Yesterday, we had a visit at BCcampus from David Scannell, Curriculum Services Manager in the Learning Innovation and Development unit from Holmesglen Institute in Australia.

Holmesglen is a TAFE. In Australia, training and further education or TAFE (pronounced /ˈteɪf/) institutions provide a wide range of predominantly vocational tertiary education courses, mostly qualifying courses under the National Training System / Australian Qualifications Framework. (Source: Wikipedia)

Lawrence Parisotto (BCcampus) meets with David Scannell (Holmesglen, Australia)

The purpose of David’s visit to Canada is to investigate innovative practices in flexible learning for trades training.  He visited BCcampus to find out more about our systemic role with educational technology, and more specifically about the BCcampus role in designing and facilitating the framework for the E-PPRENTICE initiative that was funded by the Industry Training Authority of BC (ITACBC) in 2009-2010.

Our conversation with David Scannell reminded us that one of the ideas we originally proposed for E-PPRENTICE was a digital library of open resources for flexible trades training. Our thinking was that such a library could generate value well beyond the borders of BC by building synergistic relationships with other trades training institutions or providers. More further down…

Flexible Learning Revisited.

Flexible learning (FL) is a delivery model that responds to the unique learning needs of individual learners. FL combines traditional classroom or lab/shop experience with online or distributed learning, when a learner is primarily at a distance from the instructor and teaching institution. Learners in flexible learning programs or courses usually have a choice of schedule, as course calendars are not bound by time and space. Recent years have seen an increase in the use of emerging electronic technologies in flexible learning such as simulations and the Internet, offering the possibilities for sophisticated, interactive, and engaging learning opportunities for trades training programs, too.

The strategy for the E-PPRENTICE initiative resulted from an extensive planning process commissioned by ITABC for the development of a strategy to develop alternative modes of delivery for trades training. The intent of the initiative was to increase access for trainees and improve their success and completion rates. Read the Report.

Subsequently, the development of a Business Plan to move the project forward was requested. The Business Plan identified a number of specific objectives including a delivery model, an instructional plan, a set of standards, communication plan, along with an action plan and timetable for the strategy. Read the Business Plan. 

The ITA and BCcampus also created a Draft Standards for Flexible Learning for Trades Training in British Columbia document intended to explain fundamental components of flexible learning and serve as a guide for educators and those developing quality resources for the flexible learning environment.

As a result of the innovative initiative, E-PPRENTICE trades programs were developed for automotive programs at Vancouver Community College, professional cook programs at Camosun College and welding programs at the Piping Institute Apprenticeship Board (PIAB), and these programs are currently being offered to apprenticeship students around BC.

Where to next?

One of ideas from the original E-PPRENTICE plan was to create a library of open digital resources that could be used for both flexible learning and in other delivery formats within vocational programs.

The E-PPRENTICE program was developed with public funding.  Why not build a digital library to house the products of development, make them open and accessible and invite others to improve them and provide access the improved remixes? Surely that would be a great way to leverage public investment for the greater good while demonstrating a willingness to cooperate and collaborate to develop high quality learning materials for vocational programs.

One day after our visit with David Scannell, we were contacted by our partner agency ITABC to consider how we might reignite the notion of an open digital library for flexible trades training resources.

Sometimes the stars do align.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

d.