Inside OutThe ALTO Project:

Linking OERs to Professional Development and Knowledge

Management activities

John Casey, Hywell Davies, Chris Follows, Nancy Turner, Ed Webb-Ingall, University of the Arts London, Centre for Learning & Teaching in Art & Design.

Inside Out - Content

• Problem – moving from subsistence to sustainability

• Situational Analysis• Approach – CoPs and Fieldworkers• Rationale & Benefits• Methodology• Knowledge Management• Social Layer• System Design

Stating the Problem

• The need to move from a subsistence to a sustainable model of HE & OERs – technology will be involved

“To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week”

Sir John Daniels, ceo, COL

Situational Analysis – 1

• Staff development in HE has traditionally been supplied by central units

• Adapting current teaching practices and cultures to use new technologies presents this centralized development model with critical challenges:– Capacity – Skills

Situational Analysis – 2• OER engagement adds a range of additional

needs: IPR, de-contextualization, presentational and media design, and ‘learning design for strangers’ etc.

• Ed Tech has not broken through - lack of attention to systemic and soft issues is often cited as some of the causes for this failure (Kumar @ MIT)

• But OER engagement ‘surfaces’ systemic and soft issues – so a potentially powerful engine for change

Situational Analysis – 3

• Design, development, sharing, reuse and adaption of learning resources are poorly understood

• Growing awareness and policy agenda that now privileges process over content and collaboration over delivery – a move from OER to Open Practice (but still needs/builds on OER)

• The value proposition of sharing and OER is becoming much more explicit and forceful (Chow)

Situational Analysis – 4

• Sharing as a signifier of change

Approach

• ALTO has approached this challenge in a number of ways:

– Tapped into existing communities of practice around a variety of themes and contexts

– Employed and trained part-time staff to work with front-line teaching staff across a number of different areas (IPR, learning design etc) – they and the project manager act as ‘Fieldworkers’

Rationale• The Fieldworker concept is an established practice in anthropology and

ethnographic studies - is used to understand and interact with a culture

• Fieldworkers have an important role in the design of socio-technical

systems in the workplace - advocated by pioneers like Mumford and by modern practitioners such as Sharples

• By mobilizing existing communities of practice and using fieldworkers -

OER engagement can potentially be a CPD tool to do more with limited resources

• Provides the basis for an economically sustainable means of enhancing

educational development provision in a time austerity.

• Has implications for existing approaches to educational development, organizational structures and cultures

Benefits• Engagement with OER creation is a de facto reflective

exercise – designing resources and learning experiences for ‘strangers’ - this takes us out of our normal frame of reference

• Everyone has an implicit model of learning and teaching (Biggs, Ramsden) OER engagement brings these models to the surface for discussion

• This puts us in the ‘right mind’ set for thinking about designing for flexible and blended learning – tricky in A&D!

• Good foundation for introducing and embedding new learning and teaching models

Methods • Leverage OER engagement by deliberately introducing flexible and

blended learning concepts via the fieldworkers – strategic agenda

• Fieldworkers use OER resources as ‘mediating artefacts’ to help practitioners articulate, share and reflect on mental models (Conole) and design strategies

• OERs become ‘boundary objects’ that support communication and understanding between CoPs (Wenger)

• Fieldworkers encourage and support ‘collaborative learning design’ activities between practitioners (internal and external) - benefits:– Mutual support– Reflection– P2P learning– Low threshold concepts– Shared authentic language– Embedding– CoP development & strengthening

Knowledge Management 1• Early days still

• Previous tech-centric approaches have not worked well (Lambe, Friesen, Hoel), some have a dubious rationale and ideological agenda (Friesen)

• These are complex socio-technical systems and highly entropic

• It is not nearly enough to just provide a mechanism of storage or retrieval

• Do not use meaningless and rebarbative jargon with users – use straightforward concrete language

• Allow/support users and communities to articulate their own meanings (ontologies) and classifications (taxonomies) record these for later elaboration and mediation

Knowledge Management 2

• By all means use a Repo - we use EdShare, it’s good

• But do not attempt to impose terminology, vocabularies and taxonomies developed by experts – however well meaning or authoritative

• This is not a well-defined domain:– Mainstream public education is a messy and contingent enterprise

and is highly dependant on contextual factors – it’s not like military or aviation training – where some tech approaches originated

• Introduce a ‘social layer’ for interaction, creation sharing, collaboration and negotiation of content and meanings (example - process arts)

The Social Layer – 1

EdShare Repository

The Social Layer – 2

http://process.arts.ac.uk/

ALTO System Design• A social layer enables the important human factors of

communication, collaboration, and participation that are needed for sustainable resource creation, sharing and sense making within community networks

• Solutions provided should help, not hinder, participants needs and activities

• Guiding system design principle should be the concepts of conviviality (Illich, 1973, Hardt & Negri 2009) and stewardship (Wenger et al, 2009)

• Arrange for longer term storage and sense making to be migrated from the social layer to a repository

Inside Out Summary

• Problem – moving from subsistence to sustainability

• Approach – CoPs and Fieldworkers• Rationale & Benefits• Methodology• Knowledge Management• Social Layer• System Design