Building resilience through an open approach to education
5 ideas for using open approaches to empower citizens to recognise learning that happens everywhere, and contribute to resilient education structures
Over the last year, I have been working with government leaders to explore how they can use open approaches to deliver better, more resilient services. Then the Covid-19 pandemic happened, throwing a vast range of structures and services into chaos. This event has highlighted that approaches that empower us to adapt to change, are more vital than ever.
In a recent live Question & Answer chat with my associate Jen Kelchner, we discussed how we can build resilience into our education structures using open approaches. The recording is linked below but I summarise and expand on the key points in this post.
What do we mean by an ‘open approach’?
The 5 fundamentals of openness are defined by opensource.com as:
- Transparency
- Inclusivity
- Adaptability
- Collaboration
- Community
Open approaches leverage these fundamental ideas to deliver solutions that take account of a range of perspectives, build in engagement, and support adaptability.
What has happened to education during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns?
During the coronavirus lockdowns, formal education buildings have closed and these institutions have either moved to a reduced online service or no service at all. If we look at how citizens responded to this, we find they started collaborating to create learning solutions to fill the gaps. When schools closed, local groups started sharing resources and ideas for school children, such as activities and worksheets. Groups used social media channels to engage and keep the social side of school alive.
In this digital age, in theory we can learn anywhere and at anytime and the pandemic has shown that even in lockdown, we can use our networks, community, and citizen-based solutions to continue learning.
However, the pandemic has also highlighted that we don’t have all the structures or processes to support this across the board. Individuals and organisations have been responding on the fly. Teachers have been left to figure out the tech and how to teach in a brand new context, often without much support. Many formal education institutions have not ensured the infrastructure or skills were in place for remote teaching and online assessment, so the institutions and teachers have been placed under increased stress, and mistakes have happened (e.g. security). With places of formal education closed, digital exclusion has become increasingly problematic, and those who aren’t proficient at managing their own learning or how to gain recognition for it, could already be being left behind.
So how could we provide some parity?
1. Take the learning and recognition to the learner
Despite advances in online learning, formal education still mostly happens in a place — a school, college, or university building. In this current structure, utmost importance is placed on the exams that happen in these buildings, and for students that don’t achieve the grades in these exams, career opportunities can be closed to them in later life. However, the pandemic has highlighted the fragility of this approach. With formal education buildings closed, questions are being asked about how the current cohorts of pupils will be assessed fairly.
One of the reasons for using such rigid structures for delivering education and assessing learning is because it was easier to deliver and assess learning in a certain place at a certain time. But this is no longer the case. With digital advances and open standards, we can take learning opportunities and recognition to wherever the learner is.
Learning and opportunities for skill recognition also no longer need to be restricted to the years when children and young people attend school and further/higher education. Why should the grades young people gain at the ages of 15/16 affect opportunities for the rest of their lives? With open approaches, learning and recognition can take place at any time.
2. Use open recognition standards and badge pathways
Open recognition standards, such as Open Badges, provide a way to signpost learning activities, outline the evidence required to demonstrate the learning, and provide recognition of the learning. Open Badges can be searched for and found online, digital evidence can be submitted, and the badge itself can be shared across the web.
When badges are put together to form pathways, they can be used to create stepping stones towards an opportunity, such as an employment, civic or further learning opportunity (destination pathways); or they can aid discovery by showing the possible careers that could stem from a particular skill (interest based pathways).
The pandemic has forced some people to question if what they have been studying will still be relevant because of uncertainty over what the future holds. They want to know ‘where else could my skills lead?’
Interest based pathways can help individuals to explore what ignites their passion and see how their existing skills connect them to a range of possibilities. They can enable discovery and support adaptability when everything changes.
3. Teach citizens how to assess skills and make effective judgements about learning
In order to make the most of these open approaches, people need to know how to make effective evaluative judgements when assessing their own and others’ learning and skills.
The latest academic research on teaching techniques for developing self-regulating learners, suggests that the primary process in generating internal feedback, is comparison. By comparing your work with someone else’s, you become a better learner and judge of your own work. You learn how to make evaluative judgements, how to identify what would be considered a ‘good’ output, and what you need to work on to deliver good outputs yourself. These skills are enormously important in many contexts, as we assess the work of ourselves, our teams, our businesses. However, techniques for effectively leveraging these comparison processes, aren’t currently delivered as a standard component of our formal education curriculum — most of us have learnt how to do it on the job.
Being able to make effective judgements about our own and others’ learning, can help us to be more self-directing and adaptable with our learning, and help us to become better lifelong learners across formal and informal spheres.
4. Recognise the employablity / ‘very hard’ skills
Resilience, empathy, agency, emotional intelligence, and other such skills are being demanded by employers. As our world and the world of work changes, we need to be agile, we need to be able to communicate, we need to manage our response to change — the pandemic has highlighted how important these attributes are.
Most of these skills are not easy to assess in a traditional exam and benefit from assessment in real-world contexts or across a range of contexts. Open Badges allow us to present digital evidence of our skills, gathered across informal and formal contexts, and can include qualitative endorsements from peers, teachers and employers, thereby providing a richer picture of ability than a traditional exam could alone.
5. Expand our notions of ‘trusted’ assessment
For assessment and validation of skills to have any meaning, we need to trust it. One of the challenges often thrown at open recognition is that it could be open to abuse, people could award themselves a badge for anything and ask their friends for endorsements. Working openly invites us to re-think our fundamental assumptions about trusted assessment of learning. For example, why shouldn’t we self-issue badges for all the new things we’re learning in lockdown? We could invite our peers to endorse our claim and, if relevant, discuss with our teacher / assessor / employer why we believe we’ve developed the skill in that area.
We actually do a similar thing currently in job interviews. We assert a competency and discuss an example to back it up. With a badge, we can present an even stronger case by providing digital evidence and endorsements from others.
Employing standards that have been built in an open way by a global community of voluntary contributors, such as the Open Badges standard, also helps to build trust. Just like open source software, with an open standard everyone can see the ‘code’ underpinning it and can contribute to its development. A global community-driven development will bring a range of brains and perspectives to the table, helping to make open standards resilient, so long as they continue to be stewarded effectively.
Citizen-centric solutions
By empowering people to take more control of their learning — to develop the skills to become self-directing, lifelong learners — we create a situation where effective learning practices can continue even if one part of our educational structures can no longer function. Open approaches and initiatives that provide infrastructure and processes for learning across formal and informal learning spheres, such as Cities of Learning, can provide a solid underpinning for this. Being comfortable with open approaches would mean we wouldn’t be so blindsided by another global event such as the current pandemic, and be more able to adapt. Citizens would be part of the solution, helping to create a system that could be more equitable and relevant to how we work, communicate and learn.
