In May 2011 I had a wonderful opportunity to join colleagues in Asia at a capacity-building workshop on open educational resources (OER) at Wawasan Open University (WOU) in Penang, Malaysia.
In Malaysia, like everywhere I’ve visited in Asia recently, the economy seems to be booming, with more and more Malaysian citizens seeking to upgrade their skills and accreditation by taking advanced studies, many through open and distance learning (ODL). WOU is a new university that is boldly differentiating its programs using a refined approach to ODL that draws on innovative practices and proven technologies that can support learners with their academic quests. So it’s no surprise that Wawasan is also interested in the capabilities afforded by OER for its students and instructors.
In fact one enterprising young faculty member had already built Wawasan’s first prototype course on computer systems from existing and reusable OER materials. By presenting his work in progress, he demonstrated how open scholarship can work, inviting his colleagues to probe and ask about his thinking processes for the course design and the value that he added locally to contextualize the materials for a Malaysian audience. Great stuff from an institutional role model.
Workshop participants joined us from Pakistan, Hong Kong and other Malaysian higher education institutions. They were a highly experienced and knowledgable group that had no difficulty in seeing the promise of open. And like their counterparts in institutions worldwide, their questions focused primarily on how to promote the value of OER consumption and contribution among their colleagues, the quality assurance aspects of open resources, as well as questions of community and how they could find supportive mentors and colleagues to help them move forward.
We workshop facilitators Venkataraman Balaji (COL), Wayne Mackintosh (OER Foundation) and David Porter (BCcampus) provided our individual insights into key OER concepts over three days, using a combination of short 20-minute presentations followed by 20-30 minute activities that involved participants individually and in small groups with hands-on activities designed to immerse them in the “doing part” of OER. We also provided a prototype wiki-based course environment for self-study that we tested and will release for open access in late June 2011.
The workshop was organized and hosted by Tan Sri Dato’ Prof. Gajaraj Dhanarajan, emeritus professor, and Wawasan Open University’s first CEO. Raj has been CEO of Commonwealth of Learning and the Open University of Hong Kong. He is well known as a leader in distance education circles and has a long history of promoting capacity-building activities in Asia and in other parts of the planet.
The workshop materials were funded through IDRC (Canada). The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is a Canadian government (crown) corporation with a focus on ICTs as a key means to foster development.
Hi David,
Nice post! It is refreshing to see higher education colleagues around the world engaging with open education approaches. Collectively, each regional initiative will contribute to a thriving ecosystem which recognises regional strengths and differences while sharing the common experience for making education more affordable, more accessible and more efficient.
Increasingly, I sense that the leadership in mainstream adoption of OER will come from those institutions with well-founded distance education experience. These institutions get it, and have the tacit knowledge and experience to implement OER effectively.
Well done OER Asia!
Totally agree about ODL institutions having the aptitude and experience to run with the “open” ball. And, I suspect it will develop differently in the various institutional contexts.
The ODL crew certainly gets it and can get past some of the fundamental explaining that needs to happen on many FTF campuses. For the most part, their missions are about access and lowering barriers to entry for qualified students, or to help students qualify to study further.
d
Ah-ha ! There was intuition behind the design in IDRC ‘s support to the education field in Asia. The first brick was the ICT capacity building of DE institutions, the second was DET research and now onto OER capacity building, OER research and open development.
Thanks very much Raj and his WOU team, David, Balaji and Wayne for your great championship.
The buzz around OER and the growth of the movement cannot and will not happen unless there is serious advocacy like the type that you David, Wayne and Balaji are engaged in. We at Wawasan and the region were fortunate to have the intuitive leadership @IDRC prepared to invest modest resources and their enormous intellectual assets in promoting open source development.
There is a whole range of benefits that we in our part of the world can accrue from being part of the global movement. While the diversity of languages found around Asia may at times inihibit greater collaborative development of educational resources, I am confident that with the increasing capacities of machines to translate, in time we can achieve greater collaboration and sharing. The efforts we are currently making at promoting OER in the region is but a small beginning.