Really good speaker.
Started with a discussion about evolving teaching from blank slates which students wrote all that lecturers said on them and then moved to books and then lecture texts where you took your book to class and added comments to the lecturer notes.
So if books did not change education did computers and technology?
Copyright law makes it difficult to share things without going through huge hurdles. Open means that materials can be shared for 4r’s reuse, redistribute, revise and remix. New copyright licenses enable sharing so for example creative commons. This enables the 4r’s to be undertaken. There are 350 million items on the web using a creative commons license. You can search using google to just access free items for use. Open here means you can access these items and then using local control you can amend or change items.
The Law is getting stronger in terms of copyright and so it is easier to say that’s mine and you can not use this.
So what is the role of openness in education? Openness is the ONLY way of doing education, if you don’t share then your not educating. Successful educators are those who share with others. An idea can be shared without giving it away. However expressions of our expertise such as putting thoughts in a book are given away. Digital expressions of our expertise can be shared with many. This is an extraordinary opportunity.
Open educational resources can be shared so in a repository such as OER commons. Connexions and a range of Universities who have open repositories. OpenCourseWare provides a range of courses on line that all can access but these are not actual courses. There are some on line courses though that people can use. Open text books now exist in a range of areas.
These have been funded by grants traditionally but now other funding is available so Department of Labor in US has provided funding for open courses to help people get into work and study. Washington State has courses in an open library which comes on line this summer.
How will these courses get accredited? This is an issue because giving away materials is okay because people have to pay for degrees through University. Western Governors University is an on line organisation who provides no courses but do provide assessments to gain credit and then a degree. You can take their assessment and they don’t mind where your learning comes from if you can pass. There are other examples where you can take courses and then pay for the exams only to get the credit.
Practical analytics making use of data. Google uses experience to provide you another word when you type in a misspelt word and this is done from experience of knowing what people type in next once misspelt. Amazon provides suggestions for other purchases when you choose to buy one item and other sites do this as well. Supermarkets give discount for scanning cards because of the amount of data they get from these cards. Every interaction you have means these sites and stores are collecting and using data.
When students are working in on line environments there is a range of data that can be collected from each click. We don’t however collect this and use it in a meaningful way. Usually when discussing data we are thinking about assessment data so grades and scores. The behavioural data may be more interesting so for example when do students log in, how long do they log in for, how long do they spend on each page, how did they get there, who are they talking to? These data could be really useful to us. We might find out which students need most help, the least effective parts of curriculum and tests that do not work.
Teaching is a science and if we used the data we could collect then we might be able to research many areas more effectively. Openness gives permission to fix things but openness and analytics needs to work together. This then enables continuous quality improvement. These two together can help with curriculum design and redesign.
Strategic tutoring might be developed so online curriculum teaches as much as possible and then teachers can be proactive in tutoring those who need it. The computer can broadcast the material but the tutor has to work with the student and care for them, support and help them. This helps the curriculum get better and the students learn more.
Customer relationship management system is being piloted where tutors record all their student interaction data. This is an under explored area.
Some great points made
Yep, really like the sound of this. There was an article in last week's THE about the development of the world's first Open Educational resources University starting in Australia Canada and New Zealand. However it seems there are centrifugal forces pulling in the opposite direction to these centrepetal adventurers!
ReplyDeleteNeal
Thanks Neal - I must have a read of this. David mentioned the OER University wiki in his presentation.
ReplyDeletehttp://wikieducator.org/OER_university