not sure if “OER-enabled Pedagogy” really addresses the issue. It sounds too much like content is what guides the teaching and learning. What is the opposite of OER-enabled Pedagogy? Copyright-enabled Pedagogy? Copyright-disabled Pedagogy? Commercially-enabled?
I understand what Open Pedagogy is – I know mostly because I suffered for 16 years under its opposite. Education is closed in the sense that it is expensive, classist, inaccessible, and strangled by corporations who define the curriculum with their “great” but expensive textbooks (or technologies). The closed classroom is hierarchical and led by an “expert” whose job is to transmit information to the empty vessels. There are social justice issues here, but that does not muddy the definition any more than the closure in traditional education muddies the definition of “traditional education.”
I am teaching a course right now that uses some materials from an open textbook but most of the materials are links to newspapers and journals. We are not interested, as a class, in textbooks per se because we are looking at social studies from what is happening in the world today at this moment. We are looking at the Trump policy in Afghanistan right now. The course is student-driven, networked, and dependent on student sharing (blogs and presentations). In my practice as a teacher, this is an open class, an open pedagogy – it is not particularly dependent on the 5 R’s to succeed as a class, but it is open. The students learn a way of using information, communicating, and building learning networks.
One of the things I do with the students is getting them away from the idea of debate: that only leaves us with right and wrong, winners and losers. It shuts down the discussion. We are working on deliberation: we survey ourselves on our values as individuals and as a group and try to evaluate the issues from a shared values/different values perspective. I think that “OER-enabled Pedagogy” is not “wrong” but it represents a different set of values than “Open Pedagogy.” Wittgenstein used to say that philosophy is not a theory but an activity, and like David, I am interested in what OER enables us to do but I am not sure it is time to stop the defining process.
I have been trying to come up with a good research proposal around Open Educational Resources (OER) for some time now. Although it is an assignment for the Open Education MOOC I am involved in, it is real for me because I actually want to follow through with it – fellowship or not. Please comment and rip my ideas apart if you see any issues or have any suggestions for improvement. Below I share most of my thought process leading to the possibly final idea so if you aren’t in a mood to read you can scroll down to the proposal at the end.
The fellowship requires an action research project that is grounded in current literature, feasible and under 500 words.
The Initial Idea
As mentioned in previous posts I am surrounded by people who both support OER and caution against it. In the month leading up to the strike on campus I spent a lot of time talking to people on both sides of this debate over OER. It felt like my biggest problem was dealing with anti-OER people on campus. A team of us got together and came up with an idea. We wanted to focus on identifying the perceived risks of OER among faculty at our institution using Q-methodology. While opinions of OER are known in the literature we do not know what faculty at our institution thinks beyond anecdotal evidence. We would gather the discourse on OER perceptions and narrow it down to a representative list of statements around “What are the most significant barriers for you in the adoption of OER.” Q-methodology asks participants to sort a set of statements that are subsequently grouped together mathematically. For the fellowship, this approach was best conducted by a team since the intent was to use the identified perceptions to develop professional development opportunities for faculty that would address the identified barriers using existing literature in a workshop type format. An additional component of the study could be to measure the effectiveness of the professional development activities, but that portion of the idea was not flushed out before the strike began.
The original idea would be feasible for me because of my experience with Q-methodology. However, in an information session about the fellowship we learned that we cannot apply as a team. It was also suggested that this idea may not fit with “action research” for me in my current role as a course professor. Since the idea was vetted by my institution we may move forward with it anyway, but not for the fellowship proposal. Two of our team members are submitting separate research ideas.
Action research is meant to solve immediate problems faced by educators like me in an attempt to constantly improve (Ferrance, 2000). There are different types of action research. The idea above would fit with a group approach, but I feel the need to focus on something more closely tied to my own teaching. As a new adopter of OER in the classroom I am faced with the issue of finding something to research that would also add something meaningful to what is known in the broader literature since I want to use it for ongoing scholarship. I must find a problem that is both relevant to my current context and a gap in current literature.
Step 1: Identification of a Problem
Coming into this week’s content I was still thinking of focusing on the perceived risks of OER, but I am not sure that would add enough to the literature after finding out about so much more research than I was aware of through the MOOC. Asking about perceived risks of OER is a more basic level question, which Wiley says has been done.
What is Known
In the video below, Wiley indicates that research shows that student outcomes are the same or better when comparing OER to Costly textbooks. The course then directs us to this page where it is quite clear that studying efficacy and perception has been done.
I am really interested to see what comes out of the research Wiley discusses in the video above where he says his team is looking at if there is a difference in student outcomes when the teacher is involved in the development of OER or simply adopting it. That is really interesting and helps to answer, in part, the fear of faculty who are concerned about OER. Many of those fears could also be addressed in a few minutes on YouTube or by reading literature. I think Rajiv Jhangiani says it perfectly in the video below …
Abundant literature exists suggesting the perceived and measured value of OER for students and educators. For me it is not a question of if OER is useful – I have logic and research to back that up. I have had too many students in my office crying over finances to ignore the impact of costly textbooks on their lives to ignore it.
Identifying GapsDownes questions the impact of OER on a student’s ability to develop relationships and contribute to society. He elaborates in a way that sounds to me more like questioning the influence of OER on openness as a mindset, which facilitates collaboration and making a meaningful contribution to society. That is a great idea, but way beyond the scope of an action research project. Or is it. If the focus of the research is on open pedagogy a qualitative study could explore student perceptions of how it changed their mindset.
A lot of research has been conducted on OER. I tell my students that a good place to start looking for gaps is by reading literature reviews.
Hilton (2016) calls for the replication of this study, and designs that overcome issues of potential bias in previous research. Quantitative evaluation in this way would be a good idea if I had something already in place that could be evaluated. However, one of my biggest challenges in nursing is finding open textbooks in the first place.
Problems that I Face
YouTube and Creative Commons
In a previous post I shared some of my concerns around making my YouTube channel fit the 5Rs of OER. Maybe I could look at the impact of Creative Commons licensing on the performance of my YouTube videos. There are so many variables to try and control for that I have no idea where to start. In a brief literature search it YouTube seemed to be the focus of many articles in relation to how patients and students use it as well as factors influencing popularity, but none that measured popularity or ranking in conjunction with the creative commons licensing. Much of the literature I came across was dated. YouTube is constantly updating their search algorithm so research would get dated quickly. Would anyone else even care about that? How many YouTube educators are out there? I am going to shelf that idea for now, but it is an interesting one for the future. Or, if anyone reading this blog post wants to help me flush out an idea we can try something.
Open Pedagogy
The review project notes a need to study open pedagogy, which is intriguing. Instead of studying the impact of a resource it would be interesting to study the next step – engagement in the 5R activities as a teaching tool. The textbook I have adopted needs to be adapted. Unfortunately as far as I know I will not be teaching a course where I could get students to help me adapt it within the time frame of the institute. Maybe I could get students to help me create OER as an assignment – an idea taken from one of the previous OpenEdMOOC course videos. Encouraged by reading Mays (2017) open textbook, it is worth a try. Two courses that I teach in January do not have current textbooks and could really use one. This idea is quite intriguing. It has been done before in environmental science. Why not nursing? It may be a huge success or a failure. Either way it fits well with an action research approach and will produce meaningful data and an OER! I could definitely use the support of eCampusOntario for something like that. The fellowship would be ideal.
I struggled a little (okay a lot) with the design choice. There seem to be quite a few case studies in the book I am using to guide the implementation of my project. As I wanted to focus on the student experience it makes sense to take a qualitative approach, but I am not sure if that is realistic. Since I sit on the Ethics committee at my institution I know they would question the vulnerability of my participants while they are still in my course. It may be more ethical to do something quantitative … or return to Q-methodology in an electronic way. I am also not sure if I should study myself in some way as I engage in this process. I need to talk this idea through with someone! After some searching for methodologies I came across Narrative self-study. While I would prefer to involve student perceptions in the study I think I will focus on my experience – it will be more within my control to get participation that way and eliminate some vulnerability concerns for ethical review boards. The way it is described in this article (and some other non-open ones) seems to fit in a way that would add meaningful data to the literature.
So here it is … the idea I will be submitting later this week in the application for the OER fellowship later this week (unless I change my mind again) … please critique it!!
A narrative self-study of engaging in open pedagogy with students
Open Educational Resources (OER) have been shown to decrease student cost and improve student satisfaction, retention and graduation rates among numerous other outcomes (Hilton, 2016;Hilton, Fischer, Wiley, & Williams, 2016). In nursing, OER have been implemented in Sweden with some concern expressed about the quality and overwhelming nature of it (Elf, Ossiannilsson, Neljeso, & Jansson, 2015). Quality of OER, like books from big publishers, must be evaluated based on various factors including peer review (Gurung, 2017). Development of and peer review for OER is increasing. As Gallaway (2016) and Doan (2017) have identified, the most challenging barrier to OER use is finding appropriate resources. The Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (n.d.) has identified potential sources of OER. Still, finding OER that fits the needs of a specific nursing course has been challenging given the limited peer-reviewed open textbooks and other resources available in specific content areas. Derosa and Jahngini (2017) recommends that educators partner with students to build OER as a way of modeling open pedagogy and offering students a way to derive meaning from their assignments. While several case studies exist, an in-depth understanding of how one navigates the challenges is needed in order to support novice educators attempting open pedagogical practices for the first time.
This narrative self-study aims to unearth the lived experience of a nursing educator engaging in a collaborative open textbook creation project with students. Studying oneself is an innovative approach to research enhances the understanding of teaching practices (Hamilton, Smith, & Worthington, 2008). Consistent with this methodology and open pedagogy, reflective and open journaling through a blog will be used to document experiences. Open journaling will enable discussion of challenges through comments on the blog that will facilitate problem solving and alternate perspectives that will be used to prompt further reflection and enhance the rigour of the study. Key questions guiding the initial reflections are: What is the meaning behind experiences of facilitating a collaborative open textbook creation project? How are student reactions to the project shaping the educator’s view of it? What challenges are experienced? How can those challenges be navigated? What lessons can be derived from this experience? Further questions will emerge as the experience unfolds.
Note:
Students will be offered the choice of engaging in OER development through creating a learning object that will be licensed under creative commons, evaluated for marks and edited by the professor or completing a traditional assignment for the course. Prior to implementation rubrics and memorandum of understandings will be adapted from Mays (2017)book. Those who choose to engage in the OER development will participate in planning the topics for a textbook and placed into groups or assigned to work individually. Support will be sought from eCampusOntario to promote quality of the end product and educational experience for students.
References
Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing. (n.d.). Open educational resources for nursing. Retrieved from http://www.casn.ca/education/5656-2/
Derosa, R., & Jahngini, R. (2017). Open pedagogy. In E. Mays (Eds.), A guide to making open textbooks with students. Retrieved from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/
Doan, T. (2017). Why Not OER?. Portal: Libraries & The Academy, 17(4), 665-669.
Elf, M., Ossiannilsson, E., Neljesjö, M., & Jansson, M. (2015). Implementation of open educational resources in a nursing programme: experiences and reflections. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 30(3), 252-266. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2015.1127140
Ferrance, E. (2000). Action research. Retrieved from https://www.brown.edu/academics/education-alliance/sites/brown.edu.academics.education-alliance/files/publications/act_research.pdf
Gallaway, T. O. (2016). OER Commons. Charleston Advisor, 17(4), 35-38. doi:10.5260/chara.17.4.35
Gurung, R. A. R. (2017). Are OE resources high quality?. In R. S. Jhangiani & R. Biswas-Diener (Eds.) Open: The philosophy and practices that are revolutionizing education and science (pp. 79–86). London: Ubiquity Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.f. License: CC-BY 4.0
Hamilton, M. L., Smith, L., & Worthington, K. (2008). Fitting the Methodology with the Research: An exploration of narrative, self-study and auto-ethnography. Studying Teacher for Education, 4(1), 17-28.
Hilton, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: A review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Education Technology Research and Development, 64(4), 573-590. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9
Hilton, J. Fischer, L., Wiley, D., Williams, L. (2016). Maintaining momentum toward graduation: OER and the course throughput rate. International Review of Research on Distance and Open Learning, 17(6), 1-10.
Mays, E. (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Retrieved from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/
Discussions are going on about what the connectivism is... Is it a theory, a model, or an approach? Well, I do not care about how to name it, my experiences say that, whether you like it or not, connectivism exists if you traverse among the networks and learn from networks.
Here is a recent review on "Knowing Knowledge" a book by Siemens which addresses many issues including connectivism.
There won't be much to say, but a declaration by a node (that is me ;) ) in the vast network of open spaces. There is open pedagogy and connectivism starts right over here...
In order to be open it is critical that educators have the skills to find and use Creative Commons licensed materials so they do not infringe on Copyright. Open Educational Resources (OER) are really not all that different than what I normally create – the only difference is the licensing.
My resource curation for learning to date has occurred primarily inside of the learning management systems at intuitions where I have taught and on YouTube. Typically I search library databases, Google, YouTube and relevant reputable websites using key terms. The only shift I need to make in order to create and use more OER online is to ensure that the license supports that. It really isn’t a huge shift for me since I am use to using public domain or paid images in my YouTube videos. For YouTube I need to check if my current paid resources allow CC BY licensing. Now that I have discovered the creative commons license option inside YouTube my options for finding CC BY content for OER has expanded.
Since I am actively expanding the use of my domain it only makes sense to move to curating OER. It would be awesome to have students use my website for a full learning experience. The Curator module on the extend website has opened up new possibilities for approaches for curating OER. I frequently use the Pixabay plugin for images on my word press blog. Recently I have also discovered the creative commons search tool. As explained in the Open Ed MOOC, when searching Google I can use the advanced filters to identify CC BY licensed material. On YouTube I often use playlists to organize and share key videos, including videos created by others. These playlists are then available for public perusal.
In my experience it is not really that hard to create OER. At times it is easier to create it than to find it. Sometimes finding OER can be more challenging based on the subject you are teaching. At the Ontario Extend Institute I remember sitting with someone who taught Anatomy in French. She had a really hard time finding resources. For me, the textbooks are quite limited right now, but the good news is that they can be adapted to suit the learning needs of your students. More and more open textbooks are being produced so someday they will get to nursing. Until then I can adapt books, which is easier than starting from scratch.
My suggestion to use #OER from @eCampusOntario to avoid bookstore textbook avalibility issues got some interest. We need more nursing books!
The largest barrier to fully embracing OER is the time required to create them. I have written an eBook and have been using my Summers to work on another one. They take a lot of time. While I would love to make them open it is hard to justify all that time away from my family if there is no compensation. It was hard enough to convince my husband that the first eBook was worth writing. Instead of publishing with a major publisher right now I am keeping my eye out for relevant textbook proposal calls. There are a few textbook projects I would love to work on if I could justify the time for it. All of them are because I could not find a good enough paid resource.
Second, is the lack of clarity around if I am “allowed” to produce OER if it relates to a course I am teaching – an issue that should get sorted out soon. No one wanted to broach this issue right before a strike but my workplace policy needs some clarity. I will probably engage in OER creation regardless because I believe in it, but it would be nice if it could be connected to what I am actually teaching. Also, if given compensation in some way it would influence how large of a contribution I can make. There is a world of possibilities in front of me.
Third, there is a lot of resistance to OER among my peers, which actually has been helpful for me when trying to think of what to research around OER. I am a researcher and want to come up with something meaningful. Thankfully there is an OER supportive community where I work that balances out these pessimists.
If you are still reading – Thank you. Maybe you can help me sort out a related question – Is blogging creating OER? Is it hypocritical that I call it OER since students aren’t allowed to cite them in formal papers in my program?
The end of Week 4 already, and it has been a week of highs and lows. I started the week thinking a lot about last week’s readings and videos. A silly joke stuck in my mind. I tried out a new piece of software and created the joke at the same time. Well, it wasn’t the funniest, but it WAS great fun to create!
One of the courses I put together and teach is Appreciation of eLearning Tools, which is why I am always playing with software. I have worked for Manukau Institute of Technology for 17 years, but I have only been in my current position since February 2017. Since then I have revamped four courses in the Graduate Certificate in Applied eLearning, I have revamped a course in the old Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, and I am currently looking at creating content for two courses in the new NZ certificate in Tertiary Teaching. The one course is Creative Delivery. Finding OER resources is a perfect way to go!
I enjoyed reading David Wiley’s blog (May 2, 2017) On OER Enabled Pedagogy. He claimed that the “the terms “open pedagogy” and “open educational practices” are understood so differently by so many people that there is literally no hope of achieving a useful consensus about the meaning of either of these terms”. I have noticed this in the readings and in the interviews I conducted for my Week 3 video. The use of the term OER-enabled pedagogy seems to be a laudible solution. David defined OER-enabled pedagogy as “ the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities”. This definition looks at the teaching and learning strategies using OER that are made possible through the use of OER and how these strategies impact on both learners and teachers. There is a simple logic underlying this pedagogical approach:
we learn by “doing” 4
copyright limits what we can do, therefore, it limits the way we learn 4
removing copyright opens up the possibilities and allows us to learn in new ways.
I also acknowledge the logic in the argument from Stephen Downes on Creating, Finding, and Using OERs. He discussed the background of Connectivism and his conversations with George Siemens. The similarity between the 5 Rs and the Connectivist model of learning with aggregation, remix, repurpose, and feed forward, is striking. Stephen argued that the underlying value and importance of OERs is not just in the realm of educational content. He suggested that instead of looking at OERs as merely educational content, we should be seeing them as conversations between learner and teacher, and between the learners themselves, with the ultimate goal of learning.
, edited by Robert Biswas-Diener and Rajiv Jhangiani. I have enjoyed the chapters of this book that I have read so far. The book’s introduction outlined some ideas on open access to education, something dear to my heart, As a foundation (bridging/enabling) educator for nearly ten years, teaching on a programme with open access, I have thought about these issues intensively. I attended a conference called Success and opportunity in Challenging Times (National Association of Enabling Educators of Australia, NAEEA 2015, held at Western Sydney University). I wrote a review of the discussion which centred on the reach of education, widening participation, and open access.
Western Sydney University, NAEEA, 2015
The book Open was of particular interest as the educators come from a background as researchers in psychology. Prior to qualifying as an educator at all levels of the curriculum, I was a qualified psychologist. I am very aware of the benefit of open research and open data in the area of psychology.
In the final chapter by Rajiv Jhangiani stated “The opposite of open is not closed; the opposite of open is broken”. He backed up his argument by referring to broken academic publishing practices, broken science protocols, and even “chips and cracks” in pedagogical beliefs. As he stated, “A great many educators continue to teach in a manner that assumes their principal role is that of content delivery, despite living in an age of unparalleled access to information” (p.268). He outlined the requirements for making open access, open science, open educational resources, and open pedagogy, the default practices in higher education.
Jhangiani used a delightful analogy, “The pencil metaphor” by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (licensed under CC BY 4.0.) based an idea from a friend and mentor, a fellow member of the Virtual Worlds Working Group, Lindy Orwin.
Pencil Metaphor
He stated that instead of approaching open evangelism as disparate factions, we should be united in a recognition and response to the wood (the audience), i.e. the mainstream who would follow open practice if it was required or they could see the benefits of doing so. I like to see myself as a sharp one, following the leaders, in this care George and David!
So, why do I mention lows for the week? One low stands out so clearly for me. If you want to find out what I did, check out my little video (a direct export from PowerPoint 2016, so nothing flash!) I cannot mention it again – if you want the facts, check out the video!
The highs? Well, using the information provided in the course material, I have been searching for resources using the links provided. What a wealth of material! I had not even realised that the Google Advanced Search would sort by usage rights. The OER Commons and the Creative Commons search – wonderful! My only problem now is selecting from the huge amount of OER resources available. I am so looking forward to the Week 6 challenge! I want to use, create, adapt, and contribute towards OER.
Vahid Masrour
