Reflections on an ‘Open’ Educational Resource
As a learning technologist with programming skills, my role includes developing web-based applications for teaching and learning. I’ve worked on several freely available resources now and this seems like a good opportunity to reflect on their ‘openness’ and wider impact.
One such application is Build Your Own Earth (BYOE) — “A curiosity driven app exploring Earth’s climate”.
BYOE uses climate models to enable students to gain a greater understanding of the processes and variables that control the Earth’s climate — click through, have a play. This resource was developed for the Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Processes MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) which runs on an on-demand basis on the coursera platform. The resource is used in two University course units and forms a key part of summative assessment. It is also used for undergraduate dissertation research. It’s freely available to other instructors, students and researchers.
The value to the University of making this resource freely available has been in research output, reputation, public engagement and recruitment. A paper was published in a high impact international journal, which promoted the resource and research. BYOE was shortlisted for the global Reimagine Education awards 2018.
I’ve always considered it an open resource, although, reviewing the definition, it’s not. A summary of the open definition is “Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness.” BYOE is covered by the University’s copyright policy. This policy and lack of an open policy has been discussed at length here by colleagues, Nick Savage and Ewan Chamings. I agree with them, the marketization of higher education is a key inhibitor to openness and equity of access. I am equally frustrated by this.
Ewan asks if it’s worth it, “are OERs likely to be reused”? For some resources it’s hard to track. For BYOE, we can examine the MOOC statistics and comments to ascertain who is using the resource, why and what they think. Analytics on the application website itself provide additional statistics.
The MOOC is rated 4.6 out of 5 on Coursera. 5,981 people enrolled, 3,717 started the course and 294 ‘completed’ (passed all assessments). The largest age range is 25–34 (41.6%). Notably there are more older participants — 13.7% over 55 (Coursera average: 3.9%). Participants are predominately from Asia, Europe and North America with only 3.7% from Africa. 62% of participants were not in formal study. 75.3% held a degree or doctorate.
Looking at the website analytics for BYOE, in the past year there have been over 32,000 users on the website, an increase of 69.4% on the previous year. 61% were aged under 34 and 11% over 55. The largest geographical usage is in the US (38.4%), France (22.8%) and the UK (7.7%). There is less usage in less affluent countries.
The statistics could lead one to think that the course is largely accessed by well-educated people in developed countries. This is concurrent with some previous findings: “most MOOC participants are already well-educated and employed” (MOOCS: Expectations and reality).
Although, in the comments on Coursera, many participants identify themselves as teachers updating their knowledge. They state they will use BYOE in their own teaching.
For example, BYOE is being used in seminars in Universities across Pakistan to educate about climate change: “I got familiarized with BYOE while doing [the MOOC]. As a result I was able to gain some decent knowledge about the history of our earth and now I want to spread this knowledge to students across Pakistan that will be attending my seminar”.
And: “it gave me a way to tie in relevant and recent examples into my own classroom, so I was able to share my experiences from the course with my students. This was the first year that I really felt comfortable teaching and elaborating on topics in this unit with my students”.
Students report increased engagement using BYOE: “It’s really amazing to see the animation of lots of climate models [by] just clicking few buttons”. They want to share it with friends: “when I share the link with one of my friends, she thought it was easy to operate and found it amazing”. It acts as a catalyst for spreading and generating new knowledge about the Earth’s climate. Users of BYOE can examine previous earths and climates to uncover new insights. It could be compared with the “citizen science movement” which includes projects such as planethunter.
So does BYOE meet the ‘aims’ of open?
The Capetown declaration states: “[OERs] contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.” Unesco states “OERs provide free and legal access to some of the world’s best courses. Educators can then adapt them to local languages and cultures and use them as a basis for innovation” and “OERs make it possible for people of all ages and backgrounds to learn more about the world around them and access the tools they need to improve their lives and livelihoods”.
I’d argue that BYOE satisfies these aims. It’s particularly encouraging that it appeals to teachers to use with their students, that it is being used by researchers to further knowledge and that it is fostering greater student engagement. Barriers to using the resource could be in terms of technology (availability and literacy) and language (English).
An oft-cited benefit of OERs is that they can be used instead of costly textbooks. I would argue that BYOE, and resources like it, offer much more than a free substitute for books. They help people understand and participate in a discipline, enable interaction and give people the knowledge and confidence to enter into discussion and collaboration. BYOE fosters engagement and promotes deeper understanding
(Great news! OER courses can boost engagement;
A Case for Authoring Multi-Touch Interactive Open Educational Resources).
It does this across all stages of life and in all countries where the technology is accessible. Further, these applications can be particularly valuable in STEM teaching, making concepts/models more cognitively accessible and providing virtual access to experiments where equipment may be scarce. In itself, the tool is a collaborative effort between data and subject knowledge being made openly available. We need to create more tools like this, in collaboration with other parties. In doing so we can create better resources, further knowledge in and between disciplines and provide a better educational experience for our students, whilst promoting greater collaboration and equity of access.
