oer
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Types of OER user
[slideshare id=60551259&doc=oeglobalmjw-160406092521] For the GO-GN we are relaunching our webinar series. These will be the first Wednesday of every month, 4pm UK time. They are aimed at anyone with an interest in OER research, and will feature external guests, GO-GN students talking about their work and also research advice sessions. So, put a reminder in your calendar, details will appear on the GO-GN website. I did the first of the new series, using it as an excuse to trial my talk for OEGlobal and OER16. It was looking at types of OER user, based on the findings of the OER research hub. What with OER movement being 15years old now…
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What are the research questions for OER?
When we developed the OER Research Hub project with Hewlett, we came up with 11 hypotheses that they and we felt represented questions that it would be useful to find answers to. Some worked better than others to be honest, but it was a good way to shape the research of that project. We got the questions largely right I think, and this led to more people wanting to collaborate with us. But it was still very much our interpretation as to what was significant, and this was back in 2011. A lot has changed in the OER world since then – we’ve had MOOCs, open textbook projects are getting…
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You yell barracuda
I went to OpenEd in Vancouver a couple of weeks back (well done Clint, Amanda and the team for an excellent conference), so thought I’d do a quick couple of posts before I disappeared beneath a morass of mince pies and end of year lists. My colleague Rob Farrow wrote an excellent piece on the two cultures he saw emerging which he labelled “colonizers and edupunks“, with colonizers seeking to move into the established higher ed system (eg with open textbooks) and edupunks desiring a more wholesale change (eg in pedagogy, or assessment). This followed a theme from many of the conversations I had, and blog posts since the conference.…
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Battle for open – latest skirmishes
(you should read this post in 1940s BBC voice) I did a post a while back on some of the frontline reporting from the battle for open (I am being slightly tongue in cheek with this militaristic language), so thought I’d give another quick account. First, some good news. The US Dept of Education continues to engage with OER, and announced “the launch of its #GoOpen campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use Open Educational Resources (OER).” This is great news for several reasons – it reduces costs, allows diversity of resources, and if the ‘open virus’ theory has any weight (okay, it’s just me who proposes…
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The ROI on open education
Increasingly in education one is asked to justify the time and resource allocated to projects. I’m not adverse to this, no matter what political belief you subscribe to, everything comes down to allocation of resources in the end, and so considering the best allocation for your intended aim is useful. But this type of justification is often rather crude and determined by simple return on investment. This is easier to do for some aspects of education than others, and I want to make a case for open education. You can view open education (in whatever form, MOOCs, OERs, podcasts, open access publishing) as a straightforward marketing and recruitment tool. There…
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It’s about ownership, stupid
I went to an excellent presentation from Cable Green yesterday about the K12 OER Collaborative. The project is aiming to get states to some of the money they currently spend on buying text books from publishers to produce open ones. He highlighted very forcibly what a crappy deal we currently have in that books are often very old (because they can’t afford to update), children are not allowed to do anything useful like take notes in them (because they have to be passed on), and if you lose one, the parents have to pay to replace it (which results in some parents telling their kids not to bring the book…
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Finding the problems OER solves
At the Hewlett Grantees meeting in San Francisco, David Wiley made a very good argument that we need to focus on specific problems that OERs can address and solve those. I think this is part of the mainstreaming process – at the start of the movement there are grand claims and big visions. These are necessary to get it going, but over time and with further investment the focus becomes more practical. So, reducing the cost of textbooks for students in higher ed is one such specific problem. We can show how OERs (in the form of Open textbooks) can achieve this, we can implement an approach to solve it,…
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The Ivory Tower & the wrong focus
I am at the Hewlett Grantees meeting in Sausalito this week, and last night they showed the film The Ivory Tower, in order to provoke discussion around what relevance OER had to the issues raised in the film. I’d seen it before, on a plane, and it had vaguely irritated me, but it was interesting to see it again last night, when it really irritated me. I think a documentary film about how we fund higher education is an interesting thing to do, but this one jumps around all over the place. It suggests that the fault of high education costs lies with the university. It is not a film…
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Better than Christmas – OER Research hub report
The OER Research Hub completed its second annual report for the founders, the Hewlett Foundation in September. It plots the evidence we’ve gained against the 11 hypotheses of the project. It’s not the final report which we will deliver next year, but it has some very interesting findings. We have over 6000 survey responses from educators, informal and formal learners, and librarians. Some of the key findings are: 37.6% of educators and 55.7% of formal learners say that using OER improves student satisfaction 27.5% of educators and 31.9% of formal learners agree that OER use results in better test scores 79.4% of OER users adapt resources to fit their needs…
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It’s not reuse, it’s adaptation
(I posted this over on the OER Research Hub originally, just reblogging here) Reuse of OERs is an elusive, even mythical creature, so much so that Alan Levine has compared finding it to tracking Bigfoot. David Wiley has spoken of ‘dark reuse‘, like dark matter, we assume it’s going on but we can’t see it. But maybe we’re looking for the wrong thing, or at least calling it the wrong name. We’ve just completed our annual report for the Hewlett Foundation, and reviewed our findings against the 11 hypotheses. We’ll put up the full report later, and dig into findings some more, but one thing that struck me was how…
