sloan 2008

OER’s & A good educational system

Terry Anderson, PhD Professor and Canada Research Chair in Distance Education

 “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.

Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada

* Athabasca University

Fastest growing university in Canada

34,000 students, 700 courses

100% distance education

Graduate and Undergraduate programs

Master & Doctorate – Distance Education

Only USA Regionally Accredited University in

Canada

 Athabasca University

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

Why is E-learning so Popular?

Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning Allen and Seaman 2007

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.

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

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

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

OER Granularity

  Diagrams, photos   Articles (Open access publications)   Games, simulations, activities   Units of learning (IMS LD)   Units and courses   Programs

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

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?

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)

A Tale of 3 books

Open Access

100,000 downloads plus

indiv. Chapters

500 hardcopies sold @ $50.00

Free at aupress.org

Commercial publisher

934 copies sold at $52.00

Buy at Amazon!!

E-Learning for the 21st Century Commercial Pub. 1200 sold @ $135.00 2,000 copies in Arabic

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement Achievements, Challenges, and New … DE Atkins, JS Brown, AL Hammond, William and Flora … - 2007

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??

Challenges and Solutions   Wrong timetabling/chunking

  Cultural constraints

  Not invented here

  Wrong technical format

  Wrong Language

  Lack of Accreditation/authority

  Modularized units

  Tools Distributed with content

  Transparency and objective display

  Dogged adherence to standards

  Produser translation

  Consumer and peer review   Challenge for credit

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,

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

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

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

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

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!!

Open Learn Example http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

490 units

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

Why Don’t we Use and contribute OERs??

2. A Good education system: “empowers all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn”

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

  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

JimFarmer,2006

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

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

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

Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices) 2008

From a Deschooled society to a Learning Society that includes new models of formal and informal learning

Steven Warburton, 2007

Taxonomy of the Many

Dron & Anderson, 2007

Collectives

Groups NETWORKS

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)

Choosing the right tool?

http://www.go2web20.net 2770 logos as of Oct 31, 2008

Your Institutions LMS

OR

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

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

Problems with Groups

  Restrictions in time, space pace, & relationship

  Often overly confined by teacher expectation and institutional curriculum control

  Isolated from the authentic world of practice

  Poor preparation for Lifelong Learning

Paulsen (1993) Law of Cooperative Freedom

Relationships

Challenges of using informal social software tools for formal tasks

  Control   Support   Privacy   Assessment   Ownership and perseverance

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

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

2. Formal Learning with Networks

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  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

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  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

2. Networks

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  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

Network Tools

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  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.

Network Tool Set (example)

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Text Text

Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007

Network Pedagogy

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  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

Groups are Managed - Networks Emerge!

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  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

3. Collectives: Harvesting the Wisdom of Crowds

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3. Formal Education and Collectives

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  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”

Hive mind? Borgs? Group consciousness?

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  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)

Collective Tools

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Example: Determining our Effect?

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  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

Collective Example: Terry’s Store at Amazon

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Explicit

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  Explicit recommender systems:

Digg Monitoring collective recommendations in real time

60 http://labs.digg.com/swarm/

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

Is DE Better than Classroom Instruction? Project 1: 2000 – 2004

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  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

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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.

Summary of results: Achievement

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Achievement Outcomes

*Significantly heterogeneous average effect

Summary of results: Attitudes

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Attitude Outcomes

*Significantly heterogeneous average effect

Summary of results: Retention

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Retention Outcomes

*Significantly heterogeneous effect sizes

Equivalency: Are all types of Interaction necessary?

Anderson, 2003 IRRODL

Anderson’s Equivalency Theorem (2003)

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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

  Increasing satisfaction through teacher and learner interaction interaction may not be as time or cost-effective as student-content interactive learning sequences

Do the three types of interaction differ? Moore’s distinctions

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Achievement and Attitude Outcomes

Achievement Attitudes Interaction 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)

Does strengthening interaction improve achievement and attitudes? Anderson’s hypotheses

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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)

Achievement and Attitude Outcomes Achievement Attitudes Interaction

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*

 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

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

  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

"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!