Open Scholarship Assumptions

Open educational practices are many, George Veletsianos and  Royce Kimmons look at open scholarship in ‘Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship’. The following are some thoughts on the 4 assumptions they make within the article.

Assumption #1: Ideals of Democratization, Human Rights, Equality, and Justice

Anecdotally it would seem that those who work within the ‘open education’ community, who advocate for and publish openly would describe themselves as having ideals that are congruent with this assumption, being involved with movements that reach openly beyond education such as Open Access and Open Standards. However there is potentially a coincidental relationship between the assumption and those engaged in open scholarship at this stage in the ‘evolution’ of openness.

Veletsianos and Kimmons identify Open Scholarship as not always having to be entirely noble, as the benefits of working openly increase to enhance personal academic practice and the markets value this openness so this assumption becomes diluted based on needs. MOOCs are perfect example of this with first steps into this space coming from the more altruistic nature of access to learning and connectivist approaches but with the rapid rise of Universities and private companies providing ‘open’ access to learning, or some might argue just content, the drivers for openness become more about economics than learning (or the assumptions outlined).

Assumption #2: Emphases on Digital Participation for Enhanced Outcomes

It would be fair to say that openness is not predicated on technology although the ability to engage in networked communities through ICTs does support or, as described by the assumption, enhance the ability to disseminate, engage and learn openly. As Veletsianos and Kimmons recognise it not just about having the tools their but about the ability of those to utilise the tools and understand the contexts and the participatory nature of those digital tools in developing their digital literacies.

Assumption #3: Co-Evolutionary Relationship between Technology and Culture

Here we see an extension of the above assumption in the development of digital literacies. Being able to understand how you are potentially being manipulated by the technology in its impact on how we see ‘open’ based on a set of algorithms. Being able to develop strategies to deal with or at least understand this is key in contextualising your approach. For example the Wikipedia view of the world comes from a predominantly male, global north perspective http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=the-geographically-uneven-coverage-of-wikipedia with more articles written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America.

Assumption #4: Practicality and Effectiveness for Achieving Scholarly Aims

Again in this assumption Veletsianos and Kimmons see the need for the development of digital literacies as a key component of scholarly practice. Being able to efficiently filter data, stay on top of publications and disseminate your work in an increasingly (over) crowded space is essential. The other issue that this poses is an extension of the last point the ability to be ‘recognised’.  This is exemplified in the world of online sponsorship before the support of technology to gather sponsorship for your local 10 mile run you would see people raising £50 maybe £100 pounds now this has (as the authors say) sky rocketed with targets set in the thousands and seeing daily campaigns that begin to reach the millions. One no longer needs the approval of 5 or 10 peers reviews but 100s or 100s of thousands to be seen as successful.  The value of this is of course debatable in the week that sees Wayne Rooney reach his 10 millionth follower on twitter will we soon see value given to scholarly practice based on the number of hits or followers (paid for or real)?  

Indian MOOCs

MOOCs

There has been much talk of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) over the past 2 years with the Open University arguably taking a lead role in the UK seeing the launch of its platform FutureLearn https://www.futurelearn.com/. For those that have not heard of MOOCs before they are courses, usually between 2 – 8 weeks long, offered for free and open to anyone, there is no entry requirement beyond having an internet connection. The term MOOC was coined around 2008 from the Open Education movement particularly those with an interest in OER, early pioneers from Canada include George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The real explosion of MOOCs in terms of significant uptake came about in 2011 when large Universities such as Stanford released MOOCs to the world, in particular Sebastian Thruns MOOC on Artificial Intelligence saw an enrolment of 160,000 students. Since then many Universities have released their own platforms including the aforementioned FutureLearn from the Open University UK and edX from Harvard and MIT, there are also very significant private companies such as Coursera and Udacity founded by academics.

Development perspective

The uptake of MOOCs within the HE sector has increased exponentially in the last 2 years with a belief that it will be of benefit to the issues around provision of education in an ever expanding world (Trucano, 2013). With the majority of MOOCs coming from and being aimed at the global north (ICDE, 2013) asking the question how do providers of MOOCs contextualise them for a local or global context and how does OER support this contextualisation? One answer was provided when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in his independence day speech the launch of an Indian MOOC platform 'Swayam' http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/moocs-platform-swayam-narendra-modi-deen-dayal-upadhyaya-iit-bombay-princeton-university-hrd-ministry/1/376764.html Full details are yet to be released but there will be a launch on the 25^th September. This announcement has coincided with NCERT (National Council Of Educational Research And Training) and COL (Commonwealth of Learning) launching the ‘Teach Smarter with OER’ MOOC http://nroer.gov.in/CourseOnOER/ and a MOOC on MOOCs from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology)Kanpur http://mooconmooc.org/ which will have a focus on development issues in particular low bandwidth access. IIT Kanpur have already run one MOOC (http://m4d.colfinder.org/) and have created their own platform MOOKIT http://mookit.co/ to support these it will interesting to see the crossover with the government based platform.

TESS-India MOOC

The TESS-India project (www.TESS-India.edu.in)is developing a MOOC aimed at supporting Teacher Educators in developing pedagogies based around collaborative and open practices and the use of OER. Launching in May 2015 this MOOC will be developed around the use of already existing OER with very minimal content being originated in order to realise the potential of OER. OER used in the MOOC will not always have specific local context as it is dependent on available content, the contextualisation will come in the form of scaffolding and support that the MOOC structure offers.

The MOOC will be developed collaboratively with a series of developmental testing workshops and pilots within the focus states to gain an understanding of the contextualisation required in the  scaffolding. This approach will also support the development of the course to work more efficiently for those with bandwidth issues and seek to address alternative approaches that would be unique in MOOC development.

References

ICDE. (2013) ‘World Bank EduTech: MOOCs and developing countries’, http://www.icde.org/en/icde_news/news_archive/2013/2013_part_2/World+Bank+EduTech%3A+MOOCs+and+developing+countries.b7C_wJLG2t.ips  [online] last accessed 04/09/14

Trucano, T. (2013) ‘More about MOOCs and developing countries’, World Bank blog on ICT in Education. http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/moocs-developing-countries [online] last accessed 04/09/14

OER14 Building communities of open practice

So I have just returned from Newcastle in the UK after having attended OER14 conference. After being involved in the planning of both OER12 and OER13 I would like to congratulate the team on an excellent conference, not only was the organisation incredibly smooth and helpful as a delegate but the quality of the papers were particularly high this year. A full list of abstracts can be found here.

The theme this year was "Building communities of open practice" which saw presentations from Europe, Africa and the US. Catherine Ngugi Project Director for OERAfrica delivered the opening keynote and related themes of OER as a collaborative catalyst for open practice in the context of copyright in Africa where the cost of textbooks considerably limits access for teachers and students alike, potentially leading to more rote and didactic approaches. Something which is of course a particular interest in the work of TESS-India.

Catherine Ngugi Project Director for OER Africa - Photo CC BY OER14 

There were a lot of discussions this year around open practices and support for staff and academics in the development of these practices with presentations from Lindsay Jordan on Open Practices for teachers, Erin Nephin and Nick Sheppard from Leeds Met on linking communities of practice for digital literacy and an off the wall Blues Brothers inspired presentation from Rochelle Lockridge, Alan Levine and Dr Mariana Funes on how the corporate world is looking to open practices to create more collaborative and creative skills sets to support business.

(L-R) Dr Mariana Funes, Rochelle Lockridge and Alan Levine - Photo CC BY OER14 

The conference was finished as always with the announcement of next years conference which will be in Wales and hosted by co chairs Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology, The Open University  and Clive Mulholland, Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of South Wales.

You can read more about others views of the conference on the OER14 blog but would just like to leave this post with a mention of Sara Frank Bristow's Craigs List for OER http://oerexchange.org/ go and add your resources, projects and anything OER a new look at aggregating content, services and discussions.

Open Courseware Consortium Global Meeting 2014

This year the Open Courseware Consortiums Global meeting http://conference.ocwconsortium.org/2014/ was held in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, as always it was another great event and saw participants from multiple sectors including academia, government and commercial. The theme of the conference was “Open Education for a Multicultural World” and so was particularly relevant for the work of TESS-India working in multiple states within India and collaboratively with UK and Indian academics.

Union Hall in Ljubljana at OCWC 2014 

The conference keynote saw Slovenian Minister for education Jernej Pikalo launching new initiative ‘Opening up Slovenia’ introducing openness into Slovenia enabling teachers and students alike to gain access to new methods of teaching and learning.  The initiative is wider than just education and you can find out more here http://www.k4all.org/openingupslovenia/

TESS-India www.TESS-India.edu.in was represented by Alison Buckler, Leigh-Anne Perryman and myself and we presented a paper on the adaptation of TESS-India OER, the full paper can be viewed here http://conference.ocwconsortium.org/2014/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Paper_48-localisation.pdf  

Alison Buckler presenting on TESS-India

Leigh-Anne Perryman presenting on TESS-India

Finally it was great to see the OER research Hub win an award for excellence in open research http://oerresearchhub.org/2014/04/25/oer-research-hub-celebrates-open-research-award/

Mobile Learning Week 2014

Mobile phone technologies and ownership are advancing rapidly. Around 75% of people globally have access to a mobile and ownership in developing regions is matching this trend. The rapid growth in mobile use has the potential to open up access to learning, supporting teachers and students alike.

The theme, explored in this year’s mobile learning week (http://en.unesco.org/events/mobile-learning-week-2014 )at UNESCO  is teachers with an emphasis on using mobile to leverage effective use in education, deliver professional development to working teachers and support the training of new teachers.

The week began with a series of workshops including one from USTAD mobile, learning how mobile learning id benefiting police women in Afghanistan and enabling simple app development from basic feature phone to smart phones https://www.ustadmobile.com/

Mobile Learning Week 2014 - Opening Plenary

The following 2 days saw presentations from a varied range of participants including large NGOs, commercial providers, Universities and individual teachers on how mobile learning is benefiting their work in education and development. You can view the complete range of presentations here http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/themes/icts/m4ed/unesco-mobile-learning-week-2014/symposium/breakout-sessions/

Technology is often assumed to incur significant costs to the learner, but this needn't be the case. In TESS-India the learning resources can be preloaded onto a micro SD card – teachers don’t need connectivity, simply slot the card into the side of their phone. VSO’s work in Papua New Guinea on English language teaching  http://www.vsointernational.org/Images/sms-story-impact-assessment-report_tcm76-41038.pdf uses SMS to deliver lesson plans and Cambridge University are looking at SMS to support professional development of school leaders http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/cce/initiatives/projects/leadership/index.html . Penn State University talked about using MOOCs for teacher development reducing distributed learning costs, if you are able to attend they are running a conference on MOOCs for development in April http://www.moocs4d.org/ .  There were also many apps presented to the delegates including the Keywords English language and literacy app, demonstrating how mobile pedagogy can address diverse learning needshttp://www.keywordsenglish.com/ .

Mobile learning presents a unique set of benefits and challenges. Complex learning needs to be adapted for the small screen. Mobile offers 24/7 access, yet it is also more likely to be associated with interruptions, necessitating bite sized learning. Users can engage with fellow learners at a distance, access rich educational content such as video and personalise their learning.

Low bandwidth services were a key topic at Mobile Learning Week with the continued presence of SMS as well as missed call technologies that have the potential to deliver micro-learning chunks, without costing even the price of connecting a call.

The range of discussions at mobile learning week sort to strengthen the rhetoric that rapidly changing technologies are hugely eye-catching, but equal emphasis must be placed on the academic value of mobile if we are to improve teaching and learning.

(written for TESS-India blog 24th Feb 2014 - www.TESS-India.ed.in)

Another year another BETT show

BETT ( http://www.bettshow.com/ ) now in its 30^th year opened yesterday and again was a packed affair with over 680 exhibitors and visitor numbers expected exceed last year. This year the show coincided with the Education World Forum http://www.ewf2014.org/ and delegates were invited to the opening with Michael Gove (UK Secretary of State for Education) delivering the keynote. He, as you would imagine, talked about the use of technology in schools and how students and teaching have been shaped with the advances in technology and will continue to be shaped as we prepare our students to tackle the ever changing world of technology. 

Michael Gove addressing BETT 2014 delegates

He highlighted the government looking to industry and shows like BETT to understand the ways in which the educational technology landscape is changing and how the government can support these changes within schools and the education sector in general.

Of particular interest to TESS-India http://www.tess-india.edu.in and other international visitors was the success of other global BETT events and the announcement that BETT South East Asia will be launched in 2015, will people as far afield as Hanoi tweeting their approval.

As with all “trade” shows there seems to be one key thing that dominates most stands, a few years ago it was 3D technology in televisions this year it was 3D technology in printers with almost 10% of exhibitors bringing some kind of 3D technology onto their stands. This is of course very impressive and the opportunities this brings to schools in integrating this technology into their curriculum is boundless but I am not sure how many more unusually shaped plastic vases and pots the BETT show needs.

There was of course the usual “big players” Microsoft, Intel, Dell, hp etc; showcasing some very impressive tech but one of the most important pieces in my opinion was to see the representation of open badging being brought into the classroom and the amazing popularity this had with students and teachers alike. 

Open badging is the idea that you can gain credit for the learning you do outside of more formal structures http://openbadges.org  my experience has really been in the realm of HE, further and adult education so to see the implementation of this in the classroom was very inspiring. It also brought to mind the potential importance for some students of “bridging” their learning between secondary and higher education and how recognition for this could be gained even if they don’t continue to more formal credit in that particular area. It was great to see that the Openness agenda is alive and kicking in education at all levels (as perhaps some might argue it always has been).

Stand on Open Badges at BETT 2014

You can find many bloggers commenting on negative aspects of any show and yes in some respects you could say there was nothing new there but then this may only be the case if you are already engaged in the ed tech space so good for you. Just having an event like this means that there are people talking and thinking about how best to use some of these technologies and for the naysayers how not to, either way the outcome for me is positive. All in all it was another great show and I always find something that is of interest personally and in respect to the advancement of technology in education but the most impressive thing that there is every year is the enthusiasm of the thousands of teachers and students that are leading the way in implementing, supporting and enhancing technologies in education.