Such is the case with the whole open movement. I love the sentiments, the allure of community and collegiality. It is an ideal that I find compelling and attractive. I just like it. It feels right. The recent OpenEd 2009 conference in Vancouver was an opportunity to celebrate with others who are also drawn to this community and its approach to making knowledge accessible.

It’s clear that across North America, in Europe and in other parts of the world, there is now a growing movement to share educational resources in ways that leverage investment in instructional development many times over for the public good and for the opportunity to build sustainable knowledge communities.

In British Columbia, the organization I manage (BCcampus) has provided leadership in promoting open educational resources (OERs) as a strategy for developing and sharing educational models and instructional resources among our 25 public post-secondary institutions. The Online Program Development Fund (OPDF), established in 2003 by our Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market development has succeeded in demonstrating that institutions and educators can collaboratively develop educational resources and share them with their peers under specified conditions.

Publications and papers authored by BCcampus staff, by industry folks, and by UNESCO document the BCcampus rationale and role in the OER movement within the British Columbia academic domain.

In our case, we offer the choice of a Creative Commons license or own BC Commons license. Not surprisingly (to me), most developers and faculty choose the geographically limited BC Commons approach as a very tentative foray into the world of open. This seems like a realistic first step for many who are unfamiliar with the benefits and/or implications of a more open approach. The resonant value in open is not immediately apparent to everyone. What may seem sub-threshold openness to some, is actually a leap of faith by others.

The diagram below, developed by my colleague Paul Stacey, describes many of the decision points that need addressing in order for various constituencies of users to actually play in the open domain.

What remains for us is an explicit rationale for BC educators and institutions to participate in the OER movement in a more active manner, in a more open and on a more global basis.

For me, what works in a systemic context is an optimal approach to innovation, not an ideal one.

David Wiley’s invitation for readers of his blog to post on the reasons for their approach to openness sparked the notion to write this post.

“…clearly there is a long way to go before OER becomes mainstream, and any positive and practical suggestions you had on how to move it that way I’m sure would be appreciated by the community.”

Well here goes.

One of the powerful ways people learn (to teach) is from watching others and emulating their practice – often improving it through further iterations and enhancements. I know I’ve benefited from many wonderful teachers and colleagues in my career, and I’m fairly certain that the core beliefs and principles in my own practice arise from those experiences.

The first really “open course” I saw was a wiki-based approach that David Wiley modeled a few years back. I was still using learning management system models myself and was impressed by David’s approach. Even though I knew lots about keeping content and presentation separate throughout its life-cycle, I’d never seen any achievable examples of how to do that using lightweight tools completely under my control as an instructor.

At the same time, John Maxwell at Simon Fraser University, a former student, and more recently a mentor to me, was experimenting with wiki-based course environments for his SFU Publishing Program students.

Since then, I’ve seen other fine examples of open instructional practice from Alec Couros and from the team of Stephen Downes and George Siemens.

Couros – Social media and open education

Maxwell – Thinkubator

Siemens and Downes – Connectivisim

Most recently, my co-teaching colleague David Vogt and I have taken our UBC Master of Educational Technology (MET) course Ventures in Learning Technology into the open blogosphere using a Word Press MU (multi-user) environment. Previously, we’d explored various environments for hosting and engaging with students in this course, everything from WebCT Vista to Crowdtrust – an experimental social networking technology.

Without benefit of access to the models noted above we would have nothing obvious against which to compare our UBC MET experiences. And, I’m sure other folks are looking for models and examples for comparison and exploration, too. It think it would be a great service to see a catalog of examples of open-type course models that we could all explore and borrow from to suit our own instructional needs.

We’ve presented on our UBC course model, talked about why, what and how we do what we do in our course, and have reported on the experiences of our students. Recent presentation slides from the Canadian e-Learning Conference 2009 can be found here:

Breaking Out of the CMS: Civilizing the Open Internet Frontier for Learning

So, in answer to Scott’s question, I believe the simplest approach is best. Contribute examples of practice, be prepared to answer questions and critique about them. I think this could be an accessible starting point for many instructors wanting to go in the open direction.

We also need to bear in mind that what we’re talking about here should be close to the principles that Brian Lamb put forth in his post, Are you open enough?

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Using video stories collected from Net colleagues and friends, the prezo showed a way forward for marketing the goodliness of open without having to say anything else.

Bravo!

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Watched the screencast this morning of the Wiley Downes Dialogue from OpenEd09. Couldn’t help thinking phase change when the discussion crisscrossed terrain that has been traveled many times before at various conferences, forums and meetings since about 2000.   “It’s deja vu all over again,” as Yogi Berra said when describing repeated back-to-back home runs by Mantle and Maris in the early 60s. But it was more like veja du for me – I know I’ve been a party to these conversations countless times before. The discussions/arguments continue to hover around definitions, clarifications of terms, and wishful thinking about an education system that is what it is.

Some tweets on the subject (unattributed):

• …how many angels can dance on the head of a Creative Commons license? hoping Downes/Wiley move on to more fertile ground
• Let’s move it along Stephen and David… and, we wonder why the OER movement hasn’t really taken off…
• Didn’t expect Stephen and David to spend so much time arguing about what the definitive Zeppelin album is. And really… PRESENCE?

Now the above tweets have been selectively chosen to help me make my point. There are other tweets that reveal that many participants were drawn into the arguments to some degree. See here for more –> #opened09. And that’s a pity.

Unfortunately for the OER innovators and early adopters, what needs to happen to move the OER approach ahead is a lot more focus on the how, rather than on the what and why parts of the argument. A phase change really needs to take shape – one that involves actual practitioners, people who teach courses, normal humans, real instructors. A quick peek into the wiki list of participants at the OpenEd09 reveals a usual-suspects array of characters, devoid of the instructor base at which this innovation is aimed and pitched. This is not be the stuff of change, of implementation, of mainstreaming.

To move this innovation ahead will require another skill set, better (more authentic) marketers – and a phase change.

d.

I’ve read two separate articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the last two weeks, each highlighting instructor discomfort with technology tools in higher education classrooms.

One focused on the perils of desktop slideware. The other on the notion of parking techno-tools in favor of a social fasting approach.

The articles are commentary on the proliferation of slideware in post-secondary classrooms, as well as the perceived headlong rush towards amusing themselves to death that has been associated with NetGen students. Together these two rubs provide a sort of yin::yang relationship.

On the one hand it is easy to agree with students that it may be reasonable choice to focus on an engaging small screen experience when faced with a mind-numbing onslaught of 12-point type on the classroom big screen. Comments toThe Chronicle blog about “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” underscore the sentiment that is it not the technology that is bad, but the way it is so often used – seems like common sense to me.

However, the proponent of the article pushed the notion of “going naked” into the classroom a little further, emphasizing a greater need for engagement through thoughtful dialogue of the sort that occurs in small classes like those in graduate school or smaller colleges. But, the rub occurs when an instructor finds herself in front of a large-scale class of 100+ undergraduate students all sporting laptops and various mobile devices. I’ve faced this situation myself occasionally as a guest speaker. I literally scoped out one of the classes, an inter-disciplinary group of engineers, computer science and business students, a week in advance of my appearance, to try to better understand the classroom dynamic and to plan how I would engage their brains and devices simultaneously. I knew it was going to be a challenge.

Teaching remains a performance sport. What I’ve learned from my limited large-scale engagements is that like a good stand-up act, I’d need a set of “routines” (instructional strategies) around which I could structure large-scale classes, the course material and my interactions both verbal and digital with the learners. And, I’d likely need to work on the routines as ongoing projects to keep them fresh to ensure that actual learning or teachable moments were to occur in those lecture-style classes. I don’t know how others are coping, but I’d love to know. It’s not surprising to me that slideware becomes a default approach in an attempt to bring both structure and focus to classroom experiences. What is sorely needed is an updated pedagogy and new models of practice that would enable engagement of both brains and devices in various teaching situations, without backtracking to the “naked” approach.

The flip side of the story, the yang to the previously discussed yin, is the notion of social fasting that was put forward in The Chronicle article, “Professor Challenges Students to Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In.” In this scenario, the professor challenged students to come to his classes without benefit of social media devices and in fact by dropping other forms of media (movies, TV, video games) while they take his course. His exchange for their “fast” is an additional 5 percent in their overall grade.  Hmm.  Surely, the horse is out of that barn.

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