Some real pioneers from BC were in the audience for the event, including Brian Lamb (UBC) and Scott Leslie (BCcampus). Brian and Scott will be taking taking the lead for OpenEd12 that will be held in Vancouver, and this will persent another opportunity for us to bring greater numbers of educators into the circle. We’ll be promoting that conference hugely starting in early 2012.

And, we hope we’ll be able to attract you back for an update on the growth and development of OERu.

I was encouraged by the depth of understanding of OER issues among participants attending the meeting. This signals a level of maturity in thinking. Canada and British Columbia have the foundations to establish a global leadership position in building sustainable OER futures.

Congratulations on an excellent event and leading by example! Great to see these resource released under open content licenses.

The rest of the world should be watching this space!

d.

d.

Great comment.

I’m not sure what the final assessment was of this particular MOOC, but the effort required for me to sustain participation far outstripped any nuggets I gleaned. Time remains a limiting factor, as you note. And for me, the value has to be more inviting and immediate to capture both my interest and input in a cooperative learning model such as MOOC.

Looking forward to your upcoming blog post on this item. Taking a stand on this item *will* require work and the commitment to facilitate a viable alternative path.

d.

Then again, this has been an opportunity to tell some instructors about the alternatives, and at least some of them are receptive. There’s no question we will be reusing more OER at UBC this year. And hopefully this object lesson will illustrate the importance of sharing more of our own stuff.

Re. “Does anyone know where the notion that MOOCs hold potential as exemplars of the “future of education” actually came from? Size and openness suggest inclusiveness but this certainly isn’t a place I’d expect to find students from our community college hanging out–now or in the future. Maybe we should stop trying to force meaning or a greater purpose on this project?”

I confess that I extrapolated the “future of education” bit to instigate response – which I got almost immediately from Stephen Downes (scroll down).  Stephen along with George Siemens has been a pioneer of the MOOC. You’ll find many references to their work both singularly, and as a team on MOOC initiatives. Rather than quoting Stephen and George, follow the links and you’ll see how they write about open online courses in their own words.

My interest in following the MOOC path stems from my interest in the OERu concept. Wayne Mackintosh is the primary proponent of OERu. There is a study group component of the eduMOOC that is actively conceptualizing how large numbers of learners can participate in the OERu concept. You can take look at the deliberations and research questions. Clearly a central issue for OERu will be how to organize activities, events and processes for self-directed learning on a large scale. Thus the question of whether MOOCs hold promise for that potential future.

Thanks again for your comments.

Good one. Yes, there is a serendipitous aspect to MOOCdom. I do likewise in following alternate paths not usually followed (or known) in MOOCs and blog posts, and it has paid some dividends. But it feels more like luck than intentional design. Maybe that’s a less obvious value, and maybe that is a loosely-coupled design principle at work.

I guess my gut is telling me that design plays a bigger role, and that the freeform aspects of the MOOC while useful after much active filtering, may not be my preferred or even ideal “study orchestration,” – (serendipitous link provided by following posts by Tony Bates, by design intent.)

d.

Does anyone know where the notion that MOOCs hold potential as exemplars of the “future of education” actually came from? Size and openness suggest inclusiveness but this certainly isn’t a place I’d expect to find students from our community college hanging out–now or in the future. Maybe we should stop trying to force meaning or a greater purpose on this project?

Scott

No doubt there is enormous potential in MOOCdom. My reaction was to the volume of activity and the cognitive load it presents, requiring a mega-filtering to glean potentially useful stuff as a self-directed learner. Many of the participants in the current MOOC activities are professional educators with lots of information filtering skills. How does it work for a novice to the domain, like some of the targeted demographic for OERu?

I tweeted last week that I was “up to my elbows in MOOC,” and it still feels like that. It’s hard work to find the nuggets of gold – maybe too hard.

d

d.

d.

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.

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

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!

d.

Your reflection on “convivial tools” for the contemporary education professionals makes me think hard. Regretably we don’t have books by Illich translated into Vietnamese language for broad readership yet.

Still – allow me to re-quote your view above on our new blog omt4you.elearn.vn.

Let’s all pick up and share the techno-tools!

Bravo.

d.

Greetings from Hanoi, Vietnam. It’s truly encouraging to see resonance from afar and on behalf of OMT team, thank you for this spiritual support!

We have since then agreed with the ILO Vietnam office to develop the online version of their popular “Know About Business” program in Vietnamese language and host it free for one year (kab.vn – currently under construction), so that the vocational schools in Vietnam can make use of the online courses to enrich their classroom teaching experience. For OMT, we hope to use this portal as a “demo” for us to get business from the schools: there will come a time when they want us to do ToT to their teachers and deploy the customised elearning system for them.
Again, I really appreciate David’s request that if anyone knows about other synergies b/w educational and business in the world, let’s share this information and see how we all can leverage each other’s resources in this flat world.

P.S: KAB is the ILO-spearheaded entrepreneurship education program for secondary, vocational and higher education: http://kab.itcilo.org/en

“I do not see much reason to distinguish between educational resources and other types of intellectual property”. As Homer would say; “Duh!” It amazes me to see ‘sectors’ believe that their media, and the Intellectual Property (IP) embedded in it, has somehow more credibility or value if presented by “an expert”. Most professional crystal balls seem to have the same clarity.

I’m viewing this from The Nederlands = the National leaders in replacing printed materials with pre-print (in my opinion) . The idea of “links in the chain” being “closed” shows the confusion in understanding the change in publishing paradigms. And sentences like “We can pressure the intellectual resources industry to change”, while full of good intent, don’t help.

Yes “OERers can pressure the PUBLISHING industry to change, simply by working with a couple of other professions. The first is the technicians who run the NRENetworks in each country, and have yet to hear from a LOUD lobby group who represent global groups. The second profession is (National) librarianship. It’s National or Institutional repositories, or silence. They could aggregate content and provide a directory on a global basis (this is the World Wide Web), if OERers had a little insight into how networks are constructed. They don’t, so we are overwhelmed by duplications of OER materials, buries in silos all over the web.

OK, enough bitching. Run a survey. Who’s got an eduroam account? OK. There’s your first step to a common sign on to all sorts of global comms tools. E.g. http://www.surfnet.nl/en/samenwerkingsomgeving/pages/default.aspx
(and yes leigh, I do understand why you’d throw stones at eduroam. But it’s the easiest way to stitch the national networkstogether.)

Next question. If you were a user in a huge unclassified (web) library of OER materials (as we are today), and access to all the same tools. How would you find anything, especially your peers?

You know I’m not sure Illich’s ideas of being imprisoned in a global Classroom are that much help here. But it does seem to describe the OERer’s perspective. They are, as a librarians would say, “buried in the stacks”. ) But I do love their passion.

Yes, I believe there are multiple ways forward.
Yes, good things happen outside institutions.
Yes, I’ve cherry picked the aspects of conviviality that resonate with my sensibilities.
Yes, I believe that change can happen just as effectively within systems, as outside.
Yes, I believe the world has turned many times since 1973.
Yes, I think we have to constantly retune to suit the current context.
Yes, we can each be effective on our chosen paths.

d.

“I guess as an oldster of sorts, I find this notion that there is only one *real* way forward, well….. narcissistic.”

I interpreted your post as being that you believed there was only one *real* way forward. That OER reaches critical mass when teachers take it up and evidence is shown within that norrow scope. This to me ignored a wider posibility and seemed to contradict your use of Illich to frame your blog. The “good job and enriching the lives” goes on outside the institutions.

But my question remains unanswered. As an “oldie” how have you reconciled your appreciation for Illich with your perspective here in this post, along with your reply to my comment? Is it as simple as, Yes, I’m a pragmatist.”? Or is it you’ve come to dismiss the core argument that Illich used: Institutions eventually solve obly the problems they create. I’m certain that if Illich were alive today, he’s stick would be much sharper than mine. I ask all honesty, because I do the same work as you, and refer to Illich in a big way. Perhaps I should dismiss it too, if I am to practically continue in our line of work?

Regards from the “narcissistic, dismissive youth”

Yes, I’m a pragmatist. The people I deal with are primarily faculty, instructors and students who are in universities, colleges and schools. No doubt about it.

And, I don’t underestimate or dismiss the capability of university-based educators for doing a good job and enriching the lives of their students using resources of their own creation, or those of created and made freely available by others. The best of them assume that their students are largely responsible for finding their own way forward and intentionally point to intellectual foot and toe holds they’ll need to advance upwards. As “instructors,” they are only close to students for a fraction of the the students’ lives.

And, I don’t doubt that significant change is underway, or that radical shifts will occur. But to actively segment the primary actors (“prisoners running the prisons”) into those who “get it” and those who never will, seems counter-productive and anti-social. Why would you seek to actively ignore, or even drive away a talented population with a latent capability for positive change in the open sense?

I guess as an oldster of sorts, I find this notion that there is only one *real* way forward, well….. narcissistic.

d.

The new piece of research you recently announced on your own site re. open textbooks and the affordances for self-regulation in students will be something I look forward to reading.

But what I’d like to know here, is how you reconcile your appreciation for Illich, and your call for teachers here? Apart from OER being primarily a solution to the problems created by teachers, aren’t you ignoring the deeper prospects of OER: conviviality and deschooling?

I see OER (actually, drop the R or change it to R for Reform) primarily as a critique on education and the role teachers play in sustaining institutionalised learning. Teachers (institutionalised) should be the last group should want to engage with open education.

It seems to me your call is based on a respect for educational practice in its current form, and an expectation that OER should be demonstrated in those terms. Quite the opposite, I think OER shows that education (learning) would benefit with more radical rethinks, and opportunities outside the status quo. Looking to teachers to demonstrate that would be like asking prisoners to run the prison. Look outside. Look to communities online that support learning without any premise to “education”, or “teachers”. Rewatch an Anthropological Introduction to Youtube, and other works by Wesch. Most of all, reread Illich – particularly his recap on Deschooling – Imprisoned in the Global Classroom, I think listen more carefully to the “marketers and theorists” of OER who are attempting to channel this perspective.

http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/group/researchers/

This is an excellent research paper. Please join the College Open Textbooks Ning and our research group and post it. I would be happy to do that but it really helps if others post on the group.

If you cannot post it, we will do so.

Jacky

As a return, here is a reference on Open Educational Practices that my colleague Paul Stacey just sent me. This is another promising research direction.

d.

Your original post called for “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.”

Our research partner, the Institute for Studies of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) is interviewing dozens of instructors, students, administrators, bookstore managers, and librarians using or promoting open textbooks. ISKME’s research will be published in a peer reviewed journal,. Other research is available at http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/group/researchers

We publish lists of instructors and professors who have adopted open textbooks at http://cnx.org/content/m34356/latest/ and http://cnx.org/content/m18261/latest/

Anyone at any school in the world who has adopted an open textbook is invited to notify us at http://collegeopentextbooks.org/adoptedtextbooks.html

We are creating author/adopter communities. The pilot is for Ron Hammond’s sociology textbook. Instructors and students need ancillaries and these communities will create those essential items.

Best,
Jacky

PS: Barbara Illowsky and I were at OpenEd in Vancouver. The conference was great but it was preaching to the choir. We all need to go to conferences of people who do not know what OER is. Barbara recently gave a presentation at the Text and Academic Authors Association conference. Her topic: How Open Licensing Improved Our Textbook and Our Careers. She will give the same talk at a math conference this fall.

Many thanks for this response. I’m all for intentional strategies that drive value to end users, primarily learners and teachers. Your pragmatic approach with the Collaborative is one that I can certainly support.

Open textbook models stand as one of the best examples of how open can work in any higher education context. It’s hard to argue against a resource model that can both lower costs and provide a more flexible medium with which to study.

And, thanks for the references. We highlight Prahalad’s BoP concepts in a master’s course I co-teach called Ventures in Learning Technology, ETEC 522 at the University of British Columbia.

d.

My perspective is primarily from the point of view of open textbooks but it also applies to many other forms of open content. I also do not see much reason to distinguish between educational resources and other types of intellectual property. An art gallery may be one person’s education, another’s entertainment, and someone else’s career.

I was feeling down about open content a few months ago. We had a high-tech CFO analyze the textbook industry and his prognosis was that open textbooks would never be a more than a tiny percentage. Then he made a startling recommendation: get the textbooks companies to help the open movement. Remember that IBM fought Linux until it embraced it. Already MacMillan is offering modifiable textbooks. Other for-profits are getting into the picture, e.g., homework programs that work with open textbooks.

One role the OER community can take on is gadfly. We can pressure the intellectual resources industry to change just as credit unions force banks to change.

Our Collaborative is also starting to talk with educational organizations that make top-down textbook decisions: private colleges and the military. Not only will adoptions be faster with these organizations, they will provide resources to update and improve the textbooks.

This only works if the open movement really cares about results rather than just being anti-industry. A big mistake is to approach OER as altruism. I strongly recommend two books:
* C.K. Prahalad: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Alleviating Poverty through Profits
* James Tooley: The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves

Regards,
Jacky Hood
Director, College Open Textbooks http://collegeopentextbooks.org
Director, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources http://oerconsortium.org

I need to think about this a bit more, and perhaps post something further.

Reference: Engestrom, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualisation. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133-157.

The power of sound boarding ideas in the open. Yeah the notion of a “Thematic” approach for making the future happen is potentially a productive way forward …

W

For me, the intentionality of a thematic approach allows potential participants to quickly identify with a specific value proposition that fits their needs or interests, and compels them to join a community of practice, or even start their own.

Simply naming a few specific examples, as you have done, is a step forward.

Thanks.

d.

When I heard the OMT model described, I thought it could work just as well here in North America. We already have companies supporting open source education platforms like Moodle. If they could strike an alliance with academic partners in a similar or alternative manner, it might provide win-win proposition that lowers costs for both and makes good stuff more available and more polished for multiple uses.

I’ll definitely be following these developments, too.

It’s interesting–and encouraging–to see this kind of partnership that will reuse, re-purpose, and localize existing open educational resources and share the results. As you point out, it could provide a model for sustainability in OERs. Looking forward to following the progress of this initiative to see how it works out.

Sorry, I have no similar examples to share at this time.

The open textbook approach is also a very pragmatic way of demonstrating economies of scale, and the cnx.org folks at Rice University have lead the charge on that front. FlatWorld Knowledge is another bold and helpful approach. Washington State’s new foray into open courseware/textbooks further demonstrates the value of an organizational strategy at a macro-level. For me, these approaches and our own are “low-hanging fruit type value propositions” for open development models. Easy to spot, straightforward to describe, and with clear intent that can capture both attention and financial support.

However, aside from your own WikiEducator initiative, I actually see very few outreach models that address teachers and instructors directly, and that demonstrate clear value or present a credible pain-for-gain argument. Surely, this is an important omission given that teachers and students are the primary targets in the OER value chain.

Where are the user stories of success, and who’s promoting them?

I agree — and good reflection. In some respects a good sign of the maturation of the OER field. We’re starting to question implementation in a substantive way

Notwithstanding the tireless work of our OER advocates who have done a sterling job so far — OER is nowhere near being a mainstream practice and you’re right – -still lots of work to do before we achieve critical mass.

In addition to your point about the inclusion of teachers and teaching, I also think its important to cross the chasm from individual engagement to organisational implementation where institutions start aligning strategies and incentive systems which are more OER friendly. I think the best way to do this is through institutional engagement on focused collaboration projects with buy-in and commitment from the participating organisations. This learn-by-doing implementation approach will help organisations experience the benefits while gaining first-hand experience in preparing for these futures. Let’s focus on those dimensions which are important for organisations and show how OER does a far better job than traditional models.

I think OER futures are inevitable and in years to come when we look back at this juncture in history — will we wonder why it took so long?

Cheers,