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OER Festival in Berlin – How An Open Event Inspires Open Educational Activities in Germany

- March 17, 2016 in events, featured, guestpost, oer

ber1Last week the OER community celebrated its first OER Festival in Berlin which consisted of an OER Camp and an OER conference/forum (here is the German website). After the successful OER13 and OER14 conferences in Germany, the goal was to broaden and intensify the debate about OER with relevant stakeholders. In this regard, two additional OER projects are worth mentioning as they are funded by the German government and targeted at “Mapping OER” and synthesising affordances and requirements for infrastructure on which OER-related systems can be built and integrated (feasibility study). These projects have then led to a call for proposals from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for (1) building and establishing a centre for information (and support) related to OER and (2) training for multipliers.

The OER Camp in Germany was based on an innovative format called BarCamps: these camps are participant-driven conferences, in which attendees share and learn in an open informal environment. Unlike traditional conferences that pre-schedule a programme, BarCamps rely on input from attendees to create the session programme on the spot and collaborate ad hoc on emerging topics.

Session planning with all OERCamp attendees Photo by “jmm-Hamburg” under CC BY 2.0 Generic

Session planning with all OERCamp attendees Photo by “Jmm-Hamburg” under CC BY 2.0 Generic

Since 2012, several such camps have taken place in Bremen, Bielefeld and Berlin. On top of the ad hoc sessions, some workshops are offered by the members of the emerging OER Camp, who are practitioners and educators in media for education, adult educators, school teachers, researchers, policy-makers, educational publishers, and OER advocates.

The main goals of the OER Camp are to:

  • Network and connect stakeholders across diverse educational domains
  • Share knowledge and expertise on OER
  • Spread the word on existing as well as new initiatives
  • Promote open education among educational practitioners and to decision-makers and policy-makers

Why did we choose the initiative as good practice? 

The events are very participatory, incubate new ideas and attract attendees with diverse backgrounds.

OER Atlas 2016 - Publication on OER stakeholders and activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

OER Atlas 2016 – Publication on OER stakeholders and activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Also, the OER Camp has directly or indirectly produced the following outcomes (there are more that could have been selected):

  • The low threshold to initiate discussions and share knowledge has been the main driver of a growing OER grassroots community in the German-speaking countries. Several established educational platform providers for school education have started to license resources with Creative Commons.
  • The event built on and strengthened an existing community on OER which has had a major influence on the growing political support for the topic in Germany, e.g. the availability of national funding for awareness raising and further education measures.
  • A concise guide for teachers on the objectives behind OER, Creative Commons licenses and the main educational repositories/platforms has been developed by OER Camp participants from Austria and has been remixed and adapted to the German context
  • Plans to issue an OER award were discussed openly during the OER Camp 2015 and put into practice early 2016. Also as a result of the award plans the event grew into a 2-day BarCamp and a 1-day forum involving 7 partners, 30 supporters, 272 registrations, and 109 speakers.. The organisers presented all submissions in a CC-BY licensed publication that gives a good insight into the current OER landscape.
OER Award 2016 Photo under CC0 (Courtesy of Karl Kirst)


OER Award 2016 Photo under CC0 (Courtesy of Karl Kirst)

So it has been an exciting time and a great opportunity to talk about the latest developments of OER in Germany.

  • OER has been established as an important topic in contemporary education. After its slow uptake in German-speaking countries, OER has gained considerable momentum and more and more people from different sectors are now involved. What can be seen in this “OER-socialisation process” is that there is a set of shared beliefs about what OER should be, but less agreement on how we should bring about changes in the educational systems.
  • Although there is growing interest in OER, the discussion on procedures to mainstream OER is at the beginning. It is an interesting process to watch as arguments like “everything that is paid by the public/state should be OER” turn out to be much more complex than initially thought.
  • We are on the verge of reaching a next level as indicated by the afore-mentioned political initiatives.

Overall and to sum up this brief review, it was an inspiring OER event given the diversity of formats and the nicely orchestrated opportunities for discussions. There are exciting times ahead of us and it is in the hands of all of us to keep OER going.

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About the authors

ACT Anne-Christin Tannhäuser is a project coordinator in technology-enhanced learning and open education programmes and a consultant on educational innovation. She holds a Master’s degree in Educational Sciences and Linguistics from the University of Leipzig and she was trained at the Max Planck-Institute for Human Development, Berlin, in the use of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. In the past seven years she has managed and contributed to several TEL initiatives at national and European levels, including for the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning, Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, Knowledge Information Centre Malta, Wikimedia Germany, University of Applied Sciences Ruhrwest, Linnaeus University and the Institute of Prospective Technological Studies (European Commission) in the field of open education, recognition of open learning and evaluation/communication of R&D projects. She coordinated the Open Access journal INNOQUAL, the International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning, for two years. She is also an associate researcher at the Berlin campus of ESCP Europe, a private business school with six locations in the EU.

Dr. Markus Deimann

Dr. Markus Deimann, has since September 2013 been Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat) in the Department of Instructional Technology and Media at FernUniversität Hagen. He completed his studies of Educational Sciences and Political Sciences at the University of Mannheim. Afterwards he worked as Research Assistant on the Project BMBF “Mulitmediales Fernstudium has been Medizinische Informatik (MEDIN)” (Multimedia-based Distance Study Medical Computer Science) at the Technische Universität Ilmenau (Ilmenau University of Technology) and at the University of Erfurt. Furthermore, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Florida State University, Tallahassee (USA) for one year. In 2011 he was a Scholarship Holder at the Open University (UK) for three months.

** (Part of this column was published in http://project.idea-space.eu/2016/03/02/oercamps/)**

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A Scuola di OpenCoesione: Using Open Data in schools for the development of civic awareness

- March 15, 2016 in data, featured, guestpost, mooc, OEP, oer, Open Educational Resources

A Scuola di OpenCoesione ( ASOC), from Italian, translates as Open Cohesion School. It can be understood as an educational challenge and a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) designed for students in Italian secondary schools. ASOC was launched in 2013 within the open government strategy on cohesion policy carried out by the National Government, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Representation Office of the European Commission in Italy; it is also supported by the European Commission’s network of “Europe Direct” Information Centres.

The third edition of ASOC was launched in November 2015. While you are reading this post, about 2800 students and 200 teachers are involved in a collective learning experience focused on civic monitoring of public funding through open data analysis, and also by visiting sites and conducting “data journalist” research.

A_scuola_logo_quadricromia_png

The main objectives of ASOC are to engage participating schools in actively promoting the use and reuse of open data for the development of civic awareness and engagement with local communities in monitoring the effectiveness of public investment.

The participating students and teachers design their research using data from the 900,000 projects hosted on the national OpenCoesione portal in which everyone can find transparent information regarding the investment in projects funded by Cohesion Policies in Italy. The portal provides data including detailed information on the amount of funding, policy objectives, locations, involved subjects and completion times: so schools can select the data they want to use in their research, which can be related to their region or city.

ASOC’s Teaching and learning programme

infografica-new

The teaching and learning programme is designed in six main sessions. The first four sessions aim at developing innovative and interdisciplinary skills such as digital literacies and data analysis to support students to assess and critically understand the use of public money.

Students learn through a highly interactive process using policy analysis techniques, such as tackling policy rationales for interventions, as well as understanding results and performance. This process employs “civic” monitoring to work on real cases using data journalism and storytelling techniques.

During the fifth session, and based on their research projects on the information acquired, the students carry out on-site visits to the public works or services in their region or city which are financed by EU and national funds, and also they interview the key stakeholders involved in the projects’ implementation, the beneficiaries and other actors.

Finally, the sixth session is a final event where students meet with their local communities and with policy-makers to discuss their findings, with the ultimate goal to keep the administrators accountable and responsible for their decisions. Here you can find all the video sessions and exercises: http://www.ascuoladiopencoesione.it/lezioni/.

The teaching method combines asynchronous and synchronous learning. The asynchronous model is designed following a typical MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) style where participants learn through a series of activities. Teachers are trained by the central ASOC team through a series of webinars. The synchronous in-class sessions share a common structure: each class starts with one or more videos from the MOOC, followed by a group exercise where the participants get involved in teacher-led classroom activities. These activities are organised around the development of the research projects and reproduce a flipped classroom setting.

In between lessons, students work independently to prepare data analysis reports and original final projects. Also, in order to have an impact on local communities and institutions, the students are actively supported by local associations that contribute with specific expertise in the field of open data or on specific topics such as environmental issues, anti-mafia activities, local transportation, etc. Furthermore, the European Commission’s network of information centres “Europe Direct” (EDIC), is involved supporting the activities and disseminating the results. On ASOC’s website there is a blog dedicated to sharing and disseminating the students’ activities on social networks (see here ASOC in numbers).

ASOC’s pedagogical methodology is centred on specific goals, well-defined roles and decision-making. This has allowed students to independently manage every aspect of their project activities, from the choice of research methods to how to disseminate the results. On the other hand, the teachers are also involved in an intensive community experience that allows them to learn not only from their own students, but also from the local community and from their fellow teaching peers involved in the project.

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 16.40.52

Ultimately, this takes the form of a collective civic adventure that improves the capacity to form effective social bonds and horizontal ties among the different stakeholders, actors of the local communities. In fact, detailed Open Data on specific public projects has enable new forms of analysis and storytelling focused on real cases developed in the students’ neighbourhoods. This, in turn, has the key goal of involving the policy-makers in a shared, participatory learning process, to improve both policy accountability and the capacity to respond to local needs.

Finally, ASOC’s key element is that the pedagogical methodology we have developed can be used as a learning pathway that can be adapted to different realities (e.g. different policy domains, from national to local, in different sectors) using different types of open data with comparable level of detail and granularity (e.g. detailed local budget data, performance data, research data, or any other type of data).

If you are interested in learning more from ASOC’s experience, you can read a case study which includes the results of the 2014-2015 edition on Ciociola, C., & Reggi, L. (2015). A Scuola di OpenCoesione: From Open Data to Civic Engagement. In J. Atenas & L. Havemann (Eds.), Open Data As Open Educational Resources: Case Studies of Emerging Practice.

You can also watch ASOC’s documentary video of the 2014-2015 edition here: https://vimeo.com/138955671

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About the author

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 16.28.23

Chiara Ciociola Is the community manager of the project A Scuola di OpenCoesione at the Department for Cohesion Policies, Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers. She holds a BA in Political Science, with a focus on New Media and Journalism at University of Florence and a MA in Digital Storytelling at University of Turin. In 2013 she founded Monithon Italia, a civil society initiative for citizen monitoring of EU-funded projects. Since 2011 she is a contributor of Neural magazine, a critical digital culture and new media arts magazine.

 

**Part of this article was originally published in the Open Education Europe blog as “OpenCoesione School” – An example of scalable learning format using OpenData as Educational Resources. We thank Maria Perifanou for sharing this post with us**.

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Romanian National Open Education Conference

- March 17, 2015 in communication, featured

Adelin Dumitru has written a post for us about the second Romanian National Open Education Conference held in Bucharest as part of Open Education Week. The event was organised by the Open Society Foundation and Coalition RED Romania. Adelin works for datedeschise.fundatia.ro, a Romanian platform that hosts information about open data projects, events and news.

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On 10th of March the Open Society Foundation, endorsed by the Government of Romania and the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Romania organised a Romanian National Open Education Conference in order to reaffirm Romania’s commitment to the principles of open education. This year’s Conference, the second to have taken place in Romania, represents a step forward towards cementing this tradition in a country which lacks a culture of openness, a fact which was reiterated throughout the event by some of the panelists. A full agenda for the day is available in Romanian.

Afis-educatie-deschisa

The discussions at the conference mainly focused on harnessing the potential of open educational resources in education and research and on the convoluted problem of copyright and the challenges this issue poses to the Romanian educational system.

An open framework for education in secondary education

Ovidiu Voicu, the Open Society Foundation’s Public Policy Department director, opened discussions in the panel session on ‘An open framework for education in secondary education’ with an intervention in which he emphasised the benefits of open education. He focused on presenting the case for open education as a change of paradigm. An open educational system would purportedly solve some of the pressing problems of the current state of affairs. It would correspond with a permanent enhancement due to its focus on analysis and evaluation, with easing access to education due to its elimination of institutional barriers and with efficiently and transparently employing resources to achieve its ends. This last point is connected to another characteristic of an open educational system, that it is deeply interwoven with technological advances.

Another point he has made is that to enter the open education paradigm would require neither legislative changes nor investments. What is needed, instead, is a change of perspective, which can be accomplished only by conceptually integrating and coordinating the many strategies that currently co-exist but do not interact as they should. Moreover, the open education paradigm does not entail massive investments, though it requires a rethinking of the way we allocate resources.

Ciprian Fartuşnic, Director, Institute of Education Sciences Cristian Dinu, Technical Lead, Co-founder, Learn Forward Eugen Crai, specialist educational policy Iosifescu Serban, President ARACIP Tincuţa Apăteanu, President, Association Edusfera

Panelists: Ciprian Fartuşnic, Director, Institute of Education Sciences; Cristian Dinu, Technical Lead, Co-founder, Learn Forward; Eugen Crai, specialist educational policy; Iosifescu Serban, President ARACIP; Tincuţa Apăteanu, President, Association Edusfera

Although open education is not a panacea, international good practice examples show us that it can have propitious effects, such as increasing educational equity by easing access to educational resources, raising standards and improving quality by promoting peer evaluation, increasing community’s interest in education, stimulating innovation and increasing competition and making investments in education cease to be seen as uncertain, and instead become safer bets.

One particular field where open education effects could be immediately seen is that of online textbooks, which would effectively implement a proposal mentioned in the National Education Law. This makes reference to an online platform which would host open educational resources at a national level. During the conference this was contrasted with the actual online textbooks, which are neither open source nor legally open, since they do not have any associated license. This makes things complicated for authors, since the lack of a specified legal status represents a disincentive for improving upon the existing textbooks. Another proposal in the spirit of open education would be increasing transparency and integrity of educational institutions. This could be done by publishing budgets and by ensuring that consulting procedures are respected by the Ministry of Education.

Interventions from the public have brought up some interesting aspects, such as the fact that parents may be those who oppose change and who pose threats to the shift to an open education paradigm. The conclusion that has been drawn was that teachers should be those to educate not only children, but also parents, presenting the advantages of open education and trying to reduce their incredulity in alternatives to traditional textbooks, for instance. One participant has mentioned that textbooks represent anchors for parents, which preclude them from seeing the real benefits of reforms. Such issues will have to be dealt with if we want a paradigm shift.

Open access and OER in higher education and research

The second panel session focused on open access and open educational resources in high education and research. Nicolaie Constantinescu of Kosson explained to the public concepts such as open access, open resources, licenses, and shed some light on misconceptions associated with these concepts. He elaborated on the history of open education in Romania, focusing on open access via data bases. Radu Atanasiu, Adjunct Lecturer of Critical Thinking at the Maastricht School of Management Romania highlighted the utility of Massive Online Open Courses (MooCs) and also their hidden potential which could be tapped in the future by Romanian scholars and students. Constantin Vică, from the Research Centre in Applied Ethics, talked about the problems encountered by researchers in accessing data, and also about the difficult state of Romanian journals in the context of globalization of knowledge and keeping up with international household names.

Nicolae Constantinescu, Kosson Marius Nicolăescu CIO Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Puchiu Radu, State Secretary, Prime Minister's Office Radu Atanasiu, Adjunct Lecturer of Critical Thinking, Maastricht School of Management Romania Constantin Vică, Center for Research in Applied Ethics

Panelists: Nicolae Constantinescu, Kosson; Marius Nicolăescu CIO Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation; Puchiu Radu, State Secretary, Prime Minister’s Office; Radu Atanasiu, Adjunct Lecturer of Critical Thinking, Maastricht School of Management Romania; Constantin Vică, Center for Research in Applied Ethics

The last panel session represented an extensive debate on copyright and education. There have been put forward two perspectives, one promoting a relaxation of copyright and the other supporting a better enforcement of copyright. While the latter represents the dominant perspective, the debate has shown that the counterarguments should not be easily dismissed. The Analysis Report of the EU legislation, realized by Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament, has been presented as the main case against copyright protection. Contentious topics such as the status of orphan works have been brought up, proving the numerous lines that can be opened by such a discussion, benefiting from a framework that reunited specialists and practitioners in the field. One proposal has been that the Ministry of Education should put at the public’s disposal digital textbooks in workable formats, without restrictions on their usage, according to the principle “any resource produced with public money shall have open access“.

Conclusions

All in all, the Romanian National Open Education Conference gathered 130 participants, among these professors, inspectors, scholars, representatives of the government, of student associations, of non-governmental organizations. An increased interest can be noticed in comparison to last year’s edition, the number of participants almost doubling, proving that, to a certain extent, the Romanian public has become more intent to learn about open educational resources. This could be a harbinger that the aforementioned paradigm shift is due to happen at one point or another, and it is through events like these that the public becomes informed and from this awareness can emerge the necessary reforms and the necessary change of perspective on education, transparency and integration.

More details about the event are available from the datedeschise.fundatia.ro website in Romanian.

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Open Education South Korea

- March 13, 2015 in featured, world

34d8ddcIn our final Open Education Week #openeducationwk post we have an introduction to Open Education in South Korea from 신하영(Stella HaYoung Shin).

Stella is a Ph.D candidate of Educational Policy and Administration at Sookmyung Women’s University in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, South Korea. Founded in 1906, Sookmyung is Korea’s first royal private educational institution for women. She is also a volunteer and activist for Open Educational Resource at Creative Commons Korea.

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The Republic of Korea a.k.a. South Korea is a sovereign state in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. Roughly half of the country’s 50 million people reside in the metropolitan area surrounding its capital, the Seoul Capital Area, which is the second largest in the world with over 25 million residents.

OERs in South Korea

In South Korea there have been an increasing number of OER available since 2009. The slide set below was shared at a Creative Commons Asia-Pacific Regional meeting on 2012 to introduce that time’s current aspects of OER in Korea. It contains many of screen shots and labels on those OER cases in Korea and brief tendency analysis about the OER movement in Korea.

From the slide, written and worked by Diane Jung and myself, the key part is the last page – the 4 Future Directions of OER in Korea which suggests:

  1. Integrity between each contents with blended usage of offline textbook and live lecture with online video lecture and various multimedia resources
  2. Using various media devices thanked from wide distribution of smartphone and highly ranked IT literacy
  3. Small number but very intensive and passionate student and teachers are working together to maximizing effectiveness for building, running, sharing, and promoting
  4. More and more participations by governmental sector (ministry and related institutes), individuals, NGOs, community, and corporates.

MOOCs in South Korea

Until 2012 most OER projects in Korea happened in the Higher Education area, driven by universities, for example the OCW –now MOOC- movement. However in late of 2011 there was an uprising of the OER movement in K-12 education with great wave of D.I.Y activities. This was driven by the new curriculum introduced by the ministry of education which improved cognition of Creative Commons licences in Korea and open resources. There are now some remarkable OER case studies in Korea (see POERUP for more information). These have not only been facilitated by Creative Commons Korea but also by many individuals and groups.

SNOW (Sookmyung Network for Open World)

Much of my work at Sookmyung Women’s University (SMWU) has been devoted to developing OER surroundings in South Korea through launching and running SNOW (Sookmyung Network for Open World) during 2009-2010. SNOW has launched a vision of an ‘OER missionary’ to Korean users under the motif to provide valuable global OER to Korean users and accessible guidelines to make use of them. Comparing other OER interfaces and service providing organizations and web-sites, SNOW can be one of the most ‘kind’ and ‘open’ OERs allowing users find localized OER easily.

SNOW

SNOW developed an interactive OER localizing platform for not only students of SMWU but also general users seeking ‘kind, local’ OERs. The most remarkable achievements of SNOW are the user-based content uploading-sharing-review system, SNOW Wiki system, as cooperative translation and interactive revision system and SNOW Eco-system as unique credit-saving system for donation system. SNOW can be a frontier model to envision the way to distribute OER efficiently, legally-based on Creative Commons licences, and suggests a mutual vitalization of Asian universities’ OER projects.

Creative Commons Activities in South Korea

The Creative Commons Korea Association (CC Korea) was founded in January, 2009. As a not-for-profit incorporated association, CC Korea started its activities as the official CC project team in Korea. Around thirty to forty voluntary staff with various backgrounds, such as lawyers, students, artists, professors, businessmen and so on, are taking part in many projects to promote open culture including spreading CC in Korea. For more information see the Creative Commons Korea wiki, Facebook group and Slideshare site.

2013 Open Education Week led by Creative Commons Korea

8604494For 2013’s Open Education Week festival Creative Commons Korea supported an opened webinar: an online seminar on March 12, 2013. At this webinar, Creative Commons Korea’s chief coordinator Jennifer Kang gave short and impactful lecture on “the Change of Education and How to use Creative Commons licences” and she led the web conference dealing with various issues from MOOC contents making in university related with copyright infringement.

Link to announcement post (written in Korean only).

South Korea’s National Library of Congress Signed MOU with CC Korea

This consigned MOU contract states that the National Digital Library of Congress will release the contents with using CCL towards the Library’s repository stored contents and also web contents produced by 4 major NPOs (Non-profit organization) in Korea, accessible unto National Digital Library’s web repository. The mentioned NGO through this MOU contract are; the Beautiful Foundation, Think Café, the Hope Institute, and the Simin corporation these NPOs are making and sharing their own experience and knowledge from their NPO movements and activities so lively. CC Korea and National Library of Congress expect that this MOU consignment will be the first step for the potential cooperation on more concrete and various contents sharing for citizenship education with open resources.

Creative Commons Salons on OER

The Creative Commons Salon, is a small ‘talk concert’ with tea, coffee and snack for very close and casual atmosphere in which to share ideas and experiences on specific theme, just like in a ‘salon’. The salon’s theme is picked from the open movement area i.e. OER, Open government, open data, open source, and many potential ‘open’ things. Among the almost quarterly CC salons since 2010, CC Korea has picked up OER as their salon’s theme for 3 times – 2012, 2013 and 2014.

2013 Creative Commons Salon on OER “Kaboom! Open Education!”

A salon looking specifically at Open Education took place on March 26, 201 in the HahHahHuhHuh Café@Haja Center (Seoul city government supporting center for youth).

Speaker 1: Sung-geun Lee, Elementary school teacher, Project lead of “Learning Playground”

  • “Learning Playground” is the outbreak learning and study habit innovation project by in-office elementary school teachers, providing students to grow one’s own learning habit without private academy. Teachers make video clips on current elementary school’s curriculum with their own effort as volunteerism.

Speaker 2: Tae-kyeong Lee, teacher, project coordinator of “Big Camp”

  • “Big Camp” is a project to realize the innovative and creative ideas by teacher, student, planner, developer and designer with volunteerism, to make change in education world.

Direct link to event posting (only in Korean).

2014 Creative Commons Salon on Hack the School

CC teachers (inner-group of CC Korea by teachers) and students share their experiences related to OER and educational and learning innovation using OERs. This salon was held as the format of ignite, a serial short presentations with multimedia contents and filled with 11 speakers’ insightful and passionate presentations of their own experience and life change through OERs.

Link to announcement post (written in Korean only).

salon88

Short introduction to Speakers and Talks:

  • Talk 1: “Introduction to ‘Learning Playground'” by Sung-geun Lee, Elementary school teacher, project lead of the ‘Learning Playground’, DIY OER repository for elementary school students and in-office teachers
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/00-cc
  • Talk 2: “I am teacher in my own classroom, in the world of ‘Learning Playground'” by Ji-hyun Yoon, 12 year-old student & power-user of ‘Learning Playground’
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/01-40986758
  • Talk 3: “Why Uncle Kim goes to school?” by Young-gwang Kim, given nickname as “Little Big Hero” through TV documentary, youth activist and social enterprise
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/02-40986764
  • Talk 4: “Miss Tong Tong Tong and her 30 dwarves” by Hye-jeong Yoon, former kindergarten teacher and current CC Korea intern activist
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/03-30
  • Talk 5: “Teacher Kang’s Travel to Math World” by Sung-hee Kang, in-office high school teacher & OER maker for math subject classroom contents
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-04-40987039
    Talk 6: “What you want, What’s your course” by Dong-wan Lee, founder and project lead of the ‘Passion University’, open online-offline learning platform for university students making their own DIY course out from official university classroom
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-05
  • Talk 7: “How I became a fool” by Gyu-sik Yoon, in-office teacher for special education, activist of OER movement onto special education field in Korea
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-06
  • Talk 8: “Haru, the development of SNS and the Behind Story” by Seong-beom Park & Hyung-geun Yoon, founder and developers of ‘Haru’ (‘one day’ in Korean), the SNS awarded as most creative service as instant posting, pass-over one day and automatic deleting after one day; this service was developed when they were only 18 year-old as school assignment project. Surprisingly, they learned most of their coding and development knowledge from Google and other OER contents throughout the programming filed.
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-07-sns
  • Talk 9: “Soar High with Wiki Talki in Your Classroom” by Eun-hey Koh, in-office high school teacher & founder and planner of ‘Wiki Talki’ service; the service for English and other language class with enabling students share their own voice recording to practice their own pronunciation, wording and speaking skill; made by volunteer group and shared as OER for language comprehension class, as smartphone application without charge for students
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-08
  • Talk 10: “Outing towards World for Teenagers in Korea” by Deborah Kim, President and Founder of ‘Sian Education Corporate’ & Contents planner for youth career education
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-08
  • Talk 11: “Take Action and You Are a Hero” by Jeong-hoon Lee, Founder of education corporate for candidate venture company people
    Slideshare link for this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/freentour/1-cc-teachers-11-take-action-and-you-are-a-hero

Links: OER Initiatives and Groups in Korea

  • CC Korea: http://www.cckorea.org/
  • CC wiki for OER in Korea: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/OER_Case_Studies#South_Korea
  • CC Teachers (sub-group of CC Korea by in-office teachers and educators)
  • Learning Playground: http://hn.sharedu.org/
  • KOCW (Korea Open Course Ware): Open Courseware repository and platform for universities of Korea run by KERIS (Korea Education and Research Information Service) http://www.kocw.net
  • SNOW (Sookmyung Network for Open World): OER platform and translation, localization repository for Korean users run by Sookmyung Women’s University: http://www.snow.or.kr. Many of OER contents are hard to access for Korea because of language barrier, so that Sookmyung Women’s University made volunteerism based translation platform for OER at 2009; SNOW are accessible without charge with continual OER contents uploading by SMU’s students, professors and other users.
  • Coding Everybody: non-profit project for programming education; open tutorials for novice, lay persons and even children and elderly people. Developer and founder of this project, Going Lee is now covering web-service making, various programming languages, client server development, development toolkit, and other programming knowledge. Users can access dictionary and repository on programming knowledge with Going Lee’s own voice guideline with screenshots and other multimedia resource, with very easy and considerable teaching for first learner on programming. All courses are free and open for everyone; tutorials cover many programming parts and are constantly updated by Going Lee with vigorous open conversations with Hi: https://opentutorials.org/

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OER in Adult Education

- March 12, 2015 in adulteducation, featured

Our next post for Open Education Week is from Sara Frank Bristow on the ADOERUP work to produce a “Note” (short briefing report) to the European Parliament Culture and Education Committee on the use and potential of Open Educational Resources (OER) for Adult Education/Adult Learning. This work supports the POERUP, Policies for OER Uptake previously posted about on this blog.

saraSara Frank Bristow, founder of Salient Research, LLC, is a digital education researcher and writer based in Chicago, US. She is presently writing the UK Country Report for the Sero Consulting Ltd ADOERUP (Adult Education and Open Education Resources) study. Recent projects for Sero and other clients have focused on online, blended and open learning, with an emphasis on drivers, business and learning models for OER.

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Adult Education and Open Education Resources

Adult learning is a vital component of the European Commission’s lifelong learning policy. It is essential to competitiveness and employability, social inclusion, active citizenship, and personal development across Europe. The challenge is to provide learning opportunities for all, especially disadvantaged groups who need them most. It comprises formal, non-formal, and informal learning for improving basics skills, obtaining new qualifications, up-skilling, or re-skilling for employment. The demand for adult learning is increasing and the Commission is committed to helping all EU countries create adult learning systems characterised by flexibility, high quality, excellent teaching, and an enhanced role for local authorities, employers, social partners, civil society, and cultural organisations.

In 2013 the European Commission published a communication on OER and MOOCs. This highlighted the potential of OER in adult learning. OER in fact make use of large scale digital technologies and the aim is to support a radical development of new teaching methodologies based on the use of ICT. The Communication emphasizes that, likewise, in adult learning ICT and OER offers huge potential for structural change. Therefore efficient tools and methodologies will prove decisive in handling future funding needs. In the Communication, the Commission mentions that it plans to create a new network called EPALE (Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe).

Coverage of the ADOERUP report

I am now working on a study to highlight the possibilities offered by the employment of OER with the overall aim to:

  • Review the availability and feasibility of OER in adult learning, and
  • Make suggestions for possible action to be taken.

The study is thus expected to serve three distinct functions: Description, Assessment and Recommendations.

With regard to the general objectives outlined above, the following general questions will be addressed and answered in the study:

  • What is the availability and feasibility of OER in adult learning?
  • What possible actions may be taken in order to enhance the use of OER in adult learning?

While answering these general questions, a few more specific ones will be addressed, as well:

  • How can OER be integrated into certified courses provided to adult learners? What is their sustainability (in terms of work and funding)?
  • What quality aspects may be considered in the use of OER in adult learning? What quality assurance issues may be considered? How OER can improve the quality and efficiency of training and education in adult learning?
  • Is management of Creative Commons licenses specific and in what respect?
  • Do OER improve the knowledge base on adult learning and contribute to a better monitoring of the adult learning sector? If yes, how?
  • How OER can contribute to raising participation rates in adult education?
  • What are the implications for educational planners and decision-makers of use of OER in adult learning? In particular what issues of accreditation/validation of skills and competences acquired via OER could be considered?
  • How existing policy tools to support adult learning can best be used for the inclusion of OER?
  • What is the role of educational establishments (particularly universities) to design, plan and implement education based on OER?

The study will focus on: United Kingdom, Spain, France, Sweden, Latvia, Hungary, Romania and Germany.

Asking for help

Sero has been commissioned to do a report for the Education and Culture Committee of the European Parliament on OER in Adult Education in the EU. Obviously we shall leverage on POERUP and on three relevant studies done for IPTS but we want to make sure we are up to date with the last 6 months of information on important projects developing OER for use specifically in Adult Learning (rather than spilling over into Adult Learning) – across all educational sectors: key skills (numeracy, literacy, IT skills, etc), school-level qualifications for adults, Vocational Education and Training, and University Education in a Lifelong Learning context.

We are particularly interested in the following Member States: UK, France, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Sweden and Latvia, but projects from any Member State are of interest.

Of course we shall be asking POERUP project staff as well as our network of consultants and advisors but we want a broader range of input.

For policy aspects I shall be talking in depth to authors of EU-level and Member State OER-related policy documents, to perform a realignment of POERUP-style recommendations to the Adult Learning/Lifelong Learning/Flexible Learning domain.

Please contact Paul Bacsich if you are a local expert or policy expert with relevant information.

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Open Education Russia 2

- March 11, 2015 in featured, world

In the second of our Open Education Russia blog posts and the third of our #openeducationwk posts Anna Sakoyan and Irina Radchenko look at how they have been experimenting with data expeditions. The first post gave an overview of Open Education projects in Russia.

Anna

Anna Sakoyan

The authors of this post are Anna Sakoyan and Irina Radchenko, who together founded DataDrivenJournalism.RU.

Irina

Irina Radchenko

Anna is currently working as a journalist and translator for a Russian analytical resource Polit.ru and is also involved in the activities of NGO InfoCulture. You can reach Anna on Twitter on @ansakoy, on Facebook and on LinkedIn. She blogs in English at http://ourchiefweapons.wordpress.com/.

Irina Radchenko is a Associate Professor at ITMO University and Chief Coordinator of Open Knowledge Russia. You can reach Irina on Twitter on @iradche, on Facebook and on LinkedIn. She blogs in Russian at http://iradche.ru//.

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Experimenting with Data Expeditions

1. DataDrivenJournalism.RU project and Russian Data Expeditions

The open educational project DataDrivenJournalism.RU was launched in April 2013 by a group of enthusiasts. Initially it was predominantly a blog, which accumulated translated and originally written manuals on working with data, as well as more general articles about data driven journalism. Its mission was formulated as promoting the use of data (Open Data first of all) in the Russian-language environment and its main objective was to create an online platform to consolidate the Russian-speaking people who were interested in working with data, so that they can exchange their experiences and learn from each other. As the number of the published materials grew, they had to be structured in a searchable way, which resulted in making it look more like a website with special sections for learning materials, interactive educational projects (data expeditions), helpful links, etc.

russia1

On one hand, it operates as an educational resource with a growing collection of tutorials, a glossary and lists of helpful external links, as well as the central platform of its data expeditions; on the other hand, as a blog, it provides a broader context of open data application to various areas of activity, including data driven journalism itself.
After almost two years of its existence, DataDrivenJournalism.RU has a team of 10 regular authors (comprised of enthusiasts from Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia, Sweden and UK). More than a hundred posts have been published, including 15 tutorials. It has also launched 4 data expeditions, the most recent in December 2014.

The term data expedition was first coined by Open Knowledge’s School of Data, which launched such peer-learning projects both in online and offline formats. We took this model as the basic principle and tried to apply it to the Russian environment. It turned out to be rather perspective, so we began experimenting with it, in order to make this format a more efficient education tool. In particular, we have tried a very loose organisational approach where the participants only had a general subject in common, but were free to choose their own strategy in working with it; a rather rigid approach with a scenario and tasks; and a model, which included experts who could navigate the participants in the area that they had to explore. These have been discussed in our guest post on Brian Kelly’s blog ‘UK Web Focus’.

Our fourth data expedition was part of a hybrid learning model. Namely, it was the practical part of a two-week’s offline course taught by Irina Radchenko in Kazakhstan. This experience appears to be rather inspiring and instructive.

2. International Data Expedition in Kazakhstan

The fourth Russian-language data expedition (DE4) was a part of a two-week’s course under the auspices of Karaganda State Technological University taught by Irina Radchenko. After the course was over the university participants who sucessfully completed all the tasks within DE4 received a certificate. Most interesting projects were later published at DataDrivenJournalism.RU. One of them is about industry in Kazakhstan by Asylbek Mubarak who also tells (in Russian) about his experience of participating in DE4 and also about the key stages of his work with data. The other, by Roman Ni is about some aspects of Kazakhstan budget.

First off, it was a unique experience of launching a data expedition outside Russia. It was also interesting that DE4 was a part of a hybrid learning format, which combined traditional offline lectures and seminars with a peer-learning approach. The specific of the peer-learning part was that it was open, so that any online user could participate. The problem was that the decision to make it open occurred rather late, so there was not much time to properly promote its announcement. However, there were several people from Russia and Ukraine who registered for participation. Unfortunately none of them participated actively, but hopefully, they managed to make some use of course materials and tasks published in the DE4 Google group.

russia2

This mixed format was rather time-taking, because it required not only preparation for regular lectures, but also a lot of online activity, including interaction with the participants, answering their questions in Google group and checking their online projects. The participants of the offline course seemed enthusiastic about the online part, many found it interesting and intriguing. In the final survey following DE4, most of the respondents emphasised that they liked the online part.

The initial level of the participants was very uneven. Some of them knew how to program and work with data bases, others had hardly ever been exposed to working with data. DE4 main tasks were build in a way that they could be done from scratch based only on the knowledge provided within the course. Meanwhile, there were also more advanced tasks and techniques for those who might find them interesting. Unfortunately, many participants could not complete all the tasks, because they were students and were right in the middle of taking their midterm exams at university.

russia3

Compared to our previous DEs, the percentage of completed tasks was much higher. The DE4 participants were clearly better motivated in terms of demonstrating their performance. Most importantly, some of them were interested in receiving a certificate. Another considerable motivation was participation in offline activities, including face-to-face discussions, as well as interaction during Irina’s lectures and seminars.

russia4

russia5

Technically, like all the previous expeditions, DE4 was centered around a closed Google group, which was used by the organisers to publish materials and tasks and by participants to discuss tasks, ask questions, exchange helpful links and coordinate their working process (as most of them worked in small teams). The chief tools within DE4 were Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Refine and Infogr.am. Participants were also encouraged to suggest or use other tools if they find it appropriate.

42 people registered for participation. 36 of them were those who took the offline course at Karaganda State Technical University. Those were most active, so most of our observations are based on their results and feedback. Also, due to the university base of the course, 50% of the participants were undergraduate students, while the other half included postgraduate students, people with a higher education and PhD. Two thirds of the participants were women. As to age groups, almost a half of the participants were between 16 and 21 years old, but there was also a considerable number of those between 22 and 30 years old and two above 50.

13 per cent of the participants completed all the tasks, including the final report. According to their responses to the final survey, most of them did their practical tasks by small pieces, but regularly. As to online interaction, the majority of respondens said they were quite satisfied with their communication experience. About a half of them though admitted that they did not contribute to online discussions, although found others’ contributions helpful. General feedback was very positive. Many pointed out that they were inspired by the friendly atmosphere and mutual helpfulness. Most said they were going to keep learning how to work with open data on their own. Almost all claimed they would like to participate in other data expeditions.

3. Conclusions

DE4 was an interesting step in the development of the format. In particular, it showed that an open peer-learning format can be an important integral part of a traditional course. It had a ready-made scenario and an instructor, but at the same time it heavily relied on the participants’ mutual help and experience exchange, and also provided a great degree of freedom and flexibility regarding the choice of subjects and tools.
It is also yet another contribution to the collection of materials, which might be helpful in future expeditions alongside with the materials from all the previous DEs. It is part of a process of gradual formation of an educational resources base, as well as a supportive social base. As new methods are applied and tested in DEs, the practices that proved best are stored and used, which helps to make this format more flexible and helpful. What is most important is that this model can be applied to almost any educational initiative, because it is easily replicated and based on using free online services.

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Teaching children about Creative Commons Licenses to re-use images

- March 10, 2015 in featured, oer, schools

Time for our second Open Education Week post! At the recent OER Schools Conference in Leicester it was great to meet teachers who are working at the coalface – sharing their lesson plans and resources under Creative Commons licenses.

jobadgeDr Jo Badge is a class teacher and computing subject leader at a Leicester Primary school with a year 5 class. She is also a Google Certified Teacher. Prior to this she was the Web resources development officer for School of Biological Sciences, University of Leicester where she provided support for learning technologies for staff and students.

In the workshop on OER resource building in the area of computing a group of teachers worked together on a lesson plan for teaching Children about Creative Commons and reusing images. Jo has now written up the lesson plan and shared it. The Open Education Working Group are delighted to be able to republish her thoughts here as part of our series for Open Education Week #openeducationwk.

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I have always been keen to share ideas about my teaching, and regularly tweet lesson ideas or activities. However, I haven’t gone as far as making the resources I have made available online, partly because I’ve always been wary about its licensing. Although I work in a primary school, I know that I am ultimately employed by the City Council and so the council owns the Intellectual Property Rights for any educational resources I produce in the line of my employment. As an employee I don’t have the automatic moral rights i.e. the right to be named as author on those resources. I know it isn’t something that many of us think about, but with the massive increase in access to shared resources online, it is really is an issue I believe we teachers should begin to embrace. After all, Open Education is a philosophy that is essentially at the heart of teaching, sharing and learning together, building on each other’s work and collaborating to enhance our own teaching and learning.

Open – image found on photos for class with automatic attribution http://www.photosforclass.com/

Open – image found on photos for class with automatic attribution http://www.photosforclass.com/

Fortunately, Leicester City Council has Josie Fraser working for them. She is a leading proponent of Open Education and under her leadership the Council have take the pioneering step of giving permission to all its school employees to share any educational resources they create using a creative commons licence. I feel incredibly proud to be working for such a far-sighted employer and couldn’t miss the opportunity to begin to share my teaching resources more widely under a creative commons licence.

I attended the Open Education Schools Conference in Leicester this January. The first event of it’s kind in the UK, was organised by Leicester City Council in partnership with De Montfort University. 92 attendees from 48 primary, secondary and specialist provision schools took part in the day, as well as representatives from five UK universities. One of the sessions I attended was a workshop by Miles Berry who encouraged us to think in a very practical way about how we could begin to teach primary school children about Creative Commons licenses and the correct re-use of other people’s work. There were some fantastic ideas generated, such as children remixing scratch scripts that had been shared online. I worked with two colleagues, Hannah Boydon and Marieke Guy to plan a half term unit of work to show children how to search for CC licensed images and then use them in a website they built, making sure that they included the correct attribution and a link back to the original image. Marieke was one of the main speakers at the event, and her write up of the day and impressions of Miles’ workshop are on her blog.

The final product is a medium term plan of 6 lessons:

Unit Objectives:

Digital Literacy:

  • use technology safely, respectfully and responsibly; recognise acceptable/unacceptable behaviour

Information Technology

  • use search technologies effectively and be discerning in evaluating digital content
  • select, use and combine a variety of software (including internet services) to design and create content that accomplish given goals, including collecting, analysing, evaluating and presenting information

Overview

The aim of this unit of work is to teach children the principles of copyright compliant searching and accurate attribution of digital content when it is re-used. Children will learn about the ownership of created content and creative commons licences. They will use search effectively to find images that can be re-used and learn to attribute them correctly. They will create a website which combines the images that they have found and combine them with text to explain how other children can search for images to re-use on their own blogs or websites.

I used the lessons myself in the last half term and will be building the websites with my children in the next couple of weeks. I hope that the plans could be adapted to fit into other areas of the curriculum so that the final end product has a real purpose. My children were studying space and we wrote recounts about our visit to the National Space Centre in our English lessons, which we will then turn into websites using the images we found in the computing lessons. The final websites could be recounts, information texts or even instructions on how to search for creative commons licensed images!

Places for children to search for images to re-use

We did hit a few filtering issues while we were trying to search for CC licensed images. We found using Google advanced image search was reliable, but when images were from flickr, they were often blocked by our filters. Some alternatives the children used successfully were: http://www.pics4learning.com/, http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/ and for clipart https://openclipart.org/. If you are able to use Flickr, I would highly recommend using photosforclass.com which uses Flickr images that are pre-filtered to provide a pseudo-safe search. The massive advantage here is that with a quick quick, images can be downloaded with an attribution automatically added (like the photo at the top of this post).

Lesson plans

The lesson plans are shared under a CC-BY 4.0 licence on TES resources. Thanks to Leicester City Council for giving me this freedom!

CC BY 4.0

CC BY 4.0

OER images lesson plan (2015) by Jo Badge, Rushey Mead Primary School, Hannah Boydon, Mayflower Primary school/ Leicester City Council shared under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.

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The 21st Century’s Raw Material: Using Open Data as Open Educational Resources

- March 9, 2015 in communication, data, featured

 

In the first of our posts for Open Education Week #openeducationwk Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann introduce the idea of using open data as a form of OER.

In the words of the Rt Hon. Francis Maude in the Foreword to the UK Government’s 2012 Open Data White Paper [PDF], “data is the 21st century’s new raw material.” Open data is understood as “data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike” (Open Data Handbook, Open Knowledge, 2012).

There is a general consensus that open data is becoming an invaluable resource for the research and scientific communities, as it supports and encourages more transparent research practices, supports scientific development and reproducibility, and it can be a model of good and open research practices in academia. More and more research funding agencies and academic publishers support and even mandate data sharing. For example, papers based on research funded in whole or in part by RCUK must include, if applicable, a statement on how the underlying research materials – such as data, samples or models – can be accessed.

By R2Hox, available on Flickr CC-BY-SA 2.0

By R2Hox, available on Flickr CC-BY-SA 2.0

This type of data is normally shared by government agencies, academic institutions and researchers, but regular citizens and non-profit organisations also publish and release their data for other citizens to understand, for example, how money is spent, how scientific results were obtained or how cities work (see for example the work of the Open Transport Working Group). This data can be used in Higher Education to teach students using examples from real life and to help them understand the principles of data access, formats and management, as well as to assist in the development of research tools and to create new knowledge.

According to the Open Definition, “universal participation” and interoperability are key components of open data practices. We suggest that universal participation needs to be inclusive, extending the possibilities of participation beyond researchers to include students in different levels of formal and informal education. The use of open data can bring enormous benefits for students, academics and researchers in universities, as students can learn using data extracted from real research, case studies and open government data.

The development of critical thinking skills and the use of open data is also related with the use of open government data. Using datasets to analyse, review and evaluate the information provided by the governments, such as the data provided by the European Union, the UK’s open data portal, the UK census data  or the London Data Store to mention some good examples, can help students become engaged citizens, and to use this “raw material” to contribute to society in new and yet-unimagined ways. By sharing educational resources previously kept in isolation, initiatives such as University College London’s connected curriculum scheme and other research-based learning initiatives offer insights into other possibilities for taking advantage of research data produced not only in their own institutions but worldwide.

Connected Curriculum: The key principle and six dimensions of connectivity, Fung 2014

Connected Curriculum: The key principle and six dimensions of connectivity, Fung 2014

When data is openly accessible, interoperable and reusable these type of outputs can improve the student experience as it reduces the friction between stakeholders and can potentially facilitate collaboration between academics, PhDs and postdoctoral researchers and students. Moreover, unlike educational and research outputs constrained by tighter licensing conditions and proprietary environments, open data and open educational resources allow all students to work with the same “raw materials” under the same or at least very similar circumstances. Increasing interoperability and reducing the friction to access and reuse research data should have a positive impact in research activities in universities. Research is currently lacking on open data as educational resources, and about how students can develop critical skills by using open datasets.

Researchers are sharing their datasets using open licenses in order to make them universally accessible to others, and open access repositories such as figshare support the upload and sharing of datasets and other research and educational outputs, which can then be downloaded and redistributed with creative commons licenses. However, the scientific community that embraces open science and open access remains circumscribed. The danger of the open data and open access landscape becoming an echo chamber is ever-present. Resources may be accessible, but they are not being cited, shared or reused. More to the point, in spite of different methods for open metrication, it is not yet known to what extent outputs on repositories like figshare are being used in teaching and learning. There is a need to understand how the academic community at large (beyond openness advocates) is benefiting and taking advantage of the use of open data in for teaching and learning.

Figshare

Figshare

By using real data from research developed at their own institution, multidisciplinary research projects enable opportunities to develop students’ research and literacy skills and critical thinking skills by establishing ways for collaborations amongst students, researchers and academics. Collaborative research work studying, analysing, visualising and reusing open data, such as the work conducted at City University London by Wood et al. visualising data from the London bicycle hire scheme (2011) and by Weyde et al. developing new tools and methods to carry out research on large-scale music collections is being used in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and students in these courses are increasingly aware of specific open datasets and large open data collections as research resources. For more details see the Digital Music Lab and the following paper on Big Data for Musicology.

There has also been considerable work done to create awareness of good practices in data citation (see for example DataCite, Force11 and DCC, as well some university library resources), which emphasise the role of datasets as a contribution to scholarship, as research references and as citeable outputs. However, most of this guidance is generally aimed at or known by a relatively limited number of developers, publishers of data and researchers, and not necessarily students (this may vary significantly from field to field and institution to institution, but published research and factual evidence is still lacking in this regard). Up to now it is not easy to locate dedicated studies, educational guidelines or toolkits, from the point of view of Open Educational Resources that consistently support the use of open data in teaching and learning. There is a lack of documentation and resources about best practices and standards for open data use within universities on their teaching and learning activities, and we suggest this is an area that requires urgent development.

How can we, scholars, researchers and learning technologists understand and share expertise about the value of open data in teaching and learning, and about how it is being used by others? Initiatives like the School of Data (with a focus on developing data research skills in mid and low-income countries) and P2PU (with a focus on online peer learning) offer good models of what an OER-oriented open data research educational platform could look like, if resources were allocated to it.

Cape Town Budget from School of Data

Cape Town Budget from School of Data

Students are usually given research outputs to learn about their subjects, but these have traditionally been journal articles and books, perhaps videos and eBooks when the resources exist and licensing and access are not an issue. In many disciplines, anecdotal evidence from teachers shows that students don’t often see research datasets or the research/lab logs. We suggest these are fundamental tools to comprehend research work, workflow and processes. Students should be given the opportunity to work in groups analysing datasets to conduct discoveries of their own and/or to attempt the replication of research findings. If students are only seeing research results, they have to trust them without having the tools to question or assess the source data directly. We believe that enabling students to understand good practices in data management and to locate, collect, cite and reuse open data resources is a key research skill, and one of the ways in which teachers can ‘flip the classroom’ to facilitate independent research, teamwork and critical digital and data analysis skills.

How are academics, teachers, researchers and students working with “the 21st century’s new raw material“? We aim to understand how academics are using open data as open educational resources. Some general questions stand out:

  • How academics are embracing open educational practices?
  • Are academics embedding open data in their curriculum and if so, how?
  • How are students in Higher Education benefiting from open data?
  • How are students collaborating, learning and developing quantitative and qualitative research skills by using open data in the classroom?

As an initial stage, we have prepared a very short and basic three-question survey. If you currently use open data for teaching, could you share your experience with us? It won’t take you more than 5 minutes. You can complete the survey here. Thank you!

About the authors

Javiera Atenas is a learning technologist at University College London and holds a PhD in education. Leo Havemann is a learning technologist at Birkbeck, University of London and holds an MA in Media and Cultural Studies.  E. Priego is a lecturer at City University London and holds a PhD in Information Studies.

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Open Education Week 2015

- March 2, 2015 in communication, featured

Next week is Open Education Week, a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.

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Our working group members are involved in lots of great events. Here are some highlights.

BCCampus

BCcampus is planning a week of Open Webinars for Open Education Week. Highlights include: A Discussion on Open Pedagogy, Distinguishing the dOERs: Faculty use of Open Educational Resources, Can I actually use it? Testing open textbooks for accessibility and The Open Web: (a) Lost (b) Reclaimed (c) Co-claimed (d) All of the above.

OER and Schools

On 11th March Josie Fraser will be delivering an OER Schools Workshop to 100 primary schools staff from three schools – taking a whole school staff approach to embedding open practice. This is a follow up to the OER Schools conference on the 29th of January, building on the schools guidance and the permission Leicester City Council has given to it’s school employees to openly licence their work. I’ve rounded up as many of the outputs (videos, documents, info) from the day as possible, and these can be found here.

On the 12th March Josie will be leading a practice focused session on copyright and OER at Coventry University’s Open Education Event (see more below).

Open Scotland

The second Opening Education Practices in Scotland project forum will take place in Stirling on the 19th March. Lorna Campbell will be talking about the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

EMundus International Seminars

During Open Education Week, there will be an international series of webinars discussing topics of open educational practice and institutional collaboration, which is the work of the eMundus EU project. Hear from Wayne Mackintosh, Rory McGreal, and many others at a variety of times reflecting the different originating time zones.

Disruptive Media Learning Expo

The Disruptive Media Learning Lab (Coventry, UK) is hosting a two-day event during Open Education Week celebrating innovative, experimental and connected ways of teaching and learning in higher education and beyond. These days will provide: stimulating ideas to listen to; challenging conversation to join in with; and transformative activities to participate in.

Ljubljana Workshop

On Monday 9 March 2015 as part of the SEQUENT Consultation Sessions there will be a day workshop on Quality Assurance of Open, Flexible and Distance Education held at Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia

At this event the results of the survey report on the perception and objectives of European higher education institutions on MOOCs and the main drivers behind the MOOC movement will be presented.

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