User:Redwellie14/sandbox

1. I am thinking of working on Open Educational Practices for WIKISOO.

Open Educational Practices
Open Educational Practices support the creation, use, reuse, and remix of Open Education Resources (OER).

Banzato: modern teacher practices still traditional. OEP as the creation, utilization, and management of OER. Open University project is as follows: ‘The vision of open educational practice includes a move from a resource based learning and outcomes based assessment, to a learning process in which social processes, validation and reflection are at the heart of education, and learners become experts in judging, reflection, innovation within a domain and navigation through domain knowledge’ (OPAL, 2010, p. 46). This definition was lightly revised in a succeeding publications: ‘a collaborative practice in which resources are shared by making them openly available, and pedagogical practices are employed which rely on social interaction, knowledge creation, peerlearning and shared learning practices’(OPAL, 2011a: p. 4), [with] ‘the intent to improve quality and innovate education’ (OPAL, 2011b: p. 4).

Beaven & Quinn: practices which “support the production, use and reuse of high quality OER through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path” (ICDE, 2011) is now recognised as being equally important to ensure open education can deliver on its promise. (pg 3)

OEP has disrupted formal, nonformal, and informal education practices

Beetham: The Capetown Open Education Declaration, a founding text of the OER movement, concurs with this broader approach: 'open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning'. (Cape Town Open Education Declaration, 2008)

Production, management, use and reuse of open educational resources Developing and applying open/public pedagogies in teaching practice Open learning and gaining access to open learning opportunities Practising open scholarship, to encompass open access publication, open science and open research Open sharing of teaching ideas and know-how Using open technologies (web-based platforms, applications and services) in an educational context

Camilleri: open educational practices are usage of resources in the frame of open learning architectures. It is the next phase in OER development which will see a shift from a focus on resources to a focus on open educational practices being a combination of open resources use and open learning architectures to transform learning into 21st century learning environments in which universities’, adult learners and citizens are provided with opportunities to shape their lifelong learning pathways in an autonomous and self-guided way. (pg 6)

OEP are more and more defined nowadays as practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path. OEP address the whole OER governance community: policy makers, managers/ administrators of organisations, educational professionals and learners (Ehlers, 2011) (pg 6)

Schaffert: transformation in educational practices that brings learning processes and their outcomes closer to what individuals will need to participate successfully in the knowledge society (pg 3).

initiatives
Banzato: OpenCourseWare (MIT) Merolot (Canadian Project) Open Learning of the Open University (UK) International Institute of Education Planning (UNESCO)

Challenges
Banzato: Institutional Commitment: for teachers & beyond the institution, find a sustainable economic model that does not undermine the public good of educational institutions
 * technology: lack of broadband and softward
 * financial: insufficient investment in hardware & software
 * social & cultural: lack of sharing, lack of competence of web 2.0, move from consumer to prosumer
 * political & legal: policies that limit OER (knowledge of Creative Commons License (CCL)
 * pedagogy: (sometimes overlooked by focusing on technology, management, licensing) need to move beyond access to innovative open teaching & learning practices
 * OER systems can be 'cathedrals in the desert' if they are not populated with content and the content then used, shared, modified

Downes:
 * financial: free to use does not mean free to create. Requires significant financial investment. financial model needs to be sustainable from provider perspective. What sustainability means varies: if OER is cheaper than current mechanism. Cost includes cost of resource & staff (latter often overlooked). Sustainable also should consider objectives & outcomes: whether to be used for local learning, distance learning, etc.
 * technology
 * policy
 * quality: OER expected to be trusted & authoritative, eg UNESCO discussions of OER suggested a Global Index System for users to find courseware that is easily accessible & should be overseen by volunteer board of editors
 * access
 * content: content needs to be flexible and adaptable to local needs. Reusable is both a technology & content issue. Licenses for content. Creative Commons License & Gnu Public License.
 * cultural imperialism: western institutions designing courses for third world countries (pg 12)
 * model: model shift from provider/user to community model of collaborative development, eg Mohammed Nabril-Sabey of French University of Egypt stated at UNESCO conference. provider/user model is constraining whereas community is more creative & sustainable. One is knowledge for all and the other is construction of knowledge by all (pg 12)
 * review process: MERLOT is based on the peer review process & only 14% of materials submitted has been reviewed

Beetham:
 * Students ability to distinguish between whether content was openly licensed or not – challenged assumptions about what was academically acceptable. teachers should treat OERs as a starting point in developing these skills. It would be wrong to assume that 'digital natives' come ready-equipped to learn effectively from open content. Students in these cases were not struggling with the technical skills of editing, uploading and managing content but with the learning skills of trusting and exercising judgement, beyond a strategic focus on what tutors and examiners will value. emand for open, self-directed and participative learning is not emerging strongly from students themselves. Rather, in preparing students for a knowledge-sharing society, we may need to be proactive in expanding their digital literacies and their learning horizons.

Camilleri:
 * funding: private & public, lack of
 * Integration into current courses: teachers don't know how

Strategies & Recommendations
Downes:
 * co-development - collaborative development of open content
 * development of sustainable open content community
 * Educate humans: technology & human skills including cultural sensitivity
 * co-produce
 * multi-linguistic
 * develop a quality assessment system
 * shift ideology: what can be done for learners vs what learners can do for themselves, eg Wikipedia has 2 employees. decentralization is more scalable & sustainable vs centralization that may not be financially sustainable.

Camilleri:
 * Legislation - legislate Open Access mandates for publicly funded research. In teaching, legislation on cost-efficiency of teaching resources in publicly-funded education would stimulate demand for open-textbooks, and stimulate partnerships for their creation (pg 7). Harmonising of legislation across the EU to create an EU-level Creative Commons licence. Change intellectual property laws to facilitate open access
 * Centralised directory that links to high quality OER
 * Help institutions nurture OEP
 * Make societal benefit explicit
 * Support OER/OEP initiatives that cross institutional and geographic boundaries
 * Build stakeholders: Create an EU-level stakeholder forum or expert-group on open education, tasked with mapping the field and reporting back to the Commission with recommendations on evidence-based policy actions
 * Trust: quality assessment similar to academic peer review based on community peer review & build an open citation system based on an EU level citation database

Schaffert:
 * OLCOS project focuses on open educational practices that are based on a competency-focused, constructivist paradigm of learning and promote a creative and collaborative engagement of learners with digital content, tools and services in the learning process.
 * Promote open educational practices that allow for acquiring competences and skills that are necessary to participate successfully in the knowledge society
 * Foster the development of OER, e.g. through creating a favourable environment for Open Access to educational content
 * Support the development of widely used, state-of-the-art and sustainable open access repositories
 * Demand public–private partnerships to concentrate on ventures for innovating educational practices and resources
 * academic & educational resources that have been partially or fully funded by public monies should be made freely accessible under an appropriate license
 * move away from teacher-centred knowledge transfer
 * establish reward & support mechanisms within educational institutions
 * teach about open licences - include intellectual property rights of researchers & teachers and require non-exclusive copyrights for the institution to make accessible educational resources under appropriate licenses
 * teachers should change their role from dispensers of knowledge to facilitators of open educational practices that emphasise learners’ own activities in developing competences, knowledge and skills. Hence, teachers should favour learning designs that make use of novel, low-barrier tools and services (e.g. Weblogs, Wikis, RSS-based content provision, etc.) for collaborative learning and sharing of ideas, experiences and study results.

Benefits
Beetham:
 * public communication can become public engagement, with stakeholders contributing to research and knowledge banks on issues that concern them
 * The Houghton report demonstrated that open access solutions to academic publishing are highly cost effective for participating institutions and for the sector. Two separate JISC programmes – the Virtual Research Environment programme and the Business and Community Engagement programme – have both shown that collaborative environments can be built efficiently using open technologies.
 * universities with a lower international profile have still enhanced their global reach considerably in this way. The OER University represents a new model of international collaboration which allows study across institutions and which blurs the boundaries between informal and formal learning.
 * Digital literacy, capability and confidence are critical to open practices of all kinds. Universities that engage in OER projects have demonstrably built capacity – legal, technical and educational – which enhances their ability to respond to new demands and opportunities. There is also evidence from JISC-funded projects that universities continue to build on the partnerships created by open access initiatives long after they are completed.
 * Staff - teaching legacy
 * Students - access & diversity of ideas
 * community

Camilleri:
 * ideological: OER movement has promoted idea that knowledge is a public good
 * increases innovation in, access, & impact of scholarly research

Funding Models
Downes:
 * Endowment Model: eg Stanford Encyclopedia Project
 * Membership Model: Membership organizations pay a fee, eg Sakai Educational Partners Program
 * Donations: managed by non-profit foundation, eg Wikipedia, Apache Foundation - modification on some services are paid
 * Conversion: convert to paying customer for advanced features & support, eg Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSe
 * Contributor Pay: contributors pay for the cost of maintaining the contribution, eg Public Library of Science (PLoS)
 * Sponsorship: free for user with commercial messages by sponsors, eg MIT iCampus Outreach Initiative - Microsoft & China Open Resources for Education, Stanford on iTunes - Stanford & Apple
 * Institutional: eg. MIT OpenCourseWare Project
 * Government: including UN programmes, eg Canada's SchoolNet Project
 * Partnership & Exchange: universities working together to create OER systems

Knowledge Economy
Should this be a subsection under scope?

Schaffert:
 * The roadmap emphasises that the knowledge society demands competencies and skills that require innovative educational practices based on open sharing and evaluation of ideas, fostering of creativity, and teamwork among the learners. Collaborative creation and sharing among learning communities of OER is regarded as an important catalyst of such educational innovations. Therefore, OER should become a key element of policies that aim to leverage education and lifelong learning for the knowledge society and economy.