As a prelude to Open Access Week, BCcampus and partners invited higher education institutional participants to a special event exploring the ways in which Open Access and Open Educational Resources (OER) are opening up education, and probing how these ideas might provide an action agenda for BC higher education practitioners.

The event included a keynote address and panel presentations in the morning, and interactive sessions in the afternoon that were designed to collect feedback from the face-to-face participants as well as from online participants who followed the day’s events via live web streams and a backchannel Twitter feed. The web stream archive for each section of the Opening Education event can be found here –> open.bccampus.ca

Sir John Daniel’s speech on the topic of Publishing with Public Money for Public Benefit set the tone for the day on a high plane, one that validated the interest and commitment of audience members for making educational materials more freely accessible and remixable. Sir John’s speech also challenged us to confidently marshall our arguments in support of open education, open government and open data – in his words, “to provide a common wealth.”

The panelists, Venkataraman Balaji (COL), Wayne Mackintosh (OER Foundation), Rory McGreal (AthabascaU) and Joy Kirchner (UBC Library), each took a turn highlighting opportunities in the OER space for higher education institutions to engage students and instructors about the principles of open thinking. In each case the panelists demonstrated examples of practice from their areas of interest to show what is possible and where the future could take us. Their panel segments were web streamed.

• Balaji’s segment showed how COL has instituted open policies for its collection of highly valuable educational resources. He also complimented Canada’s expertise in agricultural sciences and noted that open knowledge in this domain could be used globally in support of food security initiatives

• Wayne provided a passionate overview of his work with world-class open projects such as WikiEducator and the newly minted concept of the Open Education Resource University (OERu)

• Rory spoke with his customary vigour about copyright and educational rights, highlighting Athabasca University’s approach to providing open access journals and other resources that it believes should be freely accessible under the mantra of open scholarship

• Joy presented a recent case-study of action on the scholarly communications front at the University of British Columbia, illustrating the actions that a large university must undertake in an effort to support its employees, instructors and students to operationalize a balanced approach to copyright management and open access

In the afternoon, Paul Stacey led an interactive session using wireless clickers to probe and collect audience opinion on issues associated with open thinking that might help us to build a systemic action agenda within the BC higher education sector.

Workshop participants discuss an “open” action agenda for BC higher education.

I followed Paul with an Etherpad session with the face-to-face participants and online audience to collect ideas on three themes that might helps us move forward on the open front.

1. How do we help educators learn more about open?
2. How can we best promote open teaching and learning practices in our institutions?
3. What can we do to influence policy in institutions?

For me it was a refreshing and re-energizing day, one that reinforced the spiral approach that needs to occur with innovative ideas as they move from the periphery to the centre of our thinking.

Open content and open access in higher education are barely 10-year old concepts in a digital age, but ones that I truly believe are beginning to show signs of becoming a larger part of the consciousness of students, instructors and institutions.

The stars are aligning in interesting ways to start this academic year.

It will certainly be a year of big challenges. And with those challenges will come the potential for breakthrough risk :: reward scenarios.

One of the challenges alluded to by the tweet copied above will be how institutions and instructors manage access to published educational resources for their courses, given the decision by UBC and a growing number of Canadian universities to back away from Access Copyright agreements. The proposed tariff increase was rightly viewed as gouging, and so 26 post-secondary institutions have decided to explore other options.

The options include direct negotiation with authors and publishers, as well as increased exploration of emerging alternatives such as open textbooks and other open educational resources (OER). No doubt there are many instances where the best resource is a published textbook or authored work. So, institutions will directly negotiate those rights as required to provide the resources that instructors and students can use.

And yes, it may be painful initially to move away from the current method of acquiring course-pack licenses, but the opportunity horizon is optimal for a new economy based on open resources, collaboratively built and shared among educators using Creative Commons licenses. This scenario is the upside that will be catalyzed by the proposed Access Copyright (AC) tariff increase that many major institutions are emphatically rejecting.

This may be the year that open educational resources become a mainstream alternative.

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.

Keynote speakers Tony Bates and Michael Peters each provided a unique perspective on the road ahead. And, each used a solid research foundation to support their predictions.

Tony Bates presented with his customary well-documented and researched materials on the current state of technology-enabled learning in our institutions and a view to the future. As a supporter of open education in all its forms, Tony was clear that quality remains the key factor that will help drive open educational resources (OER) from what is primarily a supply phenomenon to one that addresses demand for quality OER teaching materials, too. This particular dynamic is documented in a a recent blog post from Tony, titled “A reflection on the OER debate: every which way but loose.”

Michael Peters provided a another well-researched view of the educational landscape, and expanded on concepts of openness well beyond the OER teaching resources and self-study materials, making a call for more open scholarship and support for a “recursive public.” Michael is editing a journal that is currently calling for papers on “open.” Take a look at the E-learning and Digital Media call for manuscripts about teaching and learning with OER.

I couldn’t find Michael’s paper from the TRU event online, but I did find this 2008 presentation that will give a flavour of his perspective.

Image source: By Tengis Bilegsaikhan from Milan, Italy (Naadam) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

I traveled to Mongolia in September 2010 as part of an external resource team and as a guest of the DREAM IT research project. DREAM IT is the local coordinating project for IDRC-funded research in Mongolia. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is a Canadian government (crown) corporation with a focus on ICTs as a key means to foster development.

Mongolia is developing quickly with almost half its population located in its capital, Ulaanbaatar. One of the first signs I saw in Mongolia was a coming soon billboard for Ikea Ulaanbaatar. Along the roadway from the airport to my city hotel were dealerships for Mercedes and Jeep, as well as breweries that produce the many popular beers you can enjoy in Mongolia. This country is in rapid growth mode.

The city centre had many hotels, restaurants and new shops that demonstrated that Mongolia is quickly becoming a major tourist destination as well as a centre for business and commerce. Sukhbaatar Square at the centre of Ulaanbataar (UB) is an impressively large public square flanked by government buildings and imposing statues.

Traffic in UB is mega, with buses, trucks, SUVs and cars everywhere competing for driving lanes, giving the city a gridlock feel throughout the work day. Getting anywhere, even short distances within the city took a longish time. Contrast this with travel outside the city – in the wide open spaces, where few cars were seen on a 80 kilometre journey to a rural school in Erdene Soum.

The “model” school we visited in Erdene was both well-equipped and well run, judging from what I saw there and from the teachers, students and administrators I met. There were three computer labs we visited. One that was used for teaching high school students and the others that were part of a teacher-training centre within the school.

The administrators were totally up front about what worked and didn’t. Network bandwidth was not always good and the school team has resorted to keeping a set of caching servers available for bandwidth intensive applications such as video programs. Any thoughts of a networked-enabled distance learning initiative would clearly be a challenge. However, anything that relied on distribution systems based on discs and servers would be well supported.

I found references in school texts to a localized version of Joomla in use in Mongolian schools as part of the ICT course for high school students. We also learned that Moodle had been localized for use in Mongolia through a previous DREAM IT research project. Excellent first steps for an ICT education build out.

Mongolia is resource rich. The mining industry is central to country’s future. So, a careful approach to leveraging investment from resource extraction is seen as a key to the development agenda, as is investment in the education and training of the country’s citizens. It’s no coincidence that the DREAM IT project is active in the health, environment, IT and education sectors, sponsoring local research and development and capacity-building initiatives with a view to influencing policy development from the outcomes of successful projects.

During my ten days in Mongolia, I helped deliver a national seminar on distance education and open educational resources (OER) and demonstrated the potential of these strategies for bringing wider access to learning resources for all Mongolians. Educators, administrators, and researchers from the general education and TVET sectors attended the national distance learning and OER seminar and were highly engaged in discussions throughout the day-long event.

Mongolia is actively pursuing an educational reform process that will bring a new shape and structure to its elementary and secondary education systems. At the same time it is embarking on a major initiative to develop an innovative technical and vocational education and training (TVET) initiative supported by the Millennium Challenge Fund.

The primary outcome of the seminar and the many meetings throughout our team’s visit to Mongolia will be a research proposal to DREAM IT for the support of two 18-month long OER capacity-building initiatives in the general education and TVET sectors that will begin in 2011.

I know the initiatives will be a success because the spirit of Chinggis will make it so.

One of the most interesting presentations made during the visit was by OMT Vietnam, an online management training company headed by the dynamic Ms. Dau Thuy Ha. OMT has a cool business model that uses open source software and open educational resources to support both the infrastructure and training needs of the emerging business market in Vietnam.

Many companies are building up their operational capacity across Vietnam and have an emerging need for workplace training. OMT has focused on this business need to provide localized versions of Moodle that can be customized to suit a particular company and be hosted centrally in a virtualized environment. Easy to set up, predictable cost, fully-supported.

To support the training needs of Vietnamese companies, OMT is translating and localizing open educational resources (OERs) that are available from multiple OER sources, including Connexions.

OMT has also joined forces with the Vietnam Foundation’s (VNF) OER initiative and will not only be using open resources to support its own training business, but in the true spirit of open, OMT will make the translated and localized resources available through the VNF’s library of open courseware that can be used by institutions throughout Vietnam.

These kinds of innovative synergies between business and academic organizations on “open terrain” point a way forward to sustainability in my view.

If you know of other similar examples of business and academic synergies in the open domain, please leave a comment and a link.

I was pretty cranky in August 2009 during the OpenEd 2009 conference that was held here in Vancouver for which my organization was a co-sponsor. My blog posts during the conference were critical of the primary OER advocates as marketers to teachers and faculty. My criticism was that they were miscast in that role. While they had done a masterful job of illuminating the concept, filling the blogosphere with good ideas, and marketing the promise to foundations that fund innovation, my belief was that it would take actual teachers, instructors and students who could demonstrate success in an OER context to bring consolidation and sustainability to the goals of the open movement. Further, it seemed that little real effort was occurring on the inclusion or promotion of teachers and teaching, and that OpenEd conferences continued to be conversations within an insular community of theorists and advocates – not the stuff of implementation, nor a demonstration of broad impact.

I hope that in 2010-2011 we will see a rise in the generosity of spirit that is promoted in the OER community, through a new focus on the nurturing of successors with implementation, consolidation and sustainability skills. If the best way forward is to give away knowledge for free, then maybe this is a good time to demonstrate a similar approach to marketing an open educational resource future, by identifying and promoting new advocates who are closer to the problem for which OERs are the solution.

Scroll to 5:45 in the video below to get to the actual starting point.

Grant Potter of UNBC was broadcasting a live panel session using the UStream iPhone app. The panel featured Rory McGreal (Athabasca), Stephen Downes (NRC) and Liz Burge (UNB) talking about issues surrounding the use of open educational resurces (OER).

This was a quick hit of professional development that was both enjoyable and thought provoking. I especially liked Liz’s probes of OER value propositions from a practitioner perspective, and the response it it provoked from Stephen.  Great fun, as well as stimulus for reflection and further consideration.

Two things were notable:

• The ease with which this sort of micro-broadcast could be done live, with relatively good picture and audio quality
• The potential that this medium has for quickly engaging a viewer with a high-level presentation or conversation, and for conveying the feeling that you are as much there as the audience was in Saint John

Although I didn’t ask a question, I know that had I tweeted to Grant he would have happily served as a proxy for a question.

Grant’s archive of CNIE 2010 micro-broadcasts is here.

While searching using “simple, easy, agile” and other adjectives to describe “OER workflow,” I finally got a hit that made sense.

OER Workflow Diagram by Lisa Rogers – Heriot-Watt University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

The OER workflow diagram by Lisa Rogers, and the explanation of its use is a valuable resource.

Thank you, Lisa.

d.

WikiEducator (WE) began its life as the brainchild of New Zealander, Wayne Mackintosh, and grew and flourished while Wayne served as an Education Specialist, eLearning and ICT Policy at Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in Vancouver, Canada.

Recently, Wayne and WE have moved back to New Zealand, and WE is now operated under the auspices of the newly created Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation that was officially launched on 17 September 2009.

WE provides free training for its community members through a series of workshops and seminars conducted online using WE itself, Google Groups, and though live events using the WizIQ web conferencing system. I got a late start, actually 5 days late, but quickly got caught up with assistance from the workshop host Patricia Schlicht and encouragement from other participants.

What makes the WikiEducator training so convivial is its pace and usefulness in guiding novice wikinauts through the core principles of wikitext in a manner that allows them to demonstrate incremental skill acquisition using a graded certification scheme. WE participants can earn designations such as WikiApprentice and WikiBuddy and all the way to WikiMaster – in a simple but effective manner that builds skills and confidence. This approach made it easy for me to catch up five days worth of training in a few hours over the weekend and feel part of the group, a sense of belonging that is a vital link when you try new or hard stuff beyond your normal comfort zone.

I can’t help thinking that my experience with WE to date is certainly not unique. Thousands of others have registered for this training – 14,000 by the most recent count.

And, as part of the training program, WE participants were asked to start a Sandbox activity in their user space. I’ve begun mine with a view to examining an agile workflow for OER development and deployment – not agile from a tech-weenie perspective, but agile from a teaching-human perspective.

The big issue, raised at a live web conference event on September 27/28 (depending on your time zone), using a whiteboard onto which everyone was invited to scribble questions was, “What comes next for WikiEducator– or maybe more importantly, what comes after what comes next?”

In a WizIQ whiteboard question for Wayne Mackintosh last night I also asked what the conceptual map for WikiEducator was, and followed it up with a few other questions.

How will WE work beyond its community authoring roots to service actual use cases of teachers who may be bound to open source or proprietary delivery systems in K-12 or higher education environments?

How do we meet teachers where they are in terms of beliefs, access, tools and experience and provide them with an agile WE OER workflow that allows them to extend themselves without imposing a pain-for-gain threshold that is too high?

Further updates coming…

d.

The Mulder presentation conveyed a sober view of what it actually takes to move open education and OER models forward in the context of academic, institutional and political structures that are specific to individual jurisdictions. Fred’s examples were attuned to the reality of the Netherlands, but much of his approach is likely generalizable in other western contexts.

My take-aways:

Have a systemic strategy (make it explicit)

Use a strategy than spans K-Life (K-12, post-secondary and beyond)

Market the strategy effectively (to colleagues, to funders, to politicians)

Draw upon supporting strategies from other contexts (The Netherlands pointed to India’s strategy)

Pick an ideal license model for OERs (even if you’ve previously chosen something less than ideal)

Seek adequate funding

Use open textbooks as an easy entry point to providing open resources systemically

Understand that a mix of open and proprietary may be a reality you will face

Ensure that training and research are the complementary bookends of the implementation process

d.

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!

d.

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 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.