Modeling “the promise” of Open Educational Resources

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) has created an online network 1 that aggregates open educational resources (OER) within a social networking environment, for the purpose of stimulating engagement of diverse populations in accessing and using OER worldwide. OER are most often thought of simply as content-that is, teaching and learning materials that are freely available for downloading, sharing, and remixing.

    However, the value of OER is best described not through their aggregation as static resources, but through their potential to engage a wide range of teachers, learners, practitioners, and other stakeholders in resource transformation, cross-pollination of ideas and expertise,     and collaborative knowledge building.

    Research about digital media has shown that the development, use, and adaptation of resources can serve as a catalyst for engaging diverse teachers, learners, and practitioners in sharing their expertise, building their knowledge, and otherwise providing leadership in their fields. This is similar to organizational research that has found that continual improvement and enhancement often emerges from knowledge sharing among practitioners. In other words, OER is an invitation to improve teaching and learning processes.

    But what comprises “doing” OER? Does it take a new belief system? Are we doing it already? What examples are there to show of models for active engagement with OER?

    The phrase, “the promise of OER,” resurfaces often around the nascent movement for ready-to-modify learning materials. If OER is seen as merely rewritten curriculum, it's not surprising that the movement might produce a few yawns. “Doing OER” is meant to embrace much more than this, starting with an evolutionary mindset about learning content and the learning itself.

    Searchable, web-based resources with clear conditions as to how it can be used represent a platform for collaborative “mutation” or remixing. They are meant to be integrated into ways we are already engaging in collaboration and knowledge building, and in the process, incrementally to be part of growing new ways of teaching and learning that are more participatory, community-based, and bottom up.

    Those of us lucky enough to have a dependable broadband internet connection already IM, email, skype, poke, post pictures, edit wikis, blog, post in forums, share bookmarks, video conference, tag, rate, review, and recommend favorite things to both friends and strangers, as part of a digital lifestyle. The knowledge building potential is enormous and growing due to repurposeable materials and the collaboration possibilities that surround them.

    The recent addition of the Library of Congress' historical image collections 2 to Flickr, which are appropriately tagged with the word “commons,” is a red-hot example of “doing OER.” The images are not formally licensed, but are shared under the terms “no known restrictions.” It is this type of engagement opportunity - i.e., the encouragement of communal tagging - that OER is meant to achieve.

    Another example of doing OER is the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium's use of problem spaces 3. In contrast to static collections of data or lessons, problem spaces are dynamic workspaces where teachers and students share their work. Rather than using a more traditional lab approach where the students - who in this case are college instructors or pre-service teachers - may be asked to follow highly structured procedures, problem spaces emphasize the development and exploration of student questions as they come to understand biological principles, analytical procedures, and the formulation of data-based inferences. By collecting and displaying the work of others, problem spaces contextualize scientific inquiry within a community of practice where meaning is negotiated and problems have a history across multiple researchers.

    Publicly available datasets, inquiry-based models for learning, collaborative tools and environments for sharing - these are the building blocks for “doing OER.” At ISKME we support ways for teachers to benefit from existing practices of online communities. This includes facilitating their ability to create and share “microcontent,” or smaller pieces of information drawn from multiple platforms (e.g., wikis) that can be augmented, revised, and re-combined, and engaging them in the use of web-based tools, such as OER Commons 4, which allow them to attach their own tags to online content, thus creating meaning from the bottom up as opposed to that which is predetermined by content experts.

    One of the things common to doing OER is that of crossing boundaries of traditional roles. Stepping into new collaborative processes creates opportunities for participants to move beyond established roles - by, e.g., providing spaces where teachers and students and teachers and their colleagues can co-create content. But such opportunities may also pose risks to a teacher's professional status. What benefits are there for teachers to share their content online?

    How can teachers work within the frame of institutional structures that do not yet support collaborative ways of working, and do not reward teachers for the time and resources spent? Especially for the K-12 arena, these questions have yet to find answers. Several hundred K-12 teachers using LeMill.net 5 are, in fact, creating and posting content for anyone to see and adapt; yet, teachers on the whole may need support in stepping into new roles such as that of OER author or online collaborators.

    At ISKME, we have just begun a pilot project with 18 middle school science teachers in four countries to see how they find and adapt resources, use available tools, and collaborate with each other and with their students around issues related to climate change and ecology. Creative remixing of teaching and learning materials will likely find its place here, but we expect to see challenges in cross-cultural, multi-lingual online sharing. We're interested to understand how much support and facilitation the group might need, and whether OER materials can be produced with relative ease and with minimal difficulty and risk on the part of teachers.

    Furthermore, ISKME has developed a set of OER case studies 6 by studying how a range of other OER projects form, change, and evaluate their own progress, and has created an OER How-To Manual that aims to offer practical assistance to anyone looking to start or evaluate their OER efforts. ISKME's case study work has revealed that a key element in “doing OER” has been to include face-to-face training, mentoring, and working with peers and experts. In one of the cases, Free High School Science Texts 7 , it was clear that high-quality resources don't just happen online on their own. In this grassroots project based in South Africa, a highly collaborative and participatory infrastructure was built over time to bring authors together both online and in person, and to organize their workflow, establish quality criteria, reward their input, and deploy their “finished” publications.

    Through the OER Commons initiative, our educative role is to identify and construct models that support a mindset about evolutionary change through OER collaboration, knowing full well that simply distributing OER content alone won't dig us out from old models. New models for teaching and learning are a necessary part of the doing, especially in terms of facilitating problem-based inquiry and data sharing, mentoring and cycling through feedback with peers.

    Perhaps through considering examples of OER in action, we might have a chance to reflect on the “promise of OER” and ask if we getting any closer to it through the way that we are doing it.

    Further readings: