1. OER’s & A good educational system
Terry Anderson, PhD
Professor and Canada Research
Chair in Distance Education
2. “Canada is a great
country, much too
cold for common
sense, inhabited by
compassionate and
intelligent people with
bad haircuts”.
Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 2002.
3. Athabasca University,
Alberta, Canada
Fastest growing university in
Canada
34,000 students, 700 courses
100% distance education
Graduate and
* Athabasca University Undergraduate programs
Athabasca University Master & Doctorate – Distance
Education
Only USA Regionally
Accredited University in
Canada
4. Presentation Overview
1. Traditional Opening Joke
2. Components of a Good Educational
System
3. A way to conceptualize Net Tools –
Taxonomy of the Many
4. Interaction Theory revisited
5. Your Comments and questions
5. Why is E-learning so Popular?
Online Nation: Five Years of
Growth in Online Learning
Allen and Seaman 2007
6. E-Learning is
Better Than Sex !
• You can finish early without feeling guilty.
• You can get rid of any viruses you catch with a $50
program from McAfee
• If you get tired, you can stop, bookmark your place
and pick up where you left off.
• With a little coffee you can do it all night.
• You don’t usually get divorced if your spouse
interrupts you in the middle of it.
• And If you're not sure what you are doing, you can
always ask your teacher.
7. A good educational system should have three
purposes:
it should provide all who want to learn with
access to available resources at anytime in
their lives;
empower all who want to share what they
know to find those who want to learn it
from them;
furnish all who want to present an issue to
the public with the opportunity to make
their challenge known. (Illich I.,1970)
Full text available:
http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/deschooling.htm
8. 1. Access to resources at anytime
Imagine a world in which every single
person is given free access to the sum
of all human knowledge.
That's what we're doing. –
Terry Foote, Wikipedia
9. Open Education Resources (OER)
Vision + Affordance
“At the heart of the open educational resources
movement is the simple and powerful idea that;
the world’s knowledge is a public good in general
the World Wide Web provides an extraordinary
opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse that
knowledge.”
Hewlett Foundation Smith, & Casserly. The promise of open
educational resources. Change 38(5): 8–17, 2006
10. OER Granularity
Diagrams, photos
Articles (Open access publications)
Games, simulations, activities
Units of learning (IMS LD)
Units and courses
Programs
11. OER’s are Open (Mostly)
Meaning they can be:
Augmented
Edited
Customized
Aggregated and Mashups
Reformatted
Returned
But they need to be licensed –
not just put online
See Scott Leslie’s 10 minute video at
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/opened.htm
12. Ownership and Licensing
Familiar problems
Who owns resource - educators or the institution?
inflated expectations
New problems
OER’s are not just journal articles
Articles are not “reworked”
Is attribution critical?
What defines commercial exploitation?
13. 4 Ownership Models
Institutional ownership
Default under most ‘work for hire’ law
Shared institutional and Academic
Often unworkable
Tragedy of the anti-commons
Individual (academic ownership)
Rights of succession? Multiple authors?
Produsage
Assume that each producer does not enforce their rights, all
can treat product as a private good
(copyleft, public domain, no tragedy of the anti-commons)
14. A Tale of 3 books
Commercial E-Learning for Open Access
publisher the 21st Century
Commercial 100,000 downloads plus
934 copies sold at Pub. indiv. Chapters
$52.00 1200 sold @
$135.00 500 hardcopies sold @
Buy at Amazon!!
2,000 copies in $50.00
15. A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER)
Movement Achievements, Challenges, and New …
DE Atkins, JS Brown, AL Hammond, William and Flora
16. Major Problems with OER
Little take up by conventional teachers
Too little reward and recognition for authors
Too few learners actually engage with the content
Undeveloped business case
Too few teachers remix and repost content
Too difficult to upload, tag and share
Solution?? Vibrant communities of Produsers??
17. Challenges and Solutions
Wrong timetabling/chunking Modularized units
Cultural constraints Tools Distributed with content
Not invented here Transparency and objective display
Wrong technical format Dogged adherence to standards
Wrong Language Produser translation
Lack of Accreditation/authority Consumer and peer review
Challenge for credit
18. Our own Experiment:
Course development based on OER’s
4 courses:
Nursing,
Communications (Theatre)
English for Business, &
Educ. Tech
Vastly different results
Critical variable was the attitude of the developer(s)
Christiansen, J., & Anderson, T. (2004). Feasibility of course development based on
learning objects: Research analysis of three case studies. International Journal of
Instructional Technology and Distance Education,
19. What is missing?
Culture of development,
sharing and remix
‘Community of Practice
Solution
Social Software
affordances
Easy to use Tools
Harnessing student energy
to create OERs
20. The Political Economy of Peer Production:
Michael Bauwens
“produce use-value through the free cooperation of
producers who have access to distributed capital
a 'third mode of production' different from for-profit
or public production by state-owned enterprises.
Its product is not exchange value for a market, but
but use-value for a community of users
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499
21. Prod-Users - From production to produsage
- Axel Bruns (2008)
Users become active participants in the production of
artifacts:
Examples:
Open source movement
Wikipedia
Citizen journalism (blogs)
Immersive worlds
Distributed creativity - music, video, Flickr
22. Produsage Principles
produsage.org
Community-Based –the community as a whole can
contribute more than a closed team of producers.
Fluid Heterarcy – produsers participate as is
appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and
knowledge, and may form loose sub-groups to focus on
specific issues, topics, or problems
Unfinished Artifacts –projects are continually under
development, and therefore always unfinished;
Common Property, Individual Rewards –
contributors permit (non-commercial) community use,
adaptation, and further development of their intellectual
property, and are rewarded by the status capital they
gain through this process
23. Case study: Open University UKʼs
Development of Open Learn
openlearn.open.ac.uk
Rationale Opportunity:
The risk of doing nothing when technology and globalization issues
need to be addressed.
A testbed for new technology and new ways of working
way to work with external funders who share similar aims and
ideals
A chance to learn how to draw on the world as a resource.
Brand Promotion
A route for outreach beyond our student body
Demonstration of the quality of Open University materials in new
regions.
Social Learn: to devise means to put ourselves out of business -
before our competitors do!!
26. Next evolution to Social Learn
“For 3000 years education has made the learner adapt to
the system. SocialLearn [1] aims to reverse this and make
the education system adapt to the learner.”
Make the formal informal, and the informal formal.
Web 2.0 tools, attitudes, learning designs
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/sociallearn/
Martin Weller
28. 2. A Good education system:
“empowers all who want to
share what they know to find
those who want to learn”
29. Creative Literacies:
“The ability to experiment with
technology in order to create and
manipulate content that serves social
goals rather than merely retrieving and
absorbing information”
p. 107 Burgess, J. (2006) Learning to Blog. Uses of
Blogs Bruns &Jacobs
30. Need to insure that our use of the Web actually results in
increased access and not just more expensive access for
those with existing high quality access to educational
opportunity
Jim Farmer, 2006
31. Two-Way Use
65,000 videos uploaded to YouTube every day
Facebook and Myspace over 100 million
profiles
Facebook 24 million photos uploaded daily
50 million blogs, 50% written by under 19 year
olds
Scientific America 229(3) 2008 & FaceBook Home
32. Example
My presentation at ECEL 2007 in Copenhagen -
maybe 200 in attendance F2F
On Slideshare:
2322 views | 4 comments | 6 favorites | 91 downloads |
5 embeds
33. 3. A Good Education:
Furnishes all who want to present an issue
to the public with the opportunity to make
their challenge known.
“One month after a virtual protest
staged in Second Life with almost
2,000 avatars demonstrating on IBM
islands, a new contract with IBM
Italy has been signed” Labour news from
UNI global union, 2007
37. Taxonomy of the Many
Groups
NETWORKS
Collectives
Dron & Anderson,
2007
38. Social Learning 2.0 3.0 3.5
Each of us participates in Groups, Networks and Collectives.
Learning is enhanced by exploiting the affordances of all three
sources of social learning.
Issues, memes, opportunities and learning activities arise at all
three levels of granularity.
Tools are optimized for each level of granularity
Formalize the formal
Informalize the formal (Martin Weller)
39. Choosing the right tool?
OR
Your Institutions
LMS
http://www.go2web20.net 2770 logos as of Oct 31, 2008
40. Formal Education and
Groups:
Classes and cohort
Increases:
completion rates,
achievement
satisfaction
Same logistic challenges as for institutional,
campus -based learning
Can operate ‘behind the garden wall” to allow
freedom for expression and development
refuge for scholarship
41. Formal Learning and Groups
Long history of research and study
Need to optimize:
Social presence
Cognitive presence
Teaching presence (Communitiesofinquiry.com)
Established sets of tools –
Classrooms,
Learning Management Systems
Synchronous (video & net conferencing)
Email
42. Problems with Groups
Restrictions in time, space
pace, & relationship
Often overly confined by
teacher expectation and
institutional curriculum
control
Relationships
Isolated from the authentic
world of practice Paulsen (1993)
Poor preparation for Lifelong Law of Cooperative Freedom
Learning
43. Challenges of using informal social
software tools for formal tasks
Control
Support
Privacy
Assessment
Ownership and perseverance
44. Group Example: The Educational Blog
Structural characteristics:
Multimedia
Chronological order
Web based, easy to edit
Networked Characteristics
Linked to other sites
Syndicated (RSS, Atom etc)
Comments and Trackbacks– spammed
Pedagogical
Reflective, personal, archival, communicative, public
45. How are Blogs used today in Groups?
“You are required to post at least two messages to your blog
and respond to the postings of at least two other enrolled
students.
Please use your postings to address the issue discussed on
pages 34-38 of your text.
Your post and responses will be assessed for 10% of your final
grade
To protect your privacy, your blog is not accessible outside of
the LMS and postings will be destroyed at the end of the
course.”
Paraphrased from major UK university graduate school requirements
46. 2. Formal Learning with Networks
Networks create and sustain links between individuals
creating communication and information spaces
Each of us may belong to many networks
Network use creates social capital
Networks can connect self-paced and independent
learners to cooperative study activities
Network leadership arises in multiple
formats
46
47. Networks combine personalization with socialization
creating transparency (Dalsgaard 2008)
Focus is on the individual’s spaces and the way they share
and expose their space to others
Reflections (blog)
Resources (photos, links, tasks)
Accomplishments (portfolio, artifacts)
Sharing sand growing interests and skills
47
48. 2. Networks
Provide resources from which students’ extract and
contribute information
In school one should learn to build, contribute
to and manage one’s networks
Transparency provides application and validation of
information and skills developed in formal learning
Provides models for new students
Networks last beyond the course - basis for
ongoing support and advise from alumni and
professional communities
48
49. Network Tools
Most web 2.0 apps including:
Profiles: Finding significant others
Blogging - outside the garden wall
Resource recommendations finding highest quality content
(Slashdot, Diig, Cite-u-like)
Scheduling meet-ups for study, debate, collaboration
WIKIs, Google docs and other open collaboration tools
Commercial Social Networking sites- Facebook etc.
49
50. Network Tool Set (example)
Text
Text
50
Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007
51. Network Pedagogy
Connectivism
Learning is network formation: adding new nodes, creating new
neural paths
“It is not what you know, but who you know to ask.”
Siemens, G. (2007)
Learning as a means to develop social capital
Social capital and social relationships “enlarge the concept of
individualism to include the ability and obligation to
work with others when the task demands it.” Edgar H.
Schein, 1995
51
52. Groups are Managed -
Networks Emerge!
Cannot be controlled like a group - requires new types of
learning activities
Need to both amplify and extinguish interaction
Facilitate quality knowledge and artifact construction
Emergent behaviours, complexity, and adaption
52
54. 3. Formal Education and
Collectives
Collectives aggregate, then filter, compare, contrast and recommend.
Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning
Smart retrieval from the universal library of resources – human and
learning objects
Need to develop and practice skills and interest to easily contribute to
collectives (tagging, sharing whenever possible, leaving traces)
only 16% of users are taggers (Pew, 2005)
Allows discovery and validation of norms, values, opinion and “ways of
understanding”
54
55. Hive mind? Borgs?
Group consciousness?
Collectively managing planet Earth
What does it mean to be aware of each other?
Collectives operate as mirrors to monitor and learn from
our collective selves (Spivack, 2006)
55
57. Example: Determining our Effect?
Analysis of blog postings using semantic and matching
techniques
Potential uses:
uncover suicidal ideation
mental health of the community
understand evolving communication genres
measure impact of popular memes
57
61. Collective Examples for Educational
Application
Artifact Ranking systems: Google Search; CitULike;
Tag Clouds
Recommendation Systems:
Wikis: Contributions from the crowd
Folksonomies: Bottom up classification systems
Voting and auction
Prediction Markets
62. Is DE Better than Classroom Instruction?
Project 1: 2000 – 2004
Question: How does distance education compare
to classroom instruction? (inclusive dates
1985-2002)
Total number of effect sizes: k = 232
Measures: Achievement, Attitudes and Retention
(opposite of drop-out)
Divided into Asynchronous and Synchronous DE
62
63. Primary findings
DE and CI are essentially equal (g+ ≈ 0.0 to low
average effect) on all measures
Effect size distributions are heterogeneous; some
DE >> CI, some DE << CI
Generally poor methodological quality
Pedagogical study features account for more
variation than media study features (Clark, 1994)
Interactive DE an important variable*
*Lou, Y., Bernard, R.M., & Abrami, P.C. (2006). Media and pedagogy in undergraduate distance
education: A theory-based meta-analysis of empirical literature. Educational Technology
Research & Development, 54(2), 141-176.
63
64. Summary of results: Achievement
Achievement Outcomes
*Significantly heterogeneous average effect
64
65. Summary of results: Attitudes
Attitude Outcomes
*Significantly heterogeneous average effect
65
68. Anderson’s Equivalency Theorem
(2003)
Moore (1989) distinctions are:
Three types of interaction
o student-student interaction
o student-teacher interaction
o Student-content interaction
Anderson (2003) hypotheses state:
High
levels of one out of 3 interactions will produce satisfying
educational experience
Increasingsatisfaction through teacher and learner
interaction interaction may not be as time or cost-effective as
student-content interactive learning sequences
68
69. Do the three types of interaction differ?
Moore’s distinctions
Achievement and Attitude Outcomes
Interaction Achievement Attitudes
Categories k g+adj. k g+adj.
Student-Student 10 0.342 6 0.358
Student-Teacher 44 0.254 30 0.052
Student-Content 20 0.339 8 0.136
Total 74 0.291 44 0.090
Between-class 2.437 6.892*
Moore’s distinctions seem to apply for achievement (equal
importance), but not for attitudes (however, samples are low
for SS and SC) 69
70. Does strengthening interaction improve
achievement and attitudes? Anderson’s hypotheses
Achievement and Attitude Outcomes
Interaction Achievement Attitudes
Strength k g+adj. SE k g+adj. SE
Low Strength 30 0.163 0.043 21 0.071 0.042
Med Strength 29 0.418 0.044 18 0.170 0.043
High Strength 15 0.305 0.062 5 -0.173 0.091
Total 74 0.291 0.027 44 0.090 0.029
(Q) Between-class 17.582* 12.060*
Anderson’s first hypothesis about achievement appears to be supported
Anderson’s second hypothesis about satisfaction (attitude) appears to be
supported, but only to an extent (i.e., only 5 studies in High Category)
70
71. Bernard, Abrami, Borokhovski, Wade, Tamin, & Surkes, (in
press). Examining Three Forms of Interaction in Distance
Education: A Meta-Analysis of Between-DE Studies. Review
of Research in Education
72. Conclusions
The Net provides means to drastically improve education
effectiveness, efficiency and engagement by providing
access to learn, to teach and to speak one’s truth.
Equally useful (and disruptive) to distance and campus
education
Our challenge, as educators, is to insure that our students
and our world benefit from these Net affordances
73. Illich tells us to search for and build
“educational webs which heighten
the opportunity for each one to
transform each moment of his living
into one of learning, sharing, and
caring” Illich, 1970
74. quot;He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”
Chinese Proverb
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
Blog: terrya.edubogs.org
Your comments and
questions most
welcomed!