This week we had the opportunity to participate in the Morocco OER Strategy Forum hosted by Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech as part of the OpenMed project. We spent two very inspiring days learning with the OpenMed colleagues about Moroccan Open Education (OE) initiatives and discussing future steps for the project. Lots of food for thought and delicious real food! Moroccan hospitality is just fantastic.

Yes we can, if God wills picture by Marcello Scalisi (UniMed)

The first day focused on the state-of-the-art of OE in Morocco and showcased relevant experiences and policies in the country presented by guest speakers from several institutions. The day started with speeches by the President of Cadi Ayyad University, Abdellatif Miraoui, and the President of UNIMED, Wail Benjelloun, who stressed that OE should be understood as a Human Right and that it offers an excellent opportunity for ensuring that universities do not become irrelevant institutions for learning in a digital age.

The opening speeches were followed by a presentation of the OpenMed Compendium, a report edited by Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL) with contributions from all partners that is the main deliverable of the first work package of the project. The document gives an overview of OE in the Middle-East and North African (MENA) region and includes a number of cases studies looking at different types of initiatives that could be taken as a source of inspiration by institutions interested in fostering the adoption of open education practices. The compendium also draws on insights from a series of international experts and offers some recommendations around five key themes:

• Top-down and bottom-up implementation
• Supporting staff in using and integrating open practices and open resources
• Collaborative creation in communities of practice
• Enhancing the quality of student learning
• Licensing of Open Educational Resources (OER)

The day continued with a presentation by Ilham Laaziz on GENIE (le Programme National GENIE pour la généralisation des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication dans l’Education), a governmental programme promoting the adoption of ICTs in education. After that, speakers from several Moroccan universities presented OE initiatives developed at their respective institutions: Université Ibn Zohr in Agadir (by Ahmed Al Makari), Al Akhwayn University in Ifrane (by Hassane Darhmaoui and Violetta Cavalli), Université Mohammed 5 in Rabat (by Ilham Berrada), Université Hassan 2 in Casablanca (by Noureddine Damil) and Khalid Berrada from Université Cadi Ayyad Marrakech presented UC MOOCs. In addition, Ismail Mekkaoui Alaoui (Cadi Ayyad University) presented on the Open Book Project. You can see all the presentations in the OpenMed Slideshare page.

The last part of the day was devoted to discussing the OpenMed OER Regional Agenda, following a presentation of the draft by Daniel Burgos and Fabio Nascimbeni (UNIR).

Jemaa el Fna by Daniel Villar-Onrubia

The second day of the forum continued discussions on next steps of the OpenMed project, with a particular focus on the development of institutional roadmaps for the adoption of Open Educational Practices. Likewise, the day included presentation of OER Repositories and Coventry University’s Domains of One’s Own initiative.

Most importantly, the day focused on discussing ways of formalising the good intentions and current initiatives, as one of the participants said: “It is important to coordinate our activities by creating chapeau of action, which is a common place where everyone in the Moroccan Universities can compare and share their practices and learn new ones.” It is key for Morocco to enhance and promote what they are already doing, as mentioned by other participant: “Morocco needs to commit to capacity building for their faculty staff by involving them in Open Education projects, sharing good practice and bringing people together, as communities of practice are the main driver to develop Open Education in every country.”

One of the main conclusions of the forum is that there is already a significant critical mass of OE initiatives in Morocco and the country could indeed play a leading role in the development of this field of practice in the South Mediterranean and, more broadly, the MENA region. However, better cohesion and coordination between universities is still needed in order to spread the principles of OE more widely and foster engagement with initiatives, as well as to prevent the duplication of efforts – e.g. when institutions are producing MOOCs. Other aspects that would require further development are the promotion of research aimed at understanding the adoption of open educational practices as well as efforts to improve awareness, both within and beyond the country, of Moroccan OE initiatives.

Jemaa el Fna by Daniel Villar-Onrubia

As a potential response to some of these issues, it was suggested the idea of working on a declaration at a country level, which could help build a network of institutions and harness support from the government. In this regard, the Scottish Open Education Declaration was discussed as an interesting model. Another measure suggested to help improve the visibility of Moroccan OE initiatives would be translating basic information into English and taking advantage of pre-existing platforms such as the OER World Map.

If you want to learn more about #OpenMed activities on Open Education in the MENA region have a look to their webpage and blog and think about contributing with a video message to their collection of videos of OER experts, helping them to inspire educators into adopting Open Educational Practices.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

(See Sweden on the OER world Map)

Brorsson: Stockholm´s Old Town seen from Skeppsholmen before sunrise, CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikipedia

OER SWEDEN

In Sweden there is a growing interest in open publication and the sharing of OER but the pace of development is still slow. There are many questions to be dealt with in this area; for universities, academic management and teaching staff. Teachers across educational sectors require support and guidance to be able to use OER pedagogically and with quality in focus.

Two national projects have been conducted since 2010 on OER: the first one was on OER resources for learning, financed by the National Library of Sweden, and the second one was on open opportunities for learning, financed by the Internet Foundation in Sweden.

Both projects intended to focus in particular on how OER affects teacher trainers and decision makers, and aimed to stimulate an open discussion about collaboration in infrastructural questions regarding open online knowledge sharing.

The objectives of the project were

• To increase the level of national collaboration between universities and educational organisations in the use and production of OER
• To find effective methods to support teachers and students, in terms of quality, technology and retrievability of OER
• To increase collaboration between universities to foster resource sharing, with a base in libraries and educational technology units
• To contribute to the creation of a national university structure for tagging, distribution and storage of OER.

During the project a series of successful open webinars focusing on the use and production of OER were conducted with a large outreach to the target group. A virtual platform for Swedish OER initiatives and resources was developed. Although both projects are complete the network is still alive as well as the webpage OER Sverige. The network still runs webinars reaching a wide target group nationally, but also sometimes with an international audience.

The webinars focused on the following areas

• Digital literacy in HE as a prerequisite for OER
• Bonus Presskopia (Swedish reproduction rights organisation)
• What are OER and how to work with them?
• Collaboration between UR (Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company) and universities
• Quality in e-learning
• The digital library
• International trends in OER
• Metadata and standards

Swedish Association for Distance Education (SADE)

The Swedish Association for Distance Education (SADE) is a professional organisation for all those involved in distance learning and flexible learning in Sweden, including open education, OER and MOOCs. SADE was founded in 1984, and is designed to broaden the knowledge of and participate in the development of open flexible education and distance learning.

SADE has run the BOLDIC OER project for more than ten years aiming to explore and disseminate best practice in OER through Boldic Awards: it is also responsible for the International Council of Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Operational Network(ON) BOLDIC, aiming to promote open online learning including OERs and MOOCs.

OPEN SNH Open Collaboration For Net-Based Higher Education

OpenSNH is a repository for open academic learning resources The opensnh.se website is a initiative from two Swedish Universities and the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company (UR), to provide their open educational resources under thematic topics allowing for use and reuse in different ways. In the OpenSNH platform there has also been material included from several other Swedish universities as well based on an agreement with OpenSNH.

Lektion.se

Lektion.se is the largest site for teachers. It is a meeting and discussion place but most of all, it is a place where teachers can find free learning resources, where teachers can quickly and easily search and retrieve lesson materials and upload their own lessons. Today over 236000 individual teachers and others are members.

MOOCs IN SWEDEN

MOOCa have been conducted in Sweden since 2013, and there were MOOC-like predecessors since about 2003. An example of an early course of MOOC character was the KTH and Stockholm University joint preparatory course “Sommar Matte” (summer maths), which has been held since 2003, and has had up to 10,000 participants per course edition. The course is based on a combination of automatic correction and group assignments which students solve together.

Another early pioneer was Jönköping University, with two courses “Digital Imaging” and “Photography – Visual Communication”, which were studied by 25,000 students between 2007 and 2012. The courses included a large amount of video-based instruction, tutored largely by former participants. The examination was based on students’ written reflections on their learning.

Karlstad University was early to offer MOOC-inspired courses in collaboration with the National Agency for Education, with technical support from Lillehammer University College. Karolinska Institute released its first two MOOC courses in September 2014. The courses hosted by the international MOOC provider edX, and received a total of 50,000 registered participants. Mid Sweden University also released their first MOOC on Digital Design with VHDL in 2014. Lund University started in 2012 an investigation on how to provide MOOC courses worldwide: the first three Lund courses, at Coursera, started in spring 2015. Then Chalmers University offered MOOC courses on edX: they have launched three courses; Uppsala University will start their first MOOCs in October 2016 in collaboration with FutureLearn.

On behalf of the government the UKÄ (The Swedish Higher Education Authority) has investigated since April 2014 if the universities’ educational programs can be broadened, including by use of open online education. UKÄ was asked to investigate whether, how and to what extent, open online education (so-called MOOCs) could be accommodated within the Swedish university system. UKÄ suggested that MOOCs should be offered by Swedish universities and they see many opportunities with MOOCs. The conclusions are here.

Other interesting projects

Open Government Partnership-Sweden

Sweden is partner in the Open Government Partnership, by that Sweden reaffirmed its commitment to open government efforts both in principle and practice. with its long tradition of transparency, citizen engagement and efforts to build an effective and accountable government, embraces the ideas of the initiative. Sweden’s Action Plan and engagement focus on the challenge of More Effectively Managing Public Resources in development cooperation.

The Swedish Digitalization Commission

For the past couple of decades, we have been caught up in societal developments that are catalysed, facilitated and driven by digitalisation. These developments involve entirely new opportunities for society and people. The Digitalisation Commission wants to shed light on these developments and on the significance of digitalisation within four areas of society in which there are both opportunities and challenges. The Commission has chosen a structure that divides society up into the following areas: the economy, work, social institutions and infrastructure .

References

• http://oersverige.se/about-the-project/
• https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooc-kurser_i_Sverige
• http://www.sverd.se/swedish-association-for-distance-education/
• http://www.opensnh.se/
• http://www.lektion.se
• http://www.uka.se/download/18.68b9da0d14d8a7e2f5aab4e/1434628864514/eng-arsapport2015.pdf

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About the author

Dr. Ebba Ossiannilsson, is an e-learning and digitization specialist. She was awarded the EDEN Fellow title in 2014, and she became an Open Education Europa Fellow in 2015. She is V President for the Swedish Association for Distance Education (SADE), and in the Swedish Association for E-Competence (REK). She is in the Executive Committee of EDEN. She is a national and international researcher and consultant in the areas of open online learning, OER and MOOCs, special on quality, and she serves as a quality reviewer for ICDE and EADTU. Ossiannilsson has a long experience from Lund University within her areas, but also from other Universities in the country where she has worked for longer periods as a consultant, and expert. Ossiannilsson collaborated with the EC ET working group on digital and online learning. She was the research leader for the ICDE study on the global overview of quality models in open online learning and education. She is in the Editorial Board for several Scientific Journals and she is the Collection Editor for the Education Science on MOOCs. She has a comprehensive publication list herself (over 200). She earned her PhD at Oulu University, Finland in 2012 with a dissertation on Benchmarking e-learning in higher education. Ossiannilsson has a passion to contribute to open education for a future we want for all.

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

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

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)

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

 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, 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/)**

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.

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

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.

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

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**.

]]> https://education.okfn.org/a-scuola-di-opencoesione-using-open-data-in-schools-for-the-development-of-civic-awareness/feed/ 0 1276 https://education.okfn.org/open-data-as-open-educational-resources-case-studies-of-emerging-practice/ https://education.okfn.org/open-data-as-open-educational-resources-case-studies-of-emerging-practice/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2015 14:04:09 +0000 http://education.okfn.org/?p=1241  

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

The post was authored by  Robert Schuwer and edited on to the blog by Paul Bacsich. For Robert’s original posting see http://robertschuwer.nl/blog/?p=1213

Dr Robert Schuwer is Lector (Professor) OER at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, School of ICT in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Since 2006 the majority of his work is about OER and Open Education. His experiences and research interests are in open policies, business models for OER and adoption of OER-based processes, on institutional, cross-institutional and national level. He is chairman of the Dutch Special Interest Group Open Education, established by SURF – and chairman of the Information Center Committee of the Open Education Consortium. He was an active researcher on the POERUP project and for that wrote the OER policy options brief on the Netherlands.

In the previous weeks, the OER Research Hub published results of their latest surveys on OER. In total 7500 responses were received. The results were presented for the categories Informal learner, Formal learner and Educator. Instead of creating large reports with results, they made short summaries of each category and published infographics. The full dataset is available for further analysis (in CSV-format or Excel-format).

In this blogpost I focus on formal learners (and educators. Using the infographics, I have compared some results and using the dataset, I created some cross-links between different data in the dataset.

The following table gives a break-down of responses on being US-resident or not and having English as first language or not for both educators and formal learners. Blank responses on either item are not counted.

Because of the stimulation programs in the US to adopt open textbooks, I was interested in comparing the use of open textbooks by both educators and learners in the US and outside of the US, and if having English as the first language influences this (assuming most open textbooks are in English). Related to the break-down the following percentages of use are extracted:

It seems open textbooks are more used by formal learners than by educators, more in the US than outside and more by non-English speaking users.

On the impact of using OER, a comparison between the infographics reveals that both learners and educators agree on the top-2 (educators counting (strongly) agree):

On challenges for educators when using OER, I was interested in the effect of teaching experience and subject area. The following table shows the percentage of educators per subject area that consider Finding suitable resources in my subject area a challenge. The column Total displays the total number of educators having indicated they use OER for that subject area (more than one subject area is possible per educator)

This result surprises me a bit. Considering Math and Science as two areas with a lot of OER available, I would have expected finding suitable resources less a challenge. Maybe the wealth of resources, poorly described by metadata, is an explanation. Overall, support for finding suitable resources is very useful because for most subject areas more than 25% have difficulties with this.

The last two analyses I have performed is to find out about the influence of teacher experience. The following figure displays experience vs the way OER is used by the educator.

It seems the more experience an educator has, the more activities with OER are undertaken. Furthermore, community-based activities like adding comments to a repository are less common than creating and publishing resources.

Finally, the next two figures displays challenges in using OER, related to teaching experience of an educator. The first one considers the challenges related to doubt and difficulties with OER.

It seems that educators having >10 years of experience encounter more challenges in finding the right resources and judging the quality of them than educators with less teaching experience. The previous figure indicates that the latter category uses OER less, and therefore did not encounter these challenges.

The next figure displays the challenges in using OER, posed by the environment of the educator.

Again, educators with the most teaching experience encounter the most challenges, with not having enough time to look for suitable resources as the largest challenge. This can be overcome to both provide this time by the institution and to improve support on findability of the right OER.