Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Report - pdf version.
For Hewlett OER Report - doc version, click here.
 A comprehensive review and facing forward look of the OER field from:
- Dan Atkins, Director of Cyberinfrastructure at NSF;
- John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox, Director of PARC, and
- Allen Hammond, World Resources Institute.
Just released, A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievement, Challenges and New Opportunities. Please distribute, read, digest and discuss here at OERderves. This report examines The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s past investments in Open Educational Resources, the emerging impact and explores future opportunities.
Central to the report is the idea of “The Brewing Perfect Stormâ€Â and the creation of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure.
We welcome your thoughts, creativity and expertise!
I read this review with interest. The mention of cell phones as a potential platform is excellent: that’s the technology that really reaches the poor globally.
My biggest concern about the open content movement is that we create tons of great content that gets relatively little use. The movement is also incomplete: we have a lot of courseware, but few open content textbooks to go with them. The network effect is incomplete: I’ve seen lots of similar sites that position themselves as *the* site. Users have to find what they are looking for more than half the time or they stop bothering.
Lastly, the field is incredibly undermarketed. How do we sell free? One answer might be to get Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft to all donate free ads for open content sites.
Jim,
I think we are now at a point where there are plenty of high quality free online resources, including full online textbooks and video lectures but it does require a bit of research to find them. There will be some differences between fields but in organic chemistry there are several excellent university level free online textbooks. It is up to the instructor to identify and validate these sources and there are some powerful new tools like Google Co-op that can help with this. Here is a workshop on that:
http://drexel-coas-talks-mp3-podcast.blogspot.com/2007/01/google-co-op-workshop.html
I appreciate your comment about how little use much of the open content gets. Some of that can be controlled by the content provider fairly easily. For example, because I use Google Co-op in my courses, I exclude all content that can’t be indexed directly. This includes some really good online textbooks. More on that here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2007/01/2007-winter-term-starts.html
Jim’s concern is well taken. One obvious solution is to persuade the mobile providers to market the “free” educational services, since they will benefit from the data traffic. Carriers are hungry for such value-added services to offer. This is particularly interesting for informal education outside of classrooms, to which english language training, business skills, and other high demand topics lend themselves. A second possible solution is to view the problem as one of enterprise development–build alliances with commercial education providers (or entrepreneurial schools) who will market the content but charge (appropriate) fees for the classroom instruction. But first there is a lot of work to be done to learn how to use the mobile platform effectively for educational content delivery.
The Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Programme is devoting significant resource to modelling with participant institutions the ‘implementation and use’ of OER’s in curriculum development and couse planning. In developing country contexts (and elsewhere?) such modelling seems essential to effective use and take up of OER’s. This includes operationalsing mobile platform delivery. It seems important to assess the ratio of OER development to implementation exemplification at this fascinating stage of OER generation.
A very interesting report and I feel that it makes some good recommendations at several levels. I have certainly been impressed by the way that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations efforts have built to create the OER movement and think that there should be a way forward that brings in other interested parties.
The section of the report that makes me pause though is when it talks about OPLI. On first reading I took this as Open Participatory Learning Initiative and I was ok with that - however the suggestion is that the “I” is Infrastructure and I am not sure that gives the right push. The Web2.0 philosophy encourages experimentation, mixing, variety and light weight solutions. Working on infrastructure implies getting it “right” careful conformance and designing grand solutions. While this could be good work I am not sure it is what is needed to move the OER movement forward.
This is also reflected in the leading grand challenge “to significantly transform effectiveness of and participation in scientific discovery and learning”. That is a very grand challenge, I think we have some more immediate challenges to address: to offer value and participation to those who visit open content sites to have fun, gain knowledge and increase their interest in learning. This would perhaps put more of the emphasis on the Participatory and less on the Infrastructure. In the report it comments on the strength of Content Context and it is when users interact with content we get some of this mix as they can give us “user augmented content” that shows either how they learn from it or (less commonly) help others learn with it.
Thank you again for the report - a great contribution to OER thinking.
Patrick.
(John asked me to post this here - it originally appeared as a post in my daily newsletter http://www.downes.ca/post/39591 )
A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities
Only a small percentage of Hewlett money is invested outside the U.S. ($12 million out of $68 million, mostly to Europe, Africa and China) and most of it is given to large institutions (who, IMHO, don’t need the money) so I haven’t paid strict attention to the foundation’s activities supporting open educational resources (OERs) - though, to be sure, the agencies funded, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare and Rice’s Connexions, have had a far-reaching impact.
Anyhow, about half this report is devoted to summarizing the Foundation’s activities. Where it gets interesting is with this: “We are advocating investments to achieve more pervasive access to OER and are advocating an initiative aimed at deeper impact on learning. We advocate an initiative, building on OER, to create a global culture of learning. A culture of learning, or what some might call a learning ecosystem, is targeted at preparing people for thriving in a rapidly evolving, knowledge-based world… We now propose that OER be leveraged within a broader initiative-an international Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) initiative…”
The Foundation, in other words, should embrace Web 2.0. Sort of - the authors pile everything but the kitchen sink into the concept, including rich media, Second Life, virtual organizations, mobile computing and gaming. The report also suggests creating linkages with e-science and cyberinfrastructure (a ‘grassroots movement’, according to the authors, though “catalyzed by a landmark 2003 report from an NSF-appointed Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel, ‘Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure.’” - uh huh).
There is no doubt some merit in the concept of the OPLI - it is, after all, very similar to what I recommended in 2005 (”the functions of production and consumption need to be collapsed, that the distinction between producers and consumers need to be collapsed”) but in the details (p. 66 ff) there needs to be some hard (and critical) thinking. Why is Globus a model but Google not? Is repurposing the good idea it is made out to be (why not a new resource for each context)? When they say ’service-oriented’, do they mean SOA, REST, or JSON? Is automated interchange a good idea? And why oh why would you allow resources that are manifestly not open to be called “open” on the dubious basis that there is “a continuum of openness.” And is “smartly instrumented” just a way for the evidence-based people to sneak into the mix?
Hewlett, like I say, goes for the institution-based solution, and this report plays right into that (and the authors even offer to recommend funding candidates). OERs don’t yet exist, and this report recommends a move away from them. Caution is warranted. Via Graham Attwell, who offers his own comments. Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, March 26, 2007. [Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources]
I particularly liked some of the exciting ideas contained in the notion of moving from OER to OPLI. I found a number of references which I will follow up. Here are a couple that were not included which might merit your attention:
The best summary I know of in this area is “Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the Dominant Design of Educational Systems”. http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/727/1/sw_ectel.pdf
In a similar spirit, here is a recent blog post & diagram which I think might reinforce your point about participatory and informal learning [picked up from Stephen Downes: Stephen’s Web]
“An educational institution asked Teemu Arina to draw up a one-pager on how to take advantage of informal learning. They were imagining the formal learning at the core, with informal learning glued around the periphery. Teemu gave them an informal-learning centric rendering instead.” http://informl.com/?p=722
PDF and DOC are paper formats, not screen formats. The community cares and wants to read this *now* while it is *new*. Please put it online in well formatted HTML so it can be properly read on screen. This is some work but the authors, the report and this community deserve nothing less. Thank you!
Appreciate the feedback. I really like Al’s suggestion about co-opting the network providers: there’s something exciting there.
Appreciate Jean-Claude’s comments about textbooks. I followed the threads and found Reusch’s textbook (on organic chemistry). Just underscores the need to find a way to get the network effect going. Where’s the amazon of free books?
My thanks to the authors and the Hewlett Foundation for this high level overview of many OER initiatives, and for placing this in the context of other major initiatives such as eScience and eHumanities.
While the report considers a number of promising future developments for education and technology, one key area is missing - Learning Design.
The field of Learning Design seeks to describe the *process* of education - the sequences of activities facilitated by an educator that are often at the heart of small group teaching. Consider the following example: an educator decides to break their seminar/tutorial class into small groups to debate an idea, then has each group report back to the whole class, then has the whole class debate the different group ideas, then the educator presents an article from the literature with a new perspective, and then the whole class discusses how their initial debate compares to the ideas of the article.
This example is typical of small group teaching around the world, and yet this dimension of education is notably missing from much of the open courseware work to date.
Learning Design seeks to describe educational processes like the example above. In particular, it has a special focus on processes that involve group tasks, not merely individual students interacting with content on a screen - students interact with each other over a series of structured tasks.
Much of the work on Learning Design focuses on technology to automatically “run” the sequence of student activities (facilitated by the educator via computers), but an activity in a Learning Design could be conducted without technology. Hence a particular Learning Design may be a mixture of online and face to face tasks (”blended learning”) or it could be conducted entirely face to face with no computers (in this case, the particular Learning Design acts as a standardised written description of the educational process - like a K-12 lesson plan). One way to think of a Learning Design system is as a workflow engine for collaborative activities. A particular Learning Design is like an educational recipe for a teacher - it describes ingredients (content) and instructions (process).
In the context of OERs, educators can share Learning Designs in the same way they can share content; but with the added benefit that they are now sharing the teaching process, not just teaching content. The two main Learning Design initiatives globally (Coppercore and related projects; and LAMS - which is my area of work) are both are freely available as open source software, and both have online communities sharing Learning Designs as open content (Learning Networks for Learning Design at OUNL - http://imsld.learningnetworks.org/ and the LAMS Community - http://www.lamscommunity.org/
The vision of how Learning Design could contribute to improving education was best articulated by Diana Laurillard in the UK Government e-learning strategy in 2005 - point 89 says:
“We want to stimulate greater innovation in e-learning design to accelerate the development of the next generation of e-learning. The focus should be on design flexibility for teachers and engaging activity for learners. Flexible learning design packages would enable teachers in all sectors to build their own individual and collaborative learning activities around digital resources. This would help them engage in designing and discussing new kinds of pedagogy, which is essential if we are to succeed in innovating and transforming teaching and learning.”
The benefit of Learning Design for OER is that it provides educators with a way to describe and share the educational process (not just content). By fostering sharing, we not only improve education through open dissemination, but as educators can adapt and improve the Learning Designs they receive, and share the improved version back with a global audience of educators, this could lead to improved educational outcomes while at the same time reducing preparation time.
For further information about Learning Design and LAMS, see http://www.lamsfoundation.org/CD0506/
As an aside, it is interesting to note that the interest in Learning Design in the USA has been markedly less than in countries such as the UK and elsewhere in Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and others. This remains somewhat of a mystery.
I have reread this report since the meeting and have innumerable comments I could make on many specific points but will try to focus on what I see as being key points for Hewlett to consider. And apologies in advance that this piece is so long but a long report needs a lengthy response.
I feel the report contains nearly all the right words and aspirations but I want them to be arranged and ordered differently to promote a Participatory Open Learning Initiative (POLI) rather than an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI). In doing this I am using my own experiences as a systems thinker and practitioner and long term employee of the UK Open University involved in the development of many types of learning system.
My starting point is that systems are mental constructs – models – of the world we perceive, where we distinguish a particular system for a particular purpose from its context or environment. I can illustrate that a little further by commenting upon the use of the analogy of an ecosystem (as in a learning ecosystem on p35 of the report). An ecosystem is a complex adaptive system in which the participants do adapt their behaviour at micro and macro levels in order to sustain the ecosystem but the ecosystem is an emergent product of these many adaptations which are of a non-reflective level of learning. It is a purposive system which we can describe as a system that does x (and build predictive models based on the discovered ‘rules’ operating between the participants). In contrast a Human Activity System, while also a complex adaptive system, is also subject to reflection and review, such that the participants can change the rules that govern individual and collective behaviour and not just rely on the emergent behaviour. This is a purposeful system which we can describe as a system for doing x. The key here is that while there may be greater agreement on the description of the purposes of an ecosystem there can be significant differences in how people view a human activity system. Take, for instance, the Higher Education system. It can be variously viewed as a system for employing lots of well qualified people, a system for undertaking publicly funded research, a system for educating privileged individuals, a system for keeping young people off the unemployment register, a system for training a modern workforce etc. Immediately these different views change the discussions that would occur around them.
Applying this thinking to the major recommendation of the report for an OPLI and in particular the statement on p60 then I think the authors are arguing for a system for creating and supporting a new set of organizational practices, utilising an ever growing technical infrastructure and changing social norms around open and distance learning. They also talk a lot about moving from a culture of sharing (in the OER movement) to a global culture of learning (and apparently not just around OERs). Personally I would want to refocus this to look at a Participatory Open Learning Initiative that builds upon re-evaluating notions of learning at the individual (and possibly community) level (which the authors do talk about to some extent) and also the context of the learning economy (rather than ecology) that encompasses the human activity system(s) that such an Initiative could focus on.
To my mind we all learn all the time and we all have the same ways of learning and technologies simply provide new contexts and means from and in which to. A lot is made in the report of the young learning in immersive environments through discovery. So what’s new? I was born and brought up on a farm and that proved a wonderfully immersive environment or context for me and some of my peers to discover and learn in. It is – and was - learning by doing observations, experiments, role play, social interaction etc. All of us have this ability but the young are particularly good at this discovering as they attempt to make sense of the formal and non-formal rules and knowledge needed to survive and thrive, the roots of learning to be a member of the social community (as we get older we also learn to be a member of a working community or a profession). While we can discover a lot of things for ourselves we generally learn more from and with other people – those more knowledgeable and experienced – because it amplifies the social learning capacity of the community above that of a collection of individuals working separately. However as societies have grown larger and developed (in the modern industrialization sense) so we have re-organized our major learning contexts by creating schools, colleges and Universities which over the years have privileged certain types of learning (learning about, learning to do) at certain stages in our lives (when young) over other types of learning (learning to be, learning through experience) and other times of our lives (lifelong learning and continuing professional development). This has led to some reasonably clear distinctions in the way the learning economy is organised with there being a dominant and large scale formal public economy of educational organisations largely funded though public monies (taxes), supplemented or complemented by a market economy of educational organisations mostly dependent on private funding (fees) and an ever shrinking small scale social economy of semi formal and non-formal educational experiences achieved through some charitable funding but mostly voluntary activity where no money is exchanged. In this mixed economy there is a balance between how open the organisations and educational experiences are to all in the communities they are found in, whether these experiences are free from cost at the point of use and how formalised and recognised those experiences are.
At The Open University we use a method we call Supported Open Learning with our students. The three words each have important connotations. Support means that we design learning experiences that factor in the pedagogical support built into crafted multiple media educational resources, draw in personal support from the students through self reflection, encourages peer support by fellow students and provides professional support from a range of specialists, not just subject experts. Open covers four aspects in our mission; open as to people, places, methods and ideas, that means we try to remove as many barriers as possible to learning (I say more about all these in my chapter in a forthcoming book: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11309). And learning means we focus more on the needs of the student than the teacher in designing our learning experiences. The lessons of Supported Open Learning have been studied and recorded and tested over 35 years, not just at The Open University but with other open universities of various types.
To a large extent many of these important lessons have yet to influence the educational practice to be found in most educational organisations at all levels of education. The reason why is that existing Institutions and their existing organisational practices achieve what they are set up to do, which is create an industrialised method of educating as many people as possible in certain forms of knowledge and learning and validating those experiences to meet labour market needs. They do not see the need to change practices for these primary purposes (a system for teaching young people how to gain qualifications and skills through tightly defined curricula). I do not see the provision of OERs per se as greatly changing this situation since it requires such a large shift in the policies and practices of governments as well as organisations. Even the internet and e-science simply add to the range of tools and contexts in which such educational experiences will continue to operate. And that in itself creates more barriers because of the lack of expertise and experience in teaching and learning using such different practices.
In looking to re-focus what Hewlett could support then I want to argue for concentrating on participation in non-formal learning outside of existing organisational contexts. So I take my restatement of Participatory Open Learning to mean that voluntary mass participation replaces the professional support element of Supported Open Learning, but that the key elements of open and learning are retained – focus on the learner experience and make it as open as possible in all the different meanings of open. That requires greater emphasis on enabling community-led, bottom-up participation using the infrastructure where the involvement of people is critical to the activity not a bolt-on to big science (examples of want I mean can be seen in the UK with multi platform participatory activities like Springwatch led by the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/wildbritain/springwatch/index.shtml). It also means making the non-formal learning the primary aim of OER activities with the support it offers formal learning a secondary aim and trying to get such activity more valued and recognised as part of the whole landscape of life long learning. So it is not about creating a culture of learning but a social acceptance of all the ways of learning. And to do so will requires a lot more work being put into researching and evidencing through best practice exactly how participatory open learning supplements and complements existing educational practices such that the new practices are taken up because they have been shown to work and because people have come used to learning in those other ways as well.
I therefore want to help create a system for enabling more effective non-formal community-based learning through participation in the sharing and creation of open educational resources and experiences using the new technological infrastructure – a Participatory Open Learning Initiative.
Great report, say a milestone publication, thoughtfull comments too.
To your consideration I offer some reflections (and supporting documents).
Focus in some of my recent work has been on the architecture of collaborative platforms, adopting a multi-level (person-organization-institution-society) approach to analysis, design and implementation challenges (in so-called concerted regulative cycles - see http://is.tm.tue.nl/staff/jgoossenaerts/methodological_reference.htm .)
For the area of e-learning, this approach is illustrated by a student report that was recently completed (see case 5 The e-learning transition on http://is.tm.tue.nl/staff/jgoossenaerts/applications.htm )
On the particular issue of multi-linguality (for SMALL content chunks, mind the mobile below) I wish to refer to UNL (http://www.undl.org/ ; referred to, to some extent in above report.
On the issues of science commons (which would form the foundation of “science OER’s”, politically neutral, but
ubiquitously needed, to mitigate development and climate risks), I wish to refer to the GICSI initiative of CODATA from ICSU
http://www.codata.org/wsis/GICSI-prospectus.html
In brief, as “infrastructure architects” we must give due consideration to stakeholders at all scales or levels in the global eco-socio-industrial eco-system :
- the learning paths of the persons (in their livelihoods, with their resource endowments -including the mobile phones for the poor);
- the organizations that leverage the person’s skills and talents, this is the private sector;
- and the institutions that play the role D.C. North has exposed so eloquently in his work(see: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html ), yet they must be tuned to the realities of the knowledge economy, as addressed by GICSI, CC, a.o..
Having that much knowledge among us, a first challenge seems to overcome the barrier formed by functional, disciplinary, proprietary, sectorial and other silos, and the other boundaries to our individual rationality.
For doing this, we have an architecture process; in which we have made some feeble steps so far…
Kind regards,
Jan Goossenaerts
My personal review on the paper..
http://hennistalk.blogspot.com/2007/09/opened-review-of-open-educational.html