Can technology advance Open Education?
Introduction
OERs have been around for a couple of decades now and been an important topic for Higher Education for some time, with more research, discussion and activity taking place year on year. The Horizon report 2018 features OERs as a mid term trend again (they’ve made repeat appearances every year since 2013) and discusses the current challenges and opportunities in the field, such as sustainability of resources and cost driven adoption. Despite this, we are yet to see mainstream uptake of these freely available resources in the Higher Education industry (Prasad et al — 2016, Pirkkalainen et al- 2014).
The systems and practices associated with them are constantly evolving with many new ideas tested, and some heralded to be the next great breakthrough in Open Education leading to the widespread sharing, consumption and collaboration on learning materials, but many fail to gain traction (189,000 results for “Moocs are Dead” ). In Higher Education, It all feels like a system that is ready for primetime, but hasn’t quite got the numbers needed - enough users on board to make it useful. What could be holding the proliferation of Open Education Resources back?
Pirkkalainen, Jokinen & Pawlowski have some thoughts on that front, in an interesting piece of research from 2014 they suggest that some of the barriers to more mainstream OER adoption include:
- Educators lack motivation to share resources and information
- Lack of reward or acknowledgement processes leads to reluctance in spending time creating
- Time needed to produce or repurpose OERs is considerable
- Meta information is lacking in detail
- Quality and relevance are difficult to assess
- Potential resources often turn out to be unsuitable for the specific curriculum
- Lack of trust of unknown publishers
- Prefer to use material of their own making
I believe that the barriers are still relevant today and while this list is fairly broad in scope, I think it is not unreasonable to distil the points into four categories of issues; concerns of organisational support, quality concerns and individual and technological challenges. Even so, there is considerable overlap between the categories. For instance motivation to share and collaborate can be hindered by a number of factors across categories such as technological incompatibility causing frustration, unfavourable organisation policies or institutional lack of clarity on OERs, lack of personal training and awareness of options. These multifaceted factors would take progress in several areas to overcome and require some considerable unpicking.
For this post I decided a look to the future was worthwhile, and being a Technologist by profession and passion I will look at current and future potential technological implementations that have potential to eat away at the barriers noted above. I’ll also note if there’s anything eLTs and other technologically knowledgeable colleagues can be doing to facilitate these improvements. Perhaps an increased awareness of the current, soon to be reality, and way off platforms will help us feed the transition “from the inside”.
Technology with examples in current use
The UK has a small number of Universities that have explicit OER policies, with Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh are among the first and this number is happily growing and The University of Manchester is working on an OER policy which we hope to see soon. In my last post I talked about how lack of OER policies will stifle uptake, this is a vital step for these institutions to begin sharing and creation open content where the individual educators may not have felt it possible before.
Horizon is of the opinion that curated authoring platform approaches to OERs are to be overshadowed by campus wide initiatives with sophisticated publishing options, In my opinion this is a very forward thinking statement and one I’d like to agree with. The institutional policies coming into place are the first step in being able to leverage such technologies, this will likely need to be combined with some institutional led awareness initiatives (either grass roots or department driven) and training on new opportunities for our educators.
At first a soft touch approach may be useful in this case, by using familiar technology to allow educators to get used to the idea of sharing, reusing and remixing content through the Learning Management Systems (LSMs) they already use.
Learning Management System Addons
Many Universities employ the services of Blackboard Inc (17,000 schools and organisations in 100 countries as of 2014), but it appears that not many yet make use of it’s OER facilities to take their resources out of the VLE walled garden. Blackboard Open Content (BOC) has evolved from Xplor, and gives access to sharable, reusable content based on the open standards of IMS Common Cartridge format, Creative Commons licensing and IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTIs).
It aims replicate the functionality of a content management system for educational resources and makes this content available to any institution that supports it, while this is not a new idea, the fact that it is already implemented (if not activated) in many intuitions the world over gives it great potential in driving OER adoption.
I have reservations about this however, as Blackboard is not well known for their user friendly implementations in systems of some complexity. So an alternative option is the OER Commons LTI Tool that has cross platform support from Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle. (I was unable to discover if BOC was available on Canvas or Moodle, I suspect it is yet to be implemented)
A limitation with the OER Commons LTI tool is that it is for embedding OERs only, there is no way to directly share content. This is unfortunate as we need technology that will break down the perceived time and motivational hurdles in sharing OERs as well as locating and embedding them.
In House Repositories
Much like the acclaimed Open Courseware from MIT and the Open Universities Open Learn (which actually predates Open Courseware), many institutions will implement some form of repository system, whether to share content internally cross faculty, or to dabble with making resources available to all.
Over time OER repositories are becoming more social (Pirkkalainen et al — 2014 gather a number of examples of this), and open source platforms like Kaltura are gaining popularity by implementing a modern resource sharing system with interactivity and social features. While Kaltura is not specifically an OER platform, it does have the ability to make resources public and is very easy to use which helps put educators and teachers as the key users and drivers of the service.
In a similar vein, the OER Commons introduced the Microsites implementation that accomplishes similar, but with a much broader media compatibility than just video. Microsites sit apart from the traditional OER commons portal, and allow more focused collaboration between a number of organisations to a defined topic or function, an example of which is the Green Microsite.
These more social, collaborative, Open Educational Platforms could potentially tackle an issue that is at the heart of OERs; the Not Invented Here syndrome that can lead educators to distrust the quality of resources they didn’t have a hand in making - by fostering an emotional ownership of projects jointly created. In comparison to the idea of sharing only complete OERs, this alternative direction in Open Educational Practices has some merit (although I believe both approaches could flourish given time and resources), and the Open Educational Ideas project expands on this further.
Web 3.0 and Future Technologies
We all know what Web 2.0 is, the lovely social media crazed version of the internet we currently inhabit, but what is Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 is the proclaimed antidote to the power centralisation that Web 2.0 gave us, decentralised applications (dApps) consisting of DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies, aka Blockchains) will seek to split the monopolies that have grown large profiting from public infrastructure and data — Facebook, Uber, AirBnB to name a few infamous entities.
A DLT is a distributed, synchronised and replicated database at its most basic. Many distinct computers (or nodes) form a network of peers that work together using consensus algorithms to ensure that data is valid and up to date across the many nodes, the unique aspect of DLTs that makes them quite interesting is that there is no centralised storage system or controller needed, no single point of failure to corrupt. Data integrity is assured.
In the example of transferring money between a shopper and a merchant we use the bank as a trusted intermediary to confirm the purchaser has the funds and then to send the funds onto the retailer, using a DLT currency (or cryptographic currency) there is no need for the involvement of a bank to confirm that the funds are present and the two parties interact to safely transmit them using digital devices much like we do currently (ala Apple Pay).
The impacts of this shift in ownership from centralised profit driven systems could potentially be quite disruptive and interesting to watch unfold, and while the ramifications will likely be felt in FinTech and Logistic industries first, there will be developments to the EdTech sector as time goes on and use cases are advanced, as a colleague muses here.
Web 3.0 in Higher Ed
Another mid term trend from Horizon this year is the the rise of new forms of Interdisciplinary Studies, which they describe as “Faculty members, administrators, and instructional designers are creating innovative pathways to college completion through interdisciplinary experiences, nanodegrees, and other alternative credentials, such as digital badges.”
Digital badges are something that DLT lends itself to nicely, they are a fairly simple implementation of a blockchain system insofar as you can record, curate and distribute evidence of learning in a manner that is an improvement to paper based records; tamperproof, less complicated (to end users), less expensive to issue and faster to verify. This can allow education providers and employers to issue official evidence of completion of certificates, memberships or other achievements at little to no cost, lowering the total cost of providing training and administration.
Higher Education establishments receiving students with these credentials would have less work to do to verify their authenticity and would not have to wait for any official documentation to arrive before knowing that the experience gathered was genuine, this could lead to good efficiency gains in admin departments and potentially lower costs associated with new student intake.
The individuals will be in control of their certificates and the security encrytption that contains the records, but they will not be able to create a false transaction to make it appear that a learning organisation has signed them off on something they have not completed. Information can then be shared on a case-by-case basis.
An example of a Blockcerts implementation could look like this:
Combined with the rise of Nano Degrees and other tailored skills packages, it is feasible that leveraging Open Education Resources and decentralised certificate systems could have great benefit to those gathering credit to attend University, or requiring specific skills for employment. Indeed, projects such as European Commission’s OpenEdu are looking into the suitability of OER degree options being credit bearing, and digital badges could work well for this transfer of credit.
Regardless of the certificate system, trusted human judgement will still be important in the issuing of the certificate at the outset, so this is not a magic bullet. Also, If this technology is to succeed, robust standards would need to be developed and accepted by the institutions and employers.
Content and Portfolios of work
Indorse is a platform that is using DLT to verify e-portfolios of web skills, users upload links to their work and their skills are validated anonymously by consensus of expert users. Portfolio systems in Higher Education are sometimes a bit of a struggle, we are aiming to allow our students to build up their body of work in a way that they can show they have the necessary skills and compliance, but also to continue to utilise as lifelong learners.
Currently the platforms that are in use are all centralised, we pay an entity for its services, then the students are then reliant on this entity still being around and not changing their rules while all the time keeping their information secure. It is not hard to envisage a decentralised system such as Indorse that would facilitate life long learning and reduce our reliance on single points of failure for portfolio work to be taken from study to professional life.
Another decentralised platform of note is LBRY:
LBRY is first and foremost a new protocol that allows anyone to build apps that interact with digital content on the LBRY network. Apps built on the protocol allow creators to upload their work to the LBRY network of hosts (like BitTorrent), and set a price per stream or download (like iTunes) or give it away for free (like YouTube without ads).
Lack of reward or acknowledgement is a barrier that Pirkkalainen et al suggest leads to reluctance in spending time creating resources for others, LBRY will allow creators to be credited for use of content (in monetary terms or otherwise) without selling ads. This works by leveraging a blockchain reward system where micro transactions can be used to fund the network storage and bandwidth associated with the media files (or drive a profit if they choose to), all the while keeping the resources live on a decentralised network.
Other OKHE commentators have pointed out that the transient nature of OER platforms can be a bit of an issue for educators in discovering resources, needing to learn the existence of a new OER platform every year or two to stay current, or finding that a previous one has closed up can be little frustrating. If decentralised systems turn out to be sustainable models for content delivery they should be much more resilient and be shielded from economic decisions to close resources that may have otherwise been useful.
After all, even though we may want to freely release content for Open Educational usage, there are costs associated for creation and distribution that need to be met, and the sustainability of these resources is vital to ensure they stick around to develop awareness and user bases that actively participate.
Conclusions
Referring back to the Pirkkalainen et al’s barriers to OER uptake it’s possible that improved technology implementations could alleviate some of the difficulties in bringing OERs and Open Education to the forefront of Higher Education, however we can’t expect shiny new technology to do all the heavy lifting for us. There are several challenges that technology can’t help with.
Awareness is a serious challenge, presently we simply do not know what is out there and how to find it in a timely fashion. It will also take some time for organisations (as opposed to individuals inside the organisations who are starting to take notice), to cotton on to the benefits OERs such as cost savings, inter institutional collaborations, quality improvements etc. These benefits can only be realised if more educators get involved, It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
In short, OER uptake needs a multi faceted approach of which technology improvements are but one angle. Motivation and individual barriers need to be broken down, and our organisations will have to play a large part in this with regard to management support, technological readiness, training and wider awareness. To encourage them to get involved, we will need to put on your best car salesman impressions and sing to them the advantages..
References
Wiley, David. (2007). On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education. OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) for the project on Open Educational Resources
Henri Pirkkalainen, Jussi P. P. Jokinen, and Jan M. Pawlowski, (2014), Understanding Social OER Environments — A Quantitative Study on Factors Influencing the Motivation to Share and Collaborate, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES, VOL. 7, NO. 4, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2014
Prasad, Deepak & Bhartu, Dhiraj & Yusuf, Javed. (2016). OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND PRACTICES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC: STATUS REPORT AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312895757_OPEN_EDUCATIONAL_RESOURCES_AND_PRACTICES_AT_THE_UNIVERSITY_OF_THE_SOUTH_PACIFIC_STATUS_REPORT_AND_FUTURE_DIRECTIONS [accessed Aug 20 2018].
