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OpenCon Santiago 2017: No more streaks in the water

- January 4, 2018 in data, events, featured, guestpost, oer, world

Guest post by Ricardo Hartley @ametodico and Carolina Gainza @cgainza

When organizing any event, questions always arise; Will enough people come? Do those who have positions to make the changes come? Will come those who should have interest in the subject? Will those who define themselves as pioneers come, but have not provided the spaces of discussion? and perhaps the heaviest of expectations: what will happen next?

Santiago en invierno by Victor San Martin – Flickr – Wikimedia CC BY-SA 2.0

In the case of OpenCon, expectations are related to how this conference is proposed, where per-se is self declared to be more than a conference; rather a platform for the next generation to learn about Open Access, Open Education and Open Data, develop critical skills and catalyze action towards a more open system to share the information, from fields of academic and scientific research, to educational materials and digital research data. That is why the declaration of OpenConference is to be “empowering the next generation to advance in open access, open education and open data”.

Bárbara Rivera López – ¿Es Open Access el fin del camino? Reflexiones alrededor de la economía y política de la producción académica https://figshare.com/s/eca56f9aab7c4db60115  

When the [OpenCon Santiago 2016](http://www.opencon2017.org/opencon_2016_santiago) was held (November 16), it was envisioned with the idea of gathering both passionate people and those who have, as part of their work, the mission to communicate and advise to various levels of our society, both political and business related, access issues.

At that time we talked about various issues that allowed us to have an overview of the issues that concern these different actors. Among these were access to data, the relationship between public policies and open education, ethics in access and communication of information, the social and economic cost of reading and publishing from the academy, among others.

Wouter Schallier from CEPAL presents project LEARN about Research Data Management – by Ricardo Hartley (CCBY)

For the [OpenCon Santiago 2017](http://www.opencon2017.org/opencon_2017_santiago), held on November 25, we had the desire to add more people, organizations and opinions. Therefore, three panels were proposed according to the main areas addressed by OpenCon:

Open Data, Open Education and Open Science. In these panels, we discuss relevant topics to reflect on and define the actions to be taken regarding the Open topic in Chile. In this sense, it is no longer just about opening for opening, but questioning how we should open, how to communicate, how to disseminate, and discuss the best strategies to carry it out.

Werner Westermann introducing Open Educational Resources and Practices at OpenCon Santiago – by Ricardo Hartley (BCCBY)

From these questions arises the need, in our community, to think about the ways in which we will join the Open movement, how we will understand it and how to generate practices that are in harmony with the ways of producing knowledge, sharing and disseminating information in our countries.

@fernando__lopez presenting the OA Latin American Ecosystem – at OpenCon Santiago by Ricardo Hartley (CCBY)

Among other issues that were discussed is the impact factor promoted by publishers that profit from knowledge; how to pass from a citizen science, where really it is involved and built in conjunction with the community, respecting and dialoguing with the knowledge of the latter. It is also important to mention the participation of research in the humanities and the arts, where the question arises as to whether we should only speak of science; when we refer to the Open movement. Finally, it is also important to consider the open culture and its conflictive areas in the area of digital creation and manufacturing.

OpenCon Santiago – by Ricardo Hartley (CCBY)

Therefore, it is noteworthy that this reflection has been developed between people who work in both Private and State Universities, CEPAL, Professional Associations,

Researchers; Associations and Wikimedia Chile, in a space facilitated by the Universidad Autónoma de Chile.

If you want to know more, you can access some of the presentations on the [OpenCon Santiago] platform (https://osf.io/2ac9f/) in [Open Science Framework] (https://osf.io). A platform that allows to leave comments and, of course, express your interest to participate in what will be the OpenCon Santiago 2018.

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About the authors

Ricardo Hartley –  PhD in Applied Molecular Biology, University of la Frontera Chile

@ametodico

Carolina Gainza, PhD Hispanic Languages and Literatures Universidad Diego Portales

@cgainza

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How students can help EU policies work better thanks to open data and civic technology

- November 30, 2016 in data, featured, guestpost, oer

Post written by Luigi Reggi 

Three small but important steps toward a more participatory EU policy were made in the last few weeks between Brussels and Rome, Italy. They are three episodes of a series of productive encounters between students equipped with open data and civic technology and policy makers managing EU funding.

Civic monitoring of EU funding as a way to assess results

The first episode happened  in Brussels. On November 22, a group of Italian higher education students engaged in a productive discussion with the European Commission – DG Regional and Urban Policy and the EU Committee of the Regions. The debate was focused on the role of open data and public participation to assess the results of the European Cohesion Policy from the point of view of the final beneficiaries.

The team MoniTOreali – composed of students from the University of Turin and led by Alba Garavet, responsible for Turin’s  Europe Direct Centre – had the chance to present the results of an intense “civic monitoring” activity focused on one of the most visible EU-funded projects in the city. Its goal is the renovation of the “Giardini Reali”, the historical gardens of Turin’s Royal Palace, one of the city’s landmarks.  With a total funding of less than 2 million euros, the project is hardly one of biggest investments of EU policy in Italy. However, its central position in the urban landscape gives it the potential to shape the way citizens perceive the contribution of the European institutions to the improvement of their neighborhoods.

The goal of this monitoring was to find out how the EU money was spent and whether the project delivered the promise or not.

The Royal Gardens in Turin, Italy, funded by European Structural Funds. Photo: MoniTOreali

The Royal Gardens in Turin, Italy, funded by European Structural Funds. Photo: MoniTOreali

What MoniTOreali students found was mixed results. While the project should have been completed by 2012, actually it is still under way due to a series of administrative delays. Its implementation is also influenced by a complex social environment, as conflicting social groups have different views on the future of the gardens and this had the effect of stalling policy decisions.

To disentangle this intricate web of relations, the students interviewed experts, citizens and local public administrators. They analyzed the project’s objectives, strengths, weaknesses, history and recent developments in a civic monitoring report, which was published in the independent civic technology platform Monithon, the “Monitoring Marathon” of the European funding in Italy. The students also provided suggestions and ideas on how solve some the project’s issues.

But the most interesting aspect of this experience is that Mrs Garavet succeeded in adapting the methodology of A Scuola di OpenCoesione (ASOC) – which was originally created by the Italian Government for high school students – to a higher education course.  She was able to effectively combine her experience as an activist in the Monithon Piemonte civic community with the more formal, six-step ASOC methodology, which also includes sessions on open data, data journalism, EU funding, and field research.  Earlier this year, Chiara Ciociola, the ASOC project manager, actively participated in the teaching activities in Turin to promote a sort of cross-fertilization between the two communities.  More information on the ASOC method and results is included in the book edited by Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann.

The idea is that an improved version of the course’s syllabus could be adopted and used by other universities in Italy and in Europe to replicate the same practice, contextualising its application. The fact that all European Countries share the same rules when it comes to EU funding can help spread a common approach.

It turned out that EU officials loved the idea. The main conclusion of the meeting was that participation in the civic monitoring of EU policy could be a way to bridge the gap between EU institutions and the public. Moreover, the spread of these activities across the EU could also help policymakers evaluate the outcome of interventions from the point of view of the local communities. This is particularly important given that, according to recent developments, EU policies will be more and more focused on actual results in terms of real change for the final beneficiaries.

More concretely, the European Commission proposed to use its programme “REGIO P2P” to fund an exchange of civic monitoring practices between EU authorities managing the funds in different Countries.

A new way to communicate policy outputs

The second episode was a stimulating workshop organized by the EU official Tony Lockett at the European Conference on Public Communication. As Lockett describes very well in this report, open data initiatives such as the EU Portal or the DG Regional Policy open data website are probably not enough to get real impact if not combined with effective citizen participation.

In particular, Simona De Luca – representing the OpenCoesione team at the Italian government – showed how independent civic monitoring of EU-funded projects, based on the open data published on the governmental portal, can profoundly change the way the policy is communicated to the public.  While most of the “good stories” about EU funding are selected by a few experts at the managing authorities and then told by communication officers, the idea of relying on real stories by citizens for other citizens makes official communication extraordinarily powerful. People’s stories, based on official data but augmented thanks to new information collected with a sound and shared methodology, can represent not only a potential risk for the government – when the projects don’t match the expectations – but also a great way to show how problems can be solved together thanks to a meaningful collaboration between governments and citizens.

 

Source: OpenCoesione - The Italian open government strategy on cohesion policy

Source: OpenCoesione – The Italian open government strategy on cohesion policy

The third episode happened last week at the Italian annual meeting with the European Commission on EU Cohesion Policy. The Agency for Cohesion, a national administration responsible for monitoring the implementation of EU Cohesion policy in Italy, for the first time used the stories from the citizens to present the results of EU Structural Funds. In particular, a set of good practices from the 2007-13 period was selected based on the civic monitoring reports included in the Monithon platform.  Most of the projects presented were monitored by the A Scuola di OpenCoesione high school students in different locations. The only exception was a project in Ancona, which was the focus of Action Aid’s School of participation.

Although problematic projects were not mentioned at all during the event, the presentation was the first attempt in Italy to represent the results of EU Policy “from the point of view of the citizens”.  A kind of Copernican revolution for official communication that surprised most of the participants.

Current civic monitoring reports as displayed on Monithon.it

Current civic monitoring reports as displayed on Monithon.it

Collaborating with the Open Government ecosystem

These three examples indicate that a process of positive change is under way among European and national administrations that manage EU funds toward a more collaborative management of EU policy.  However, stronger and more stable mechanisms are needed to ensure real participation in the monitoring and evaluation of EU policies.

What seems to drive this change is not only the desire for a more open and inclusive public policy, but also the urgent problem of finding out whether the projects funded really deliver or not. It is in the interest of all actors involved to assess the actual performance of the huge amount of money that flows from the EU budget to the European regions and cities, given the common ambitious goals of sustainable growth, innovation, job creation, social inclusion, and education. I believe that this question cannot be answered only with aggregated figures or econometric exercises. It requires a painstaking, bottom-up assessment of each single project involving local communities, journalists, analysts, and public officials at the EU, national and regional levels.

This is a complex task that public authorities cannot handle by themselves. They need to be ready and capable to collaborate with the whole open government ecosystem composed in this case of

  • open data producers such as OpenCoesione.gov.it
  • government proactive initiatives such as A Scuola di OpenCoesione, which focus on the crucial element of civic learning
  • data users like the MoniTOreali group developing the right skills and expertise to provide meaningful feedback
  • civic tech initiatives like Monithon
  • intermediaries such as local media or NGOs aggregating and interpreting the feedback from the final beneficiaries
  • policy makers willing to listen and act upon the suggestions from the public.

Monithon calls it a “monitoring marathon”, indeed.

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If you want to know more about the open government ecosystem of the EU Cohesion Policy in Italy you can read this paper, which develops a conceptual model based on this case.

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BIO

screen-shot-2016-11-30-at-17-02-16Luigi Reggi is a technology policy analyst at the Italian government and a PhD student in Public Administration and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, USA. He is interested in Open Government Data, collaborative governance and European Cohesion Policy

 

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DataLabe: Empowering young leaders from vulnerable communities with Open Data and Civic Tech

- November 3, 2016 in data, featured, oer, world

Blogpost In partnership withscreen-shot-2016-11-03-at-14-23-25

The DataLabe is a project that aims to empower young leaders from vulnerable communities with data skills and civic hacking through technology, open data, processes of political engagement, social mobilization and citizen journalism to ensure they are capable to produce new narratives to support the the development of their communities.

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The Observatório de Favelas, is a Civic Society Organisation in Brazil that collects data about Brazilian slums, which has received a grant from the Open Society Foundations to develop a Data Journalism training course and mentorship project for four young leaders from Rio de Janeiro slums working for 9 months to build a data-driven project related to youth and technology.

The first part of this development consisted of five young fellows learning the basic principles of data journalism with Escola de Dados Brasil. During the four initial months of the lab, each one of them had the opportunity to create a personal project involving data visualization concerning themes that they cared about.

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For example, on the research done by the fellows, Eloi Leones, a fellow from a Favela called Maré, chose to show data about the killings of transgender people in Brazil, gathered by the NGO Grupo Gay da Bahia, since the federal, state or local governments do not collect any kind of information on the subject. Fábio Silva, from the Favela Baixada Fluminense – decided to do a visualization on people’s perception of this location. He collected data from Twitter and scraped news about the zone to see which themes were commonly associated with the Baixada, such as politics, culture/entertainment, violence, urban mobility, education, etc.

Another interesting study is the one done by Paloma Calado, she aimed to know to know which students took the ENEM exam (which people take in order to see if they get scores that are high enough to go to college) in Maré and Complexo do Alemão, two of the most populated slums in Rio, to explore the data from the research center linked to the Ministry of Education. While it was not possible to find out how many young people from Maré have actually taken the test, Paloma could at least find the data on the performance of local schools, which do better than the general national average and the average of the Southeast zone of Brazil.

Another example is the research by Vitória Lourenço, a Social Sciences major that also works as a doula, who wanted to explore data on maternal deaths in the public health system. She collected data from the Ministry of Health to provide a better comprehension on the general profile of the mothers who have died in those facilities, figuring out their age group, how many years they have spent on school, their race, marital status, and so on.

 And since the public services were a cause of concern for some of them, Fernanda Távora thought of investigating the public transportation system. Working with Coding Rights – a brazilian NGO that focuses on digital rights and privacy –, she was able to estimate how much the bus companies knew about the people who live in Rio and use those services. She also tried to convey the flow of personal data that these owners and the government agency that supervises them have access to, including IDs, addresses and routes.

The individual projects can be found at the Data Labe website and the group also has a Medium page to document all the problems they’ve found along the way and to share their personal perspectives on their work, explaining what drew them to the topics they’ve selected, what motivates their current work and what are they doing whenever they can’t follow through the script they’ve originally planned.

The next step of the DataLabe consists of a group effort in order to build a big collective visualization project that answers some questions on the utilization of technology by young people from favelas and how these affect their ways of living. After that, the fellows of the team will organise an intensive training course, replicating the methods learned throughout the project to another 15 fellows who will work with popular communication, and who will be selected through an open call.

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About the authors

This post was written by

isis-perfilIsis Reis. Escola de Dados Brazil: She was based at the Open Knowledge Brazil, dealing with content curation and digital media and currently, manages the communications for School of Data Brazil.

020_edNatalia Mazzote:  data journalism Specialist, she coordinates School of data Brazil and is project co-director for Gender studies.

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Open Education in South African Higher Education

- November 3, 2016 in data, featured, oer, world

This post, written by Glenda Cox showcases an insightful perspective of the Open Education situation in the South African Higher Education System

As I write this piece in late 2016 Higher Education in South Africa is in crisis with the sector facing a wave of student protests calling for free higher education under the call #feesmustfall and for the ‘decolonisation of the curriculum’. The ideals of transformation following the end of Apartheid in 1994 appear not to have been satisfied and although Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are attempting to rectify what they can, protest action has forced many institutions to suspend their teaching programmes.

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-13-07-53

Fees must fall, Picture by By Ian Barbour; Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/barbourians/22697273532/in/photostream/

Public Higher Education Institutions in SA

South Africa has 26 public institutions of Higher Education. South Africa’s universities accommodate in excess of 1 million students. While SA has the best HE system in Africa, it has flaws and these are becoming very apparent during the #feesmustfall crisis. A major problem for SA, is that while SA has 2 million students in tertiary education, there are 3 million 18-24 year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEETs). For a detailed and expert review of the post-school situation in SA the CHET website has many reports and includes Open Data on http://www.chet.org.za/news/sustainable-higher-education-funding

Shape of Post-school system (http://www.chet.org.za/data/sahe-open-data)

 

Open Education at the University of Cape Town (UCT)

I work at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) and we developed UCT’s first open content directory. The purpose of the initial directory was to provide a place for UCT academics to share OER. That same OER is now shared in the new OpenUCT repository, launched in June 2014 and managed by the UCT Library. Contribution to the UCT OC directory is voluntary.

In 2014, an Open Access (OA) policy was introduced that encourages the sharing of teaching materials. However, there is no specific mandate. There is no financial or status reward or recognition in annual performance reviews for contributing teaching materials to OpenUCT or any other Open platform.

Before the OA policy came into being in 2014, 332 resources had been added to UCT OC on voluntary basis (some with the assistance of small grants). Over 200 lecturers, ranging from young lecturers to A-rated research professors across all faculties at the institution, contributed content to the directory (Cox, 2013). Nevertheless, those who added materials formed a small percentage of UCT staff (10% of approximately 2500 part time and full time academic staff).

UCT also has a Massive Open Online Project (MOOC) project (2014-2017) managed in CILT. Guidelines for what is expected, how materials will be designed and how they will be openly licensed are set out on the CILT website.

Overview of Open Education in South Africa

In May, 2012, the South African Department of Higher Education and Training included a section on the value of OER in their Draft Policy Framework for the Provision of Distance Education in South African Universities (Department of Higher Education and Training, 2014). However, there is no South African national policy on OER as of yet.

Only five of the public HEIs (UCT, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, University of Limpopo, University of Venda and Rhodes) have policy that gives the lecturer copyright to release their materials as OER. The presence of policy does not automatically result in sharing of OER. There are number of other variables which also need to be in place before OER is adopted.

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) was the first South African university to create an OER directory. Although the initiative was strongly supported by university policy, the path to sustainability has been a slow one with only a few lecturers participating. “Getting actual buy-in from participants” was acknowledged as important for the future of the UWC involvement in OER (Keats, 2009:54).

The University of South Africa (UNISA) launched an OER initiative in 2012 which included developing a UNISA OER Strategy. This must still be operationalised and encoded in formal policy, but the Strategy suggests that this ideological commitment to openness may eventually pay off in concrete policies, mechanisms and actions.

There is some recent interest from Stellenbosch University, although the institution’s focus is still on Open Access (Van Der Merwe, pers. comm.). Additionally, the University of Pretoria, Faculty of Veterinary Science launched AfriVip in 2014. The national landscape of Openness over the past 4 years is slowly shifting.

Barriers to Open Education and lessons from research

The current IDRC-funded “Researching OER for Development in the Global South” project (ROER4D) seeks to build an empirical knowledge base from across South America, Africa and South and Southeast Asia (Hodgkinson-Williams, 2013). Sub Project 4, for which I was the lead researcher, focused on three South African universities – UCT, the University of Fort Hare (UFH) and UNISA and aimed to understand the factors shaping lecturers’ motivations and concerns regarding OER use and creation. There are a number of fundamental structural issues that needed to be considered and in place before an institution can be considered “OER ready”. If any of these factors – access, permission, awareness, capacity, availability or volition – fall below a critical minimum of operational acceptability, it will comprehensively impact OER decision-making and activity at the institution. We also found that the type of institutional culture that exists at a university will have a powerful impact on the types of options institutions have for engaging with OER.

Open Education in SA: The future

Currently, it is difficult to gauge the impact of existing OER in HE in SA. Crucially, UCT will be hosting the Open Education Global conference in Cape Town in March 2017 in association with the Open Education Consortium for the first time in Africa, and it is hoped that this event can increase awareness and give African-based colleagues an opportunity to attend a conference locally that in this resource constrained environment would be difficult otherwise. The conference with its theme “Open for Participation’ welcomes delegates from all education sectors, the community and government.

In South Africa we wait to hear how events will unfold over the next few weeks but the effects are already being felt as 2016 draws to a close. In this time of crisis the sharing of teaching materials and the development of open educational practices across HE must be seen as a priority- we cannot afford to reinvent the wheel. It is up to Open Education advocates to show institutions and lecturers the value in sharing.

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About the author

glendaDr Glenda Cox is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching  (CILT) the University of Cape Town and her portfolio includes Curriculum projects, Teaching with Technology innovation grants, Open Education Resources and Staff development. She has recently completed her PhD in Education and her research focused on using the theoretical approach of Social Realism to explain why academic staff choose to contribute or not to contribute their teaching resources as open educational resources. She believes supporting and showcasing UCT staff who are excellent teachers, both in traditional face-to-face classrooms and the online world, is of great importance. She is passionate about the role of Open Education in the changing world of Higher Education.

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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

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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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Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case studies of emerging practice

- November 4, 2015 in communication, data, featured, handbook, oer

 

Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann

 

 

This post marks the official publication of the volume: Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case studies of emerging practice.

The process of developing this book was a learning experience for us. We had no prior experience in independent publishing, but instead of going the traditional route of attempting to find a professional publisher, in the spirit of openness, we decided to self publish, and to make the entire process as open as possible. The intention of this book is to showcase good practices in an approachable way that can be understood by those who are not necessarily very familiar with open data or data analysis, in order to promote the use of open data as OER to educators, researchers and other organisations.

Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case studies of emerging practice is the outcome of a collective effort that has its origins in the 5th Open Knowledge Open Education Working Group call, in which the idea of using Open Data in schools was mentioned. It occurred to us that Open Data and open educational resources seemed to us almost to exist in separate open worlds.

We decided to seek out evidence in the use of open data as OER, initially by conducting a bibliographical search. As we could not find published evidence, we decided to ask educators if they were in fact, using open data in this way, and wrote a post for this blog (with Ernesto Priego) explaining our perspective, called The 21st Century’s Raw Material: Using Open Data as Open Educational Resources. We ended the post with a link to an exploratory survey, the results of which indicated a need for more awareness of the existence and potential value of Open Data amongst educators.

A couple of months later, we spoke (along with William Hammonds) at the 7th Open Education Working Group Call: Open Data as Open Educational Resources where we ‘set out our stall’ on this topic, and formalised the idea of collecting case studies to be published as an open book for educators. As ever, Marieke Guy did a wonderful job chairing the Working Group call and pushing the conversation forward by raising difficult questions. Meanwhile, we were invited by Antonio Moneo and Geraldine García, to publish our ideas in Spanish in the open knowledge blog of the Inter-American Development Bank.

The majority of the proposals we received were accepted as they fit the themes of the book, and yet each took a different angle on the subject matter. Some other authors who contacted us with with ideas which were not quite right for this project were able to find a home for them here on the OEWG blog instead.

As we started receiving the proposals we also decided to ask a group of experts if they were willing to join us to be part of a scientific committee overseeing the book of case studies, who would act as peer reviewers but, more than that, work alongside the authors and ourselves, towards developing the case studies within an open review model. The experts that joined with us, Marieke Guy, William Hammonds, Anne-Christin Tannhäuser, Maria Perifanou and Ernesto Priego, have a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and work experiences, but all share an interest in open educational practices and were happy to embrace the openness of the project. As soon as they started selecting the cases and working with the authors to develop the drafts, it became clear to us that we had been joined by a group of fantastic people – making the process much easier for all of us – as the authors and reviewers worked seamlessly in a spirit of mutual respect and admiration.

Because of the pivotal role they have played, we wanted to include the voices of the committee members overtly in the book, so we asked each of them for a reflection on both process and product. In her piece, Marieke comments that the result is a set of “detailed and diverse case studies. They are cutting edge tales that show exciting efforts to try out something new, to experiment and to learn from the results”; and for Will, the case studies illustrate the final challenge: “supporting academics and teaching staff to develop their own skills and interests to use open data in this way.”

As we approached the finish line, our friend and colleague Santiago Martín joined us to act as designer. He made a great job of bringing a tonne of files in various different formats into OpenOffice, using an open font, and turning them into this book.

And so last, but certainly not least in the story of this book, we come to the case studies themselves. They have been provided by scholars and practitioners from different disciplines and countries, and they reflect different approaches to the use of open data. The first case study presents an approach to educating both teachers and students in the use of open data for civil monitoring via Scuola di OpenCoesione in Italy, and has been written by Chiara Ciociola and Luigi Reggi. The second case, by Tim Coughlan from the Open University, UK, showcases practical applications in the use of local and contextualised open data for the development of apps. The third case, written by Katie Shamash, Juan Pablo Alperin & Alessandra Bordini from Simon Fraser University, Canada, demonstrates how publishing students can engage, through data analysis, in very current debates around scholarly communications and be encouraged to publish their own findings. The fourth case by Alan Dix from Talis and University of Birmingham, UK, and Geoffrey Ellis from University of Konstanz, Germany, is unique because the data discussed in this case is self-produced, indeed ‘quantified self’ data, which was used with students as material for class discussion and, separately, as source data for another student’s dissertation project. Finally, the fifth case, presented by Virginia Power from University of the West of England, UK, examines strategies to develop data and statistical literacies in future librarians and knowledge managers, aiming to support and extend their theoretical understanding of the concept of the ‘knowledge society’ through the use of Open Data.

We believe the discussions raised by this book are useful in their own right, as wider engagement with, as well as transparency of, public knowledge, are in our view, very worthy aims for education. In addition, we believe that the use of Open Data as OER aids in the development of students’ transversal skills, that is, their literacies, numeracies and digital capabilities, allowing them to think and work as scientists and policy makers, in order to truly operate as global citizens.

This book has been made possible thanks to the support of many people. We would like to thank Paul Bacsich and Elena Stojanovska for supporting the continuation of this project and for their encouragement, and also our fellow OEP advocates at OKFN Edu, OpenEd SIG, OER Research Hub, ELESIG, Open Education Europe, School of Data, ILDA, and finally, our colleagues and friends at UCL and Birkbeck.

The book can be downloaded here Open Data as Open Educational Resources

Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case studies of emerging practice, edited by Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann. London: Open Knowledge, Open Education Working Group, 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1590031

 

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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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