Complimentary tools for higher education
So what does open mean?
Having reflected on my own use of open practices within my role as a technician, I decided to ask a few colleagues what they thought of their own open practice. The colleagues I work closely with are experimental officers and technical support staff, it is their job to investigate current technologies and develop courses and educational resources to support students in their studies and to introduce them to current methods of working in industry.
‘What do you mean by open?’ As conversations continued it was evident that generally most were unaware of the accepted definition of open educational practices (OEP). All agreed that they did look for open educational resources (OER’s) when developing new course material. Between us we had experience of blogging about experiments developed in our own time, sharing source code on GitHub repositories, and drawings and guides on Google Drive. We enjoyed producing YouTube videos and were involved in twitter and Facebook as networking tools to keep up to date with current trends and community practices. So it seems we are all open scholars and practice open more than we realise.
It is in our nature to be open and share what we have learned, and is becoming widely recognised that open practices make practical benefits to those who share and those who reuse such material. Tension arises between open practices and ownership of educational resources as Sam Hemsley’s piece reflects. Colleagues are generally happy to share anything they have developed with a full sense of altruism but are fully aware that anything developed while working at the university is owned by the university and is not ours to give.
The digital and network revolution has brought about a movement of openness which has influenced many sectors. With improved infrastructures and technologies, we have never been so interconnected and networked. Practitioners of education can see the benefits of open practice past altruism where efficiency, collaborations, innovation, wider participation and a raised profile for the practitioner as an individual and on an institutional level.
Openness
Openness has a long history and is a broad movement encompassing many sectors. Openness affects all aspects of higher education from open scholarship, open publications, OER’s, MOOC’s, open text books and open source software. Openness is supported by governments, foundations and organisations such as the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Hewlett foundation, and the Shuttleworth foundation, UNESCO, Jisc, the Open University and the HEFCE.
Open licensing such as Creative Commons (CC) has impacted open policy by allowing reuse and adaptation of material while still acknowledging the original author. This licensing can persuade authors and creators to offer their work openly with conditions, without fear of loss of intellectual property.
With the support of all of these official bodies the uptake of open knowledge has been more keenly accepted in the US, with the cost of textbooks becoming more of a preventative factor for higher education, open text books and OER’s in general are more widely shared than in the UK.
The open source movement along with web 2.0 has been a major influence on open knowledge in higher education, allowing software projects to be shared openly on repositories such as GitHub allowing changes to the original code, promoting efficiency and improved software. Web 2.0 principles were the precursor to modern social media platforms, Wikipedia and YouTube, advocating an engagement in an interactive narrative.
OER’s
OER’s, the successor of learning objects have become an extensively discussed topic in education, OER’s include any course material in any format or medium licensed under open copy write, in the public domain, free of cost. With permission to engage in David Wiley’s ‘5R’s activities of retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute.
Fundamental to the act of sharing, education in itself is an activity of sharing. OER’s allow practitioners to continuously improve the quality and take ownership of their teaching materials. Not to mention the sharing of materials which have already been publicly funded.
OER’s are stored in open repositories in the public domain not locked down by virtual learning environments (VLE’s) or learning management systems like Blackboard. This is the out sourcing of technology innovation and experimentation of educational practitioners.
OER’s open up different adoption of educational resources, serves a broader base of learners, has financial benefits for students and institutions and supports informal learners with a lack of support or no requirements for certification.
The positive impact OER’s has on learners and practitioners cannot be underestimated, they have developed a global digital social community of sustainable educational resources, democratised learning and reach out to excluded groups who want to learn.
MOOC’s when OER’s are bundled and less open
MOOC’s have generated a lot of attention over the past decade, in the beginning they were experimental and open networked courses (OER’s).
Soon after the success of Stanford University’s online Artificial Intelligence course other elite American institutions such as Harvard and MIT created their own online courses. Education practitioners from these institutions created MOOC providers EdX, Coursera and Udacity.
This new form of free education from elite institutions in America was being used as a lens to focus on the rising cost and accessibility of formal traditional education. Some press went as far as stating that MOOC’s could replace educational institutions and educators.
The creation of these MOOC providers gained the attention of venture capitalists and Udacity and Coursera took the commercial route, the new business model had to alter the early open connectivist MOOC or cMOOC to a more restricted pedagogy known as xMOOC. Only Harvard and MIT founded EdX has continued with the free open online OER’s theme.
After the commercialisation of some MOOC’s there was a backlash when it was discovered that the main MOOC users were already educated and tended to be white males, not exactly the intended audience for open education. MOOC’s tend to attract learners who are already proficient independent lifelong learners, maybe this is the niche of MOOC’s.
The completion rate of MOOC’s is also said to be about 12% this metric came as a shock to the press and MOOC advocators, who then stated that the completion metric missed the point of MOOC’s and learners take what they want from MOOC content.
The cost of MOOC’s became apparent with high end production, staff support and sustainability costs associated with commercialisation. With budgets anywhere from £25,000 — £300,000 the venture capitalists wanted to see a return on their investments, this meant a change of course on business models to becoming less open. Charging for certificates, monthly fees, data collection and locking down course content has all contributed to MOOC’s becoming a less open entity.
What MOOC’s have done very successfully is shine a light on open practices in education, garner much media attention and made open a mainstream phrase, any awareness generated has to be welcomed so attention and funding can be directed to other forms of open practice and networked eLearning, improve pedagogies and reputations of individuals and institutions. MOOC’s it seems are not yet quite the victim of their own success.
Here in the UK, The Open University launched its own MOOC provider Futurelean in 2013. As a student on the PG Cert HE one of my modules, Teaching and Learning with Technology required that we take part in a MOOC provided by Futurelearn.
The MOOC was free to join and was run by respected academics in the education field; Diana Laurillard, Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at UCL Institute of Education, and Neil Morris, Dean of Digital Education and Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Leeds.
The course is run by the University of Leeds and has been accredited by the CPD certification Service, which means it can be used to provide evidence of continuing professional development.
There were several restrictions to the course, I had to wait for the course to start on a particular date, and access to the course was for seven weeks (the course lasted five weeks). If I wanted further access to the course, I could upgrade for the life of the course (for a fee) and this also included a certificate of achievement once eligible.
The course was enjoyable to work through and used many mediums and resources, such as video talks from the lead educators, videos showing the educational methods in action in schools and places of work, written content, quizzes and a discussion forum where the course educators were involved (at an allotted time). I didn’t pay for certification, so to me it really was free of cost other than my time. For people who have problems with access to education MOOC’s seem like a fantastic solution.
So it’s not really an OER, as stated in John Smiths piece on MOOC’s, it is not open in the sense of open access or open content. The term ‘open’ with regard to MOOC’s is used loosely to refer to free (with the option of paying a fee for a certificate).
Not to say there is no place for MOOC’s in education or open education but most MOOC providers have now changed their business model to try and recoup the development costs which can be very high and also the staff cost for student support when the courses are running.
Ang Davies’s article asks Do MOOC’s generate a return on investment? Looks at the value of MOOC’s after a five year run of a MOOC in Clinical Bioinformatics. The high development and sustainability costs and demands on time of MOOCS can be off putting to institutions, but the variety of mediums encourages the student experience and there is opportunity for data analysis on learning patterns, as a marketing tool for institutions and for experimentation by education practitioners.
This view as a marketing tool is discussed by Martin Weller in The Battle for Open, where a part of a course could be opened as a stand-alone MOOC to allow students a ‘try before you buy’ experience to see if the subject suits the learner. This approach could lead to increased student recruitment and retention. Learners who are not suited to a subject can find out for free and choose an alternative.
Small steps
So how can we as support staff become more proactive about open practices?By taking small steps to make open practices complementary tools for higher education.
As technical support staff we rarely produce research papers for publishing, we are more hands on and well ‘technical’. A discussion between colleagues began about OER’s, what they involve and how we can share what we learn without encroaching on university policy.
As part of the Student Union clubs and societies an electronics club is run by the technical support staff, students can work on anything they are interested in and can ask for help and advice from staff. Projects developed by the electronics club cannot be related to any project on the curriculum so is purely hobbyist. It was suggested that software, documents, drawings and diagrams generated by these projects could be stored and shared on a repository in GitHub and document container Google Drive and perhaps make some video capture and share on YouTube. This would be linked from the departmental website and Facebook page.
Git is a version control system in which developers can make changes to source code and upload the newest version where other people can see the changes and make their own contributions.
Using GitHub to share source code presents an opportunity to collaborate with people outside of the university, in a relaxed informal open setting, attracting wider participation, innovation and efficiency through sharing.
Colleagues already had a collection of projects which were ideal for sharing and building upon, we began to collate and document projects that were relevant for sharing mainly looking at a first year level of proficiency although this may change to involve school and college age students.
