Big and Little OER

I have just finished reading Chapter 7 of Martin Weller’s The Digital Scholar, entitled “Public Engagement as Collateral Damage”. In this chapter, Weller argues that there is a distinction between “big OER” and “little OER” projects, and makes a case for universities engaging in more little OER projects.

“Big OER” projects often mean broadcasting or publishing well-researched, high-quality educational material with high production values, a clear purpose and a target audience. The advantage of this approach is that the output is high quality, and recognisable as the university’s “brand”. However, projects such as these come with a high price tag and central planning and coordination.

“Little OER” projects refer to “the long tail” of public engagement – i.e. material with relatively small numbers of views, which total a large number of views when taken as a whole. Weller argues that with a relatively small adaption to existing closed practices, universities can, as a whole, make a large difference to open education. This can include making lecture notes and reports on meetings made open. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require central planning, or a clear purpose, or expensive high production values.

One issue that occurred to me in considering big versus little OER was the impact on the time that university staff have available. Although opening up existing practices should not require a huge amount of time – that would defeat the purpose of “little OER” – it does create a pressure on potentially time-poor staff. In my experience, innovations such as these often create an extra burden on staff without anything else being taken away. For example, publishing the outcome of meetings openly should take the place of writing a (closed) report – not supplement it.

In addition, encouraging staff to open up their teaching practices might be a difficult sell. Again, in my own practice, I have noticed that a lot of teachers do not like to be observed, as it makes them feel they are being judged. Who is going to convince them that their every professional choice is not going to be scrutinised under the watchful eye of the general public? And if staff development is necessary to bring about this change in culture, does that not require time and money, which is what little OER is meant to minimise the demands on?

Lastly, there is a question of rights. If a practitioner chooses to make his/her teaching material openly available, who owns the copyright/creative commons license? The practitioner or the institution? (This is not a rhetorical question – does anyone know the answer?)

I’d love to hear if anyone has any answers or challenges to what I’ve said! Leave a comment below!

An OER course on Digital Skills

This activity asked us to imagine a specific group of learners and how we might deliver a course on “digital skills” using OERs.

I chose to focus on undergraduates of science/mathematics degrees, and the digital skills I chose are on specific tools and skills that are necessary in a mathematics degree. I imagine this course would be used for first-year / first-level undergraduates.

Week	Topic	Resources	Suitability (G/M/B)
1	LaTeX: getting started	A Gentle Introduction to TeX (from Merlot), Chapters 1-3	Not ideal – not really specifically mathematical, but good starter.
2	LaTeX: mathematical typesetting	Chapters 4-6	Good, now that the maths gets underway.
3	Geogebra: getting started	Learn and Use Geogebra (from Merlot), Lessons 1-3	Great resource
4	Geogebra: more advanced features	Lessons 4-6	Great resource
5	Geogebra: animation and more	Lessons 7-9

What I found frustrating about this activity is that I didn’t manage to find anything useful from any of the sites listed except for Merlot. The others either didn’t have anything on LaTeX (or typesetting in general) or Geogebra, or they had material which consisted of just a useless page from a “book” and I couldn’t access the whole thing.

Another issue I found with this activity is how quickly my ideas were shaped by what was available. The learning objectives I had in mind were adapted to whatever I could find, rather than the other way around.

In addition, I was reluctant to just pick and choose parts of resources, and instead took an “all-or-nothing” approach. Because of the hierarchical nature of developing these skills, I didn’t want to skip out chapters/sections/lessons that might have been referred to in later material.

This has been my frustration with OERs generally in the past – materials don’t quite fit the learning objectives I have in mind, so I either ditch them entirely and write something from scratch or change my learning objectives to suit whatever the resource is. Neither of these approaches seems very satisfactory in my opinion!

Three Issues for the Future of OERs

This activity ties together a previous activity where I identified what I thought were the three main challenges to open education for the future, and this week’s reading on Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Issue 1: Where are all the OERs?

One of the challenges I identified for the future of open education concerned digital literacy. This was essentially a question of access: how do students and practitioners find OERs, especially if they don’t feel they are particularly tech savvy?

Two of the key findings from the OER Research Hub’s OER Evidence Report were:

• “Knowing where to find resources is one of the biggest challenges to using OER,”
• “General knowledge of well-established OER repositories is low.”

This suggests that one of the main challenges for the future of open education is making people aware of what is available. The report suggests that awareness is increasing, and the more that students and practitioners use and engage in open practices, the more of a “snowball effect” will take place.

However, the belief in the mantra “build it and they will come” may not be enough. The report also makes the point that the most commonly used OER providers are the Big Three: YouTube, Khan Academy and TED. This suggests that there needs to be better brand awareness of OER repositories, which is something the OER movement is capable of achieving – if the Big Three can achieve it, why can’t the rest?

In summary, it is all very well and good to claim that OERs increase accessibility because they are free and available to anyone, but if no one except an elite group of technophiles and fan boys are finding them and using them, what challenge do they actually serve to traditional, closed forms of education?

Issue 2: Do students know what is best for them?

The JISC report contains several tensions and challenges for the future of open education, and one in particular seemed to chime with my concerns about whether students engage in deep learning with OERs.

As resources become increasingly open to a wider audience, the demand for OERs shapes the type of resource that is made available. If video lectures get more hits, then “more video lectures shall you have”. However, as the JISC report states, this is often at odds with more collaborative pedagogies that practitioners may have in mind – beliefs which are borne out of educational research.

The point here is that what students like is not necessarily what’s best for their learning. Students may feel that passively watching a video or individually working through an online quiz may suit their learning preferences, but if they are not really having their preconceived beliefs challenged or being put out of their comfort zone, how much deep learning can we realistically say is happening?

In order to tackle this issue, OERs have been created with collaborative pedagogies in mind – there are many OERs which embed social forms of learning using Web 2.0 technologies and social media. However, if universities continue to respond to student demand for resources based on individualist pedagogies, there is a risk of flooding the internet with resources which only emphasise a surface approach to learning.

Issue 3: Do OERs enhance or hinder assessment?

The last issue is a commonly cited problem in open education: assessment. Certainly the rise of OERs allows for innovative forms of assessment, such as the online self-assessment quizzes that the OER Research Hub report finds are popular with students.

However, as alluded to above in Issue 2, can automated quizzes really take the place of feedback from peers or experts? Institutions like Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) are experimenting with peer feedback approaches, but these require a certain critical mass of engaged participants in order to be effective. And anyway, students find feedback from an expert to be the largest motivating factor.

In addition to the forms of assessment used, there are questions of accreditation. Digital badges are one way of recognising informal open learning which have been proven to be a modest success.

However, the question of accreditation goes deeper than just recognising informal learning. With the rise of OERs that can essentially do a mathematical calculation for you automatically and display all the steps of working necessary, practitioners in formal education are also presented a challenge of what to do with OERs. As my colleague, who encountered exactly such an online calculator remarked, “I might keep this particular resource from my students!” However, if OERs continue to rise in popularity, she may not be able to keep it “closed” for long!

My experience of open education

I have to confess, I don’t have much experience of open education myself, even though I’m really interested in it as a concept.

I have signed up for a MOOC before – the one which complements H817, in fact. That was why I started this blog in the first place. However, I didn’t get very far with it – I missed the participation of others, and thought I would wait until I studied it formally on H817.

As for OERs, I am again interested in using them, but I have rarely properly got off the ground with them. I sometimes tell students to look something up on Khan Academy or OpenLearn for extra resources, but I rarely use them within my teaching practice.

I look forward to exploring this area further, as it is something I feel passionately about. I’m particularly interested in seeing how badges and other forms of accreditation work in practice, as this is the main barrier that stops me from participating more in MOOCs.

Connectivism

I have just finished reading the seminal work of Siemens (2005) on his notion of connectivism, and so I thought I would record some initial thoughts.

A lesson from physics
Firstly, connectivism is painted as a challenge to the traditional learning theories of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism. The motivation behind this is the observation that the three dominant theories were formulated before the modern computer age. Thus connectivism seeks to supersede the older theories.

However, it occurred to me that a parallel might be drawn here with scientific theories in physics. In particular, Einstein’s work on general and special relativity improved upon Newtonian physics, but did not completely supplant it. Although it is possible to apply Einsteinian mechanics to a macroscopic dynamics problem, it would be needlessly complicated to do so, whereas modelling the problem using Newtonian dynamics would be far more sensible and still accurate enough for the purposes of a problem of that size.

Perhaps the same is true of connectivism. Maybe on a larger scale of interconnected individuals and organisations, connectivism models more accurately the learning process; however, on an individual level, within the context of a classroom, perhaps learning should be modelled on behaviourist, cognitivist, or constructivist principles.

Mathematics
Another point which occurred to me is the applicability of Siemens’ ideas to mathematics. Siemens talks of rapidly changing fields, where knowledge becomes redundant so quickly that constant learning needs to take place. This doesn’t apply to what I, as a teacher of mathematics, do on a daily basis. I teach concepts and methods which are hundreds (if not thousands) of years old, which are established facts for all time. Pythagoras’ Theorem is eternal: no amount of innovation will change it. Does that mean that the connectivist metaphor has no application to mathematics? Are the knowledge networks fixed, suggesting a cognitivist view would be more appropriate?

Similarly, Siemens plays a high value on the ability of networked computers to automate a lot of what we do, meaning that learning shifts from individuals having to memorise skills and processes to networks increasing their connectedness. Does this also apply to mathematics? Is Siemens suggesting that all calculations should be outsourced to calculators and computer algebra packages, so that learning focuses on more complicated calculations?

If so, this seems to misunderstand how mathematics works. One needs to know how to do the easier calculations in order to be able to do the harder ones. Sure, computers can do calculations in a fraction of a second that learners struggle over for hours, but if learners don’t learn the basics, they won’t be able to program computers to perform more difficult calculations.

What is more, this would miss the point of learning mathematics as learning abstraction. Mathematics is not always about applying calculations to do things; sometimes it is innovating approaches to problems that have no real-world application (yet). If all computation is outsourced to a network, where is the deep individual understanding that is necessary in order to abstract?

Innovation and the role of the teacher
Lastly, I had a thought which seeks to explain why innovation is so important within a connectivist metaphor. If teaching and learning is to some extent outsourced to a network, then this goes some way to explain why there needs to be so much focus on innovation.

As Siemens says, “[t]he pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” This suggests that the role of the teacher is not to push the material through the pipes, but to find new and/or different ways to extend the network of pipes, and this is at the heart of what innovation is.

However, this leaves the question: if teachers are primarily innovators, who does the actual “teaching” in the traditional sense of the term? Are teachers expected to do both? Or is their job to be outsourced to the network of resources as well?

The problems with innovation

I have a bit of a chequered history with innovation in my own practice, which has ranged from feeling inspired to feeling completely downtrodden.

I think the low point was when I was in my probation year as a teacher in a secondary school. My Head of Department came into my classroom to have a quiet word with me, which she only did when I had done something wrong. She told me that there had been a complaint made against me by a parent that my lessons were too innovative, and there was not enough focus on doing examples from a textbook. I remember feeling distinctly discouraged and unsupported, which was one of the reasons I left teaching in secondary.

Nowadays I work across three different institutions, all of which are supportive of innovation, at least in theory and in policy documents. However, in each of these institutions there seems to be a disconnect between the policy which encourages innovation and says all the right things, and the actual day-to-day practice of practitioners on the ground.

There is a widespread view that innovation is a management buzz-word, and although practitioners are enthusiastic and supportive in principle, they need support to be able to put it into practice. Furthermore, many of the examples of innovative practice are seen to be inapplicable to mathematics, which only further entrenches a conservative view that mathematics teaching is “different” and old-school methods are inescapable.

Having said that, there are many innovations that both myself and other practitioners would love to implement. I have come away from CPD sessions feeling inspired, or had flashes of inspiration that I am going to try out a new activity for a lesson. However, there are often barriers to actually implementing innovative practices, the three most pertinent of which are:

• Time: when will I find time to do the work necessary to implement this innovative idea of mine, while also keeping on top of my day-to-day duties?
• Support from colleagues: often the negative attitudes of colleagues can make me think “I don’t want to stick my neck out here, because if my idea fails, everyone will say ‘I told you so'”.
• Institutional IT issues: I can think at least two examples where colleagues have tried to implement innovative teaching practices, only to be hindered by the lack of IT equipment which works with the institution’s ageing and inadequate IT infrastructure.

In conclusion, I guess you could say that although I am enthusiastic about innovation, it is important to me that I don’t feel that I am “on my own”. The encouragement of colleagues and management is vital to wanting to invest my time and energy into risky innovative projects. Surely I am not the only one who feels like this?

iSpot

As part of this week’s activities, we were asked to try to come up with a definition of innovation and how it applies to one of the OLnet tools. I chose iSpot, as I have often been interested by nature.

I am still in the process of refining my definition of innovation, but I am thinking of something along the lines of “experimenting; trying new or different approaches, either using new or established technologies or practices”.

Measured against this definition, the iSpot project would seem to me to be an innovative one. Users can upload their photos of plants or animals that they have encountered in nature, in order for other users to identify and classify species. Users tag the geographical location where the photo was taken, so a map can be populated with all the observations in a particular area, and thus provide data for the spread of populations of certain species.

Thus the iSpot project in some sense kills two birds with one stone. It provides users with the means to learn about their local ecosystems, while it provides researchers with valuable data that would otherwise be costly to collect. In this sense I would classify it as an innovative project.

As with all of these types of project, however, it relies on users to actively participate in the project for it to be worthwhile. Most of the observations of mammals seemed to be from 3 years ago or longer, which makes me wonder if the project is on the decline.

This raises an issue for me that I have often feared in analysing innovation: with technologies and the way in which users interact with those technologies constantly changing and developing, is it a good use of time, effort and money to develop innovative learning projects if their lifespan is limited to 3 or 4 years? If practitioners’ time is precious (and in my experience, it increasingly is), are cost-benefit analyses required before implementing innovative projects? Should high-risk projects which require a constant large active user base be evaluated on this basis? Will this dampen innovation?

Lots of questions to think about! I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave me a comment!

Minds On Fire

I have just finished reading Seely Brown and Adler (2008) Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0 and was interested to learn about the Hands On Universe project, which “invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists” (Seely Brown and Adler, 2007, p.24).

This project seems to be still going strong in 2016, as the website indicates that there was an annual conference which took place in 2015. I was also able to use Google Scholar to find scholarly articles from 2009-2012 which talk about the project. It seems that the project has been extended from its home at Berkeley, California to Harvard and across Europe.

In reading this article, the perennial question occurred to me: “How does this apply to maths?”

I remember when I was an undergraduate, pursuing an individual project in a mathematical topic of my choice, one of the assessment criteria was how well my research contributed something new to the field. I had chosen a particularly pure mathematical topic, and so I was reading about difficult abstract concepts that had been known for 100 years or more. Just understanding these concepts was difficult enough, never mind trying to contribute something new of my own! To do so would have required 4 years of postgraduate study in itself!

Is it any wonder, then, that mathematics is rife with “pointless” word problems that are artificially constructed in order to test students’ understanding? Is it possible for high school students or undergraduates to engage in “legitimate peripheral participation” of pure mathematical research, if it requires graduate study just to learn what the questions are in current research? Does this explain why so many students are turned off from maths? Does the inability to see the immediate applicability of their studies make students think that there is nothing left to discover, and so their mathematical studies are pointless? I can’t count the number of times someone has said to me, “How can you do research in mathematics? Isn’t everything already discovered?” This fundamental misunderstanding in what maths is resulting from the gulf between “learning mathematics” and “doing mathematics” may well be the reason!

Does anyone from a different subject discipline feel similarly? Or is maths the only one who suffers from the difficulty of finding legitimate peripheral activity in mathematical research that learners can actually access?

Reflecting on Reflection

And so another year of study begins! Having completed “H800 Technology-enhanced learning: practices and debates” last year, I am embarking on my second module towards the MA in Online and Distance Education (MAODE) with the Open University (OU). This year’s module is entitled “H817 Openness and innovation in elearning”.

Last year in H800, blogging was an optional part of the module, and I didn’t really engage with it all that much. For me, reflection is a participative activity, and so I prefer to discuss my thoughts with others. I have had few positive experiences with keeping a reflective journal for my own eyes only. However, I am willing to give it another try this year, and I would appreciate any comments you can leave to encourage me along.

How do you use your blog? How would you like to use your blog? Do you need an audience, or do you prefer to keep your reflections private? What barriers do you find to posting? Let the discussion begin!

Flavours of Openness

What does “openness” mean with regard to education?

The answer has changed over the past 50 years, and continues to have various flavours of meaning today. In this task, I was directed to two sources which seek to define “openness”:

• Weller (2012), The openness-creativity cycle in education
• Anderson (2009), Alt-C Keynote

The image I have created above seeks to summarise the key points from these two sources about what it means to be “open” in education. Key to this is the idea of the “open scholar”, who believes in and participates in all of these different concepts of openness.

One of the other concepts in Anderson’s slides which really interested me was the concept of the Taxonomy of the ‘Many’, which defines three different ways of describing sets of learners: groups, networks and collectives. I look forward to reading more into this idea.