This is a great discussion.

I hope it will have enough coverage.

We can find solution of higher education of 7 billion people of the world.

Two aspects of the online learning did not get enough attention in public.

1.- Quality content can be fantastic if one spends enough time and money. ONLINE is this respect 10 times better than f2f. ( Even you may not need instructor, all interactivities by the content )

I say the best CONTENT covering 12-14 weeks semester full course online , developed by the top professors of the top university with a reputation  will cost not more than $ 500.000  . Am I right ?

2.- In spite of the big investment for the content, same online content can be accessed by millions in the world bringing the cost per person almost nill . If 10.000 students all around the world access the course at $ 10 per asemster, it makes $ 500.000 in 5 years to cover the investment. Do not forget there are 200.000.000 university students in the world .

3.- In this context, online for higher education need not be free or open .

It can finance itself if a good organisation can be made. Such as UNESCO or similar .

I will keep up with the discussion.

http://www.globalonlineuniversitiesconsortium.org

Hi all,

Great comments and insights on the challenges and opportunities for OER!  I would like to touch on one area that hasn’t been mentioned much and that is OER in developing countries.  I just spent the day with OER Africa and thought it would be good to provide a few examples of how OER is operating in that context.  It ends up a number of Medical Schools in Africa are working jointly on OER Health work with the University of Michigan.  They are all developing different parts of the curricula, open licensing them and sharing them among each other.  Michigan is also taking and using videos and curricula from the African universities for disease where the expertise comes from Africa.  This is a great example of North, South – South, North collaboration.  Another example is the Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa (TESSA) project out of the Open University of the UK.  The OU developed Open teacher education materials about 80% of the way, and then they have partnered with numerous teacher education schools in Africa where the teachers take the materials and finish them by contextualizing them for their context and subjects.  This creates ownership and enables collaboration.  This program is reaching 1,000s of teachers across 9 countries. 

One potentially very exciting opportunity actually comes from the US Department of Labor’s $2 billion Trade Adjustment Act which is funding industry (IT, Nursing, Green…etc) aligned curricula developed by community colleges across the US that will all be licensed with the most open Creative Commons Attribution Only license.  The demand for these courses isn’t just big in the US, it is enormous on a global scale.  I could imagine governements and institutions from around the world leveraging these resources to impact people on an enormous scale.  And since they are openly licensed, they are free to source, adapt and translate these courses without any legal or contractual barriers that would immediately kill a more traditional project.

Thanks so much for your great ideas.

Regards

Vic

Dear Colleagues,

This is a recent post I made at http://www.edutopia.org in the STEM Teachers Group

promoting the excellent new website by John Page of Silicon Valley: “Math Open Reference”

He is an expert teacher and educational visionary.

Sincerely,

Allen Berg

http://www.mathopenref.com/index.html

Thank your for the invitation to join in the conversation.

In British Columbia, there is a strong movement to consider how we take advantage of online resources and we currently are talking not only about how to make access available but about what barriers exist. One of the most significant barriers is the beliefs about quality as resources become accessible. I appreciate Janet’s comments that initial concerns over quality actually don’t transpire and that teachers hold the material accountable for their quality. I too believe this is the case but we are rethinking our notions of curricula support teachers and their roles in helping point teachers to quality resources.

We remain very excited and optimistic about what is becoming available, the quality, and the ability of these resources to shift pedagogy. We are placing our thinking into three categories for our students:

Access – to high quality information;

Motivation – to explore topics and problems relevant to their lives; and

Empowerment – to demontrate their learning through relevant technologies.

We see this process much the same for teachers:

Access – to materials that support and inform instruction;

Motivation – to use online materials to increase flexibility and relevance for students; and

Empowerment – to free the teacher as guide rather than sage on the stage.

We at the University of Kentucky are working toward a Top 20 public research status – and also puzzling over improving our undergraduate academic experience.  One of our areas of interest is to help build faculty learning communities and encourage a more transparent approach to how undergraduate educational programming is designed, implemented, evaluated and improved over time.  Not just awarding those sparks of excellence that happen when the faculty member is fired up but also acknowledging and celebrating those who seek sustainable improvements.  Surely OER can be a critical component to this approach.

There are two other technologies that overlap OERs. The first is social bookmarking sites. Something like Diigo allows a community to tag and share web resources without a repository.

Walled search, like Nettrekker does something similar, with trusted people tagging resources so that they can be found by teachers and students.

I find that the most oft occuring event is someone asking, “do you know of something that does XXX” on twitter or plurk, and then someone else providing links that they’d researched on Diigo or LiveBinders.

A number of people also maintain google docs or blogs with useful links, but, since these aren’t as readily searchable as repositories or social bookmarking sites, I’ve found them less usable.

As an FYI, I keep my list of educational resources onhttp://groups.diigo.com/group/sites_for_education

Hello Vic, Janet, and Timothy. Thanks Catherine for the invitation to participate.

As
noted here and elsewhere, while practice in the OER space has
emphasized access, licensing, and search, emphasis is shifting to use,
adaptation, and measuring impact. The Internet created a commons where
the residual cost of sharing learning materials went to zero, making it
possible, even desirable to license materials openly and freely. Web
technologies such as blogs that make it easy to create and share
materials have allowed everyone to become an author. Again and again,
simple to use technologies have won out against more comprehensive but
also more complex technologies. Second generation Web technologies have
opened doors to interaction around open content. While the body of what
is formally considered OER is large and growing, it remains and will
continue be a small percentage of what people learn from on the web and
what teachers use in their classrooms.

Web
2.0 constituted a major shift from static to interactive websites and
changed the web experience from passively consuming to participating and
producing. New technologies are now bringing us closer to the memex
device,
envisioned by Web pioneer Vannevar Bush, that serves as a person’s memory and learning library. In addition, powerful new ways
are becoming possible for transcluding portions of rich media and documents
into other documents as envisioned by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson. Not
only are technologies going mainstream such as recommender systems that
provide automated mass personalization of the web, but also
technologies that allow a person to personalize their web experience.
First generation web allowed access to content, second generation dramatically increased interactivity, the emerging third generation “Live Web”
is democratizing the web even further by letting people overlay changes
onto websites and integrate content and services from multiple sources.
In the Learning Management Systems space, people are recognizing the weaknesses of monolithic LMSs and turning to loosely joined approaches such as those envisioned by the Open Learning Network. Technologies such as OER Glue are not only making it possible to mash
up the web, but they are also making it simple to do. Because it is
simple, it will become pervasive. Just as the affordances of previous
web technologies have changed teaching and learning and made OER
possible, these new web technologies will create new opportunities for
teaching and learning.

Access.
To make OER reach more learners we need to make it more findable,
useful, and adaptable. Providing easy ways to contextualize OER to
specific learning contexts will make it usable in more contexts. Licensing.
Providing education about open licenses and tools that make automating
extracting, embedding and searching openly licensed content will also
increase the use and adaptation of OER. Feedback loop.
A loop to gather feedback on effectiveness of materials and
approaches, and help iteratively improve it is most likely to be
successfully implemented outside of and loosely coupled with OER
repositories. That way when OER moves from one system to another
feedback data can more easily come with it. GetSatisfaction is an
example of how this can be done by inserting a third party widget into a
web page to allow users to provide feedback on it. Learner data.
Similarly, loosely coupling learning data with OER through third party
tools such as LearnLab’s DataShop is a promising approach that can
scale. Opportunities.
The next great opportunities for OER are for it to move beyond formal
learning settings and for it become used pervasively in and out of
formal school settings. In
addition to content, key components to taking OER mainstream are
tutoring / mentoring, assessment, and certification. While these
functionalities are typically decoupled from the content issues of OER,
it is important to consider them as a part of the larger ecosystem that supports teaching
and learning with OER. Collaborations.
Experience has shown that collaboration between multi-disciplinary
teams is important to effective development and adoption of educational
technologies. Barriers.
Barriers to overcome to make OER go mainstream include moving beyond
thinking about OER as something that resides in repositories to
something that is used in online learning environments and iteratively
improves over time as a result of being used. Sustainable
business models beyond grant funding need to be developed that support
the development of a vibrant ecosystem. Instructional design.
Because content is openly licensed doesn’t make it inherently more
instructionally effective than if it is not. However, designing and
documenting in the open provides additional opportunities for review and
collaboration. The OER movement also provides an opportunity to promote
the implementation of principles from the fields of learning sciences
and instructional design.

In
summary, the Internet made OER possible on a large scale. Open
licensing decreased the friction to required to make open content
available for use and adaptation. Large grant funded development
programs helped create the OER movement and a critical mass of formally
recognized OER content. New technologies and the culture of web
participation are now making it more possible for OER to be used in
practice and contributed to by the mainstream. How will the affordances
of the new technologies be used to support learning? What types of
models of interaction can be developed to support learning from open
content and the Live Web?

Great post, Vic! Thanks for opening up this very important discussion. 

In K-12 we are seeing a similar transition from innovation to mainstream.. States and districts are now catching to the benefits of OERs and incorporating them into their curriculum. They may be looking for the cost benefit, which undoubtedly exists, but by bringing OERs to every teacher in their range, they are taking a step toward the education system of the future, where every school is a successful school and every student learns in an environment of innovation and creativity.

While some say that low-cost (or free) comes at the expense of quality, at Curriki we find the opposite is true. Since many of the contributors are teachers who use these materials themselves, they have a strong interest in keeping the quality as high as possible. Districts and Regional support centers who come together in Curriki Groups to collaboratively develop curriculum for their schools, then share it to the global Curriki community. The results of these collaborations are interactive, standards aligned, project-based, units of instruction.  Great teachers encourage imagination, creativity, and innovation.

As district leadership embraces the benefits of OERs, they’ll find that not only are OER communities places where teachers find new resources to use in their classrooms and to inform their own curricula, they can:

- use Curriki as a content repository to ensure stability in instruction during teacher transitions.

- create a “living repository” of the district’s curricula

- connect teachers throughout the schools in all of the districts in the county.

- build content and ‘collegial circles’

They’ll soon discover that contributing to the global community, they are building awareness of their institution’s unique educational approach. What I am excited to see is the value that district leaders bring to the OER movement. How will they help to shape the next era of OERs?

Hello
Everyone, my name is Vic Vuchic, and I am a Program Officer in Education and
OER at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  First, I’d like to thank
Catherine for inviting me to kick off this discussion on OER and its impact on
education innovation around the world.

The
OER program at Hewlett was launched 10 years ago with our initial major grant to the MIT Open
Courseware project. Since then, the field of OER has grown into a global
movement.  There are over 250 universities and colleges, thousands of K12
schools, and tens of millions of learners around the world creating, sharing
and adapting OER at some level.  Initially, OER was about increasing
access to knowledge globally, but we soon realized that using open licenses
increased transparency and flexibility as well, which in turn impacted the way
people teach and learn.  For example, open licensing allows groups of
people and institutions to collaborate much more easily and create large scale
communities of practice which are shown to be key to improving practices of
teaching and learning.  Also, we’ve seen that publishing openly can
actually improve the quality of educators work because they pay more attention
to their materials and resources if they are going to share them publicly.
Similar to how the Open Source software movement enabled an entire Web 2.0
innovation revolution, we feel that OER has the potential to unlock enormous
amounts of innovation in education by releasing what has traditionally been
locked up in silos of institutions and publishers to a far greater audience of
educators, learners, entrepreneurs and communities.  Examples of early
innovations that we are seeing that are taking advantage of this are
KhanAcademy.org, P2Pu.org, Betterlesson.org, irynsoft.com among many others.

Today
OER is crossing the innovation chasm into the mainstream.  We see this
through the integration of OER into many prominent institutions (MIT, Stanford,
Open University of the UK), government policy programs (UNESCO, US Department
of Labor $2 billion grant program), and for-profit businesses (Apple iTunesU,
YouTube University channels, betterlesson.org) among others.  Challenges
still remain as we grow the field.  How do we continue to improve the
quality of OER?  How can we reach the next 100 million learners that need
access?  How can we integrate learning data into OER at scale?

I
would love to hear from folks where they think the next great opportunities are
for OER and what are the barriers to getting there?  Also, what are
interesting uses of OER people have seen from around the world.

Thanks
so much,

Vic