The UNESCO and UNESCO/COL Chairs will report on their activities:
1 Global OER Graduate Network (priority at PhD level) (coordinator OUNL)
2 OER Knowledge Cloud (coordinator AU)
and two enabling Lines of Action:
3 Global OER Map of national and institutional OER initiatives
4 Global balance in the network of UNESCO Chairs in OER, connected in a UNESCO UNITWIN network
These four Lines of Action will contribute through specific activities to the overall Plan of Action for the next few years.
1 Global OER Graduate Network
2 OER Knowledge Cloud
3 Global OER Map
4 Global balance in the network of UNESCO Chairs in OER
Since the transition from a planned economy to a market-based democracy in the early 1990s, Mongolian higher education has experienced a marked expansion. Between 1992 and 2007, the number of tertiary education institutions has increased more than four-fold and enrollment more than six-fold, with the gross enrollment ratio growing from 14 to 47 percent of high school graduates. However, many Mongolians believe the quality of education still remains poor, although the costs of higher education are increasing gradually. Introducing and adapting Open Educational Resources (OER) for the Mongolian higher education sector could help reverse these trends.
There is a growing interest across Mongolia for the use of Creative Commons’ (CC) licensed educational resources by faculty, institutions and government as because CC licensed materials could provide the legal and technical infrastructure essential to the long-term success of OER. Confidence in moving in this direction and the development of public policy is dependent on the availability of localized versions of the Creative Commons licenses in Mongolian. Currently, Mongolia is not among more than 70 CC jurisdictions worldwide with an affiliate, although the licences have been in use since 2011.
The International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada through the DREAM IT project supported the initial roadmap development for a CC Mongolia affiliate. A Creative Commons Mongolia affiliate is expected to boost human capital development and lifelong learning initiatives across Mongolia by working with education providers in both the formal and informal sectors to promote knowledge and skill acquisition through the use and open licensing of learning resources.
The specific objectives of Creative Commons Mongolia affiliate are:
●Support government, institutions, and organizations in the open licensing of data sets, copyright works, research reports, statistics, photographic images, educational resources, and other digital resources
●Support collaborations and partnerships to maximize government investments in education, including the sustainable development and distribution of educational materials and the sharing of digital resources by the public, parents and students across Mongolia
●Complement laws pertaining to copyright and fair use by enabling creators to assert rights and communicate permissions for use, reuse and distribution
●Enable innovative new business models in the public and private sectors using open data
●Support the revision of policy regulating the production and use of open educational resources for general education and other public services
●Contribute to raising awareness and adoption of open licensing frameworks for authors, educators, creators, businesses
●Promote creative and innovative activities which deliver social and economic benefits for Mongolia and Mongolians
The Creative Commons Mongolia affiliate has an initial starting base in the higher education sector. Currently, the four largest Mongolian universities, the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, the National University of Mongolia, the Health Sciences University and the Mongolian State University of Education, are participating in this initiative to take the lead and will invite participation from other public and private universities. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Creative Commons and representatives of Mongolian universities is expected to be signed in September 2012.
The creation of OpenCourseWare (OCW) by the MIT in 2001 can be considered as a milestone in the recent history of open educational resources (OER). Since then universities from around the world have adopted a set of associated open educational initiatives. After highlighting best practices in English speaking universities, this paper explores the current state of the OER movement in Latin American higher education (HE) institutions. Relevant open access initiatives are analyzed within this study in order to identify the strengths and opportunities of OER in Latin America.
An OER action research project, OportUnidad, founded by the European Commission is presented. This study, lead by a partnership of European and Latin American universities, aims to increase the awareness and institutional support of OER in Latin American HE. Based in this action-research project, this article analyses the impact of digital technologies in education, particularly regarding the generation, adoption and dissemination of educational content. The analysis also enquires whether recent open educational practices (OEP) promoted by universities such as Stanford, MIT or Harvard can leverage dynamics of innovation in HE. In addition, an overview is provided of the trends that are currently influencing the transformation in education in the Internet Era. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the challenges and conditions required to foster the adoption of OER in the Latin American region.
5 years ago TU Delft launched their OpenCourseWare website. This was a big step for the university, but has been very successful. In 5 year time we have published more than 90 courses; we started a national Special Interest Group for OER in the Netherlands; we got a grant from the European Commission to promote OpenCourseWare in European Higher Education and our Director of Education became the second president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.
But what is the next step?
We started with more interaction by including the OpenStudy widget, and adding Facebook and Twitter integration.
Next to this we changed the focus to the use and re-use of our OpenCourseWare materials:
For a traditional brick-and-mortar university offering online master programmes is a big step forward. We will start with three master programmes: Aerospace Engineering, Watermanagement and Engineering and Policy Analysis. The first online students will start in the academic year 2013-2014.
Are edX, Udacity and Cousera disruptive innovators? If they are, is there a future for institutions like the Open University in the Netherlands?
Are MOOC’s disruptive innovators of open education. If so, what does this mean for open universities such as the Open University in The Netherlands?
In this 45-minute session, we will spark audience discussions and encourage microblogging as we explore open visions of learning and leadership. Changes in demographics, enrollment patterns, decreased governmental funding, information accessibility, technological advancements, educational business models, systems infrastructure, and educational practices are but a few of the pressures that push and pull on open initiatives at post-secondary institutions. Questions are being asked of our pedagogical approaches, student engagement in their learning, and institutional supports for teaching and learning. Additionally, campus discussions regarding copyright practices, costs of textbooks and journal subscriptions, and e-learning/blended learning adoptions, have all combined to create a context for greater expectations of a new vision for learning. At a time when many post-secondary institutions are facing significant pressures with the traditional models of support for learning, teaching, and leadership, changing the culture of academia toward openness provides the opportunity for enabling innovation in higher education.
What will that vision look like? Open. The values and practices of open education and leadership will be at the heart of this vision. Such vision entails moving away from the over-reliance on educational traditions. In this space between what was and what will be, we find a creative a set of tensions around the push and pull of openness in higher education. The questions many of us are faced with include:
By participating in a facilitated conversation about changing the culture of academia to embrace open educational practices and leadership on our campuses, we will explore the above questions and acquire new ideas / strategies for moving educational traditions and current leadership to embrace open practices. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, success stories, and lessons learned to share the diversity of approaches for enabling open practices on our campuses. Questions, strategies, lessons and resources will be collected and shared back with all participants. Participants are also encouraged to bring electronic devices so that they can contribute to the discussions via shared documents, twitter, and other public channels of communication and sharing. Artifacts acquired through our facilitated discussions, reflections and critical analyses will be collected and shared back to the group. Educators and/or administrators in all career stages, and prior knowledge of the open practices, are welcomed.
Li, C. (2010). Open Leadership: How Social Technology can Transform the Way you Lead. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Open Policy Strategies and Implementation in the U.S. Department of Labor TAACCCT Grant Program
The unanimous adoption of the 2012 Paris OER Declaration at the UNESCO World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress heralds a profound change to how publicly funded educational resources may be openly licensed and shared in the coming years.
A small number of large-scale publicly funded OER projects are in process, many more are anticipated worldwide, and effective strategies for managing this policy shift are needed. In this session we will examine two case studies to learn which strategies are currently being used to support publicly funded OER projects, and discuss what support will be needed to ensure the success of future large OER projects as more governments adopt open policies to require publicly funded resources be openly licensed resources.
Case Study 1: The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) created the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program to encourage community colleges to create open education and vocational programs for unemployed workers. It represents one effort to introduce open policies into publicly funded projects by requiring that all materials created or modified with grant / public funds carry a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license to guarantee the resources can be reused, revised, remixed and redistributed.
Recognizing the need for grantees to fully understand these requirements, a private foundation is providing support for an OPEN Consortium (http://open4us.org) to provide consulting and direct technical assistance on open licensing, leveraging existing OER, universal design, accessibility, meta-data tagging, learning analytics, and developing open courseware. The TAConnecT program is another support mechanism that matches grantees with organizations that have expertise in many areas including faculty development of OER, measuring learning outcomes, developmental adult education, career workforce education, and open eLearning platforms.
Case Study 2: The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning / distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. COL has a decade-long history of helping developing nations improve access to quality education and training and the Open Schooling Initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa represents a multi-country project to use OER and technology to implement universal access to secondary school education.
Using professional development workshops, educators and policymakers have received training on development and operation of open schools. Topics have included OER development, instructional design, radio broadcasting, learner support including those with disabilities, eLearning, open school management, strategic planning and quality assurance for open schools.
Attendees will be asked to participate in a discussion of how successful the current support strategies have been and what additional support mechanisms for future large-scale publicly funded OER projects are needed. Feedback from case study leaders will be shared as available.
The purpose of this session is to present research that investigates the adoption of Open Course Library (OCL) courses within the WA CTC system. The Open Course Library project aims to create fully developed course content for 81 high enrollment courses in the Washington State Community and Technical College system. These materials will then be shared with an open license. The OCL project successfully developed 42 high quality courses through a year-long collaboration among 125 experts. On October 31, 2011, the first 42 courses were released as scheduled, and made available to stakeholders through multiple channels.
The immediate impact of the first 42 courses was significant. Within the first few months after its release, over 30,000 people from 125 different countries have visited opencourselibrary.org. But the most prominent result was its impact on lowering students’ textbook costs. The Student PIRGS estimated that the 42 faculty course developers and their departments will save students $1.26 million during the 2011-2012 school year, which alone exceeds the $1.18 million spent on creating the courses. These savings not only help Washington’s students afford a college education, but also provide a tremendous return on the original investment.
While the immediate impact on lowering students’ textbook costs was significant, it is unclear how OCL courses have been adopted within the WA CTC system, and how the adoption has influenced faculty’s teaching practices and student success. Our research focuses on faculty’s use of OCL materials to meet their professional needs, their perception and readiness of using OCL materials, and ultimately its influence on student success. Specifically, we seek to address the following questions:
•What are the barriers to the successful adoption of open course materials?
•What are the keys to the successful adoption of open course materials?
•What institutional policies are needed to support the adoption and use of open course
•materials?
•How and to what extent, are open course materials being shared and used?
•How does the use of open course materials influence student success?
The study is currently underway. The participants of this study include faculty working for Washington community college system. A mixed methods approach (a procedure for collecting, analyzing and mixing or integrating both quantitative and qualitative data at various stages of the research process within a single study) will be used. Data collection consists primarily of survey, and phone interviews using a semi-structured interview protocol that was designed to capture faculty’s perception on the use of the OCL materials and other open educational materials. Cross-interview analyses will be conducted for each question in the interview guide.
While the study focuses on specific open educational materials, we anticipate that this study will shed light on the usefulness of the system to faculty and students. Additionally, we believe that we will gain insights on how to keep OCL course materials evolving, and hence increase sustainability.
Practitioners considering using Open Educational Resources (OER) seek (i) the evidence that openness works, and (ii) models of openness which may be followed. The desire for evidence and guidance reflects the challenges faced by any new area of learning technology, but is particularly timely for OER as the potential to move to the mainstream is made increasingly obvious through major initiatives and high profile launches. Research across a range of activities involving themed research strands, studies and gathering of data has shown that there are models that we can follow and shared questions that need answers. Taking a reconstructive approach to existing research, we present a set of critical factors that emerge, each of which links to activity within the community and requirements from practitioners, and we show examples that provide possible answers.
There is a need for open education and its advocates to encourage mutual sharing of data in support of the objectives of the movement as a whole. Openness in education can be disruptive to existing pedagogical and business models. By piecing together data from a range of educational contexts both formal (K12, college, higher education) and informal (repositories, MOOCs, open online courses) we can assess the impact that different initiatives have had and plan for future learning from experience in each sector. A hybrid research and practice framework combines applying research findings to help make progress while at the same time seeking to further build up those findings and exemplars. By working with organisations from the open education movement from around the world to collate and analyse evidence of OER use we can start to build scalable frameworks for open solutions that are tailored to a variety of contexts. Thus, on the basis of data from the OLnet OER Evidence Hub, we argue that the way forward is to value partial pieces of evidence while clarifying their basis and appreciating the contexts in which they can apply; we can then help new projects and initiatives to make good choices as they work with Open Educational Resources and Open Educational Practices. This should be understood as an active and open process of extending and refining our knowledge about what works and why. The emerging picture suggests that some of the standard issues of OER – quality, sustainability, reuse – should not be thought of as OER issues per se, while remaining challenges can be divided into three categories: challenges of preparation; research challenges and emergent challenges (see http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/openminded/?p=523 for graphic).
In this presentation we will show the summarised challenges, map these across initiatives and pick out key exemplars selected from cases where we have had OLnet research or Fellowship connections such as in copyright solutions to influence policy of Creative Commons, access approach of TESSA, cultural work within UNESCO, and assessment and social interaction of P2PU. Collation of individual evidence offers the potential to see generic answers. We will invite interactive discussion and be prepared to match individual problems to potential solutions, or, perhaps, as new issues to be investigated.
In the Netherlands, 14 research universities and 41 universities of applied sciences offer Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degree programs. The Dutch education system is known for the excellent quality of its teaching and research and its international academic environment.
In 2009 the Dutch Ministry of Education launched Wikiwijs, an OER platform. The goal is to give teachers in all educational sectors (from K-12 to higher education) a means of finding, sharing, creating and reusing OER. In 2011, SURF (the initiator of innovation in higher education and research) launched the nationwide Open Educational Resources Program. Its aim is to increase awareness of OER in Dutch higher education, to help higher education institutions develop a strategic approach to OER, and to advance the development and use/reuse of OER. In SURF’s Strategic Plan the Dutch higher education institutions have made the theme of “openness” a priority for the coming years, in both education and research.
In 2011, all these measures resulted in an increase in OER activities at several institutions. It remained unclear, however, which of the institutions had a clearly defined vision of OER that would result in an OER policy and progress in implementing that policy.
To define “the state of openness” in Dutch higher education, SURF and Wikiwijs conducted a survey in spring 2012. The survey’s aim was to answer the following key questions: To what extent do Dutch educational institutions have a policy on developing, sharing and using/reusing OER?, and (2) which OER are already available in Dutch higher education (or have the potential to become so)? The survey thus offers a glimpse of “the state of the art”, the purpose being to understand the extent to which OER have been implemented in Dutch higher education, in both the quantitative and qualitative sense.
The presentation will provide more details about the survey, its results and the subsequent actions.
