Essentials from Open Networked Learning 2018

More than two months ago, I wrote a post entitled Fresh start with a nice view: I was about to reactivate my old blog while I still enjoyed my last autumn vacation day in Italy. I remember being slightly stressed looking forward to two months of learning with strangers from all over the world. I was a bit scared because I knew it would require quite some time and effort and I did not exactly know what to expect from the Open Networked Learning course.

After familiarizing myself with the course environment, I joined the introduction webinar and got to know the course team. The Google+ community started getting busy with loads of postings and I first met the other members of my assigned PBL group. Connecting with so many people was quite overwhelming and I struggled to keep up with all of the bee-like activity all over the place. Reading about Online participation & digital literacies – the first course topic – and sharing thoughts and experiences with my PBL group was very helpful at this point. I realized that everybody else was also struggling along and this was somewhat normal during this initial phase.

We organised our collaboration and established a few ground rules like acknowledging other group members’ postings to Google+ or checking on Google Drive for new contributions. I gained confidence and the PBL group already collaborated quite efficient on the second topic: Open learning – sharing and openness. Consequently, when working through the next topic – Learning in communities – we were already able to reflect on our own experiences and identified essential factors for a working learning community.

By then I realized how well designed the ONL course is and it was the right time to think about Design for online and blended learning – the last topic of the course. My personal take-away here was that sound learning design is very important, but it cannot guarantee successful learning experiences because every learning community is unique.

Today it is cold and rainy outside and this is my final blog post related to ONL. The course did require quite some time – about eight hours per week – but what I have learnt over the last two months was definitely worth the effort. And although I am happy it is over now I am going to miss the weekly videoconferences with my learning group. This is probably the biggest learning from ONL – that it is possible to form an efficient, effective, inspiring, personal and motivating online learning community in only two months.

Many thanks to the ONL181 team who made this possible!

Open Learning – Sharing and Openness

In my function as learning technologist I support academic staff of the department of Social Work using education technology. Although many of our teachers are inquisitive and open to new innovative teaching methods, social work practitioners are rather sceptical towards digitalisation and online networked practices (Taylor, 2017). Not surprisingly therefore, concepts of open education, open scholarship or open publishing are not always embraced with enthusiasm. Therefore we need to create opportunities for academic staff to openly discuss their experiences with digital tools, be they positive or negative. In my experience, this is often the first step towards a “digital, networked and open” identity of digital scholarship (Weller, 2011).

Openness in our PBL group

Discussing opportunities and challenges of openness in education as well as related tools, platforms, skills and competences has been as a revealing experience over the last two weeks of Open Networked Learning. Like in the first two weeks, our group has found a good balance between openness for contributions from all members and guidance from the topic leaders. This time we could already rely on the problem based learning methodology FISh and have been able to explore the mindmapping tool Coggle. Coogle was a straightforward tool to collaboratively document our thoughts and discussions about open learning, openness and sharing:

Open Learning – Openness and Sharing

Next to new insights and ideas about openness, experiencing openness in the PBL group was a highlight for me. Although I have not been able to participate all the time over the last two weeks, I have tried to keep up with the progressing work and was able to contribute at various stages. This was only possible because the group has already developed a collaboration culture that I experience as very inclusive and motivational. For me, this experience owes a lot to the concept of openness and certainly has contributed to my understanding of opportunities of open education, open scholarship and open publication.

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Lane, A. (2009). The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i5.637

Taylor, A. (2017). Social work and digitalisation: bridging the knowledge gaps. Social Work Education, 36(8), 869–879. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2017.1361924

Weller, M. (2011). Digital, Networked and Open. In The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice (pp. 1–13). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved October 27, 2018, from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781849666275.ch-001

Sharing and openness

What does the term ‘open scholar’ actually mean? It seems that the traditionally scholar has undergone a transformation with the rise of digital and networked technologies. These technologies have brought about opportunities for researching, collecting, categorizing and managing information as well as publishing, disseminating and reviewing papers – digital and networked technologies have led to the evolution of a digital scholarship.

The term digital scholarship is often used synonymously with the term ‘open scholarship’. In their paper Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship, Veletsianos and Kimmons name open access and open publishing, open education, and networked participation as key components of open scholarship. They further inquire some implicit assumptions that often underlie open scholarship.

What are these assumptions and in how far do I agree with them?

1) “open scholarship has a strong ideological basis rooted in an ethical pursuit for democratization, fundamental human rights, equality, and justice.”

In discussions regarding copyright issues, I often rely on this argument myself. When colleagues refrain from publishing their work under Creative Commons licenses because they are concerned it could be used to their disadvantage, it is always tempting to mention fundamental values like democratisation, participation, equality. These basic values are core elements of scholarship, as I understand it.

I personally still believe that technology can be used to strengthen equality and participation. However, we need to be aware of its inherent potentials of abuse. OER for example can help overcome certain barriers to education, but they might also introduce an additional ‘digital divide’. They require specific skills and knowhow and might therefore strengthen already established elites with its exclusive power to create, accredit, certify and transfer knowledge (Lane (2009). Which relates to George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons second assumption:

2) “open scholarship emphasizes the importance of digital participation for enhanced scholarly outcomes.”

If this is primarily understood in terms of quantity and efficiency – digital participation allows for more interaction and collaboration with more other scholars, which automatically leads to better outcomes – I am very sceptical. However, a fruitful exchange requires a common understanding of its social, cultural, technical, etc. environment and there can be no doubt that digital environments are increasingly important. Again, these digital environments provide many opportunities if one understands its workings and has the necessary digital literacies and skills. This means one has to put enough time and energy into constantly developing them in order to keep up with technological innovation. I personally find this interesting but also challenging, especially because there is no other choice, it seems to me. Which leads to the third assumption regarding

3) the co-evolutionary relationship between technology and culture

If I wish to participate, I need to remain active not only in my field of expertise but also and increasingly so in the technology-driven media interaction and collaboration is taking place. I not only need the necessary skills and cultural knowledge, I also need to reflect the algorithms and embedded values of social media, search engines, and other tools I use. This again I can do to a certain degree only, which means technology influences my access to information and my interaction with other people in ways I am not fully aware. Therefore I believe that current predominant techno-enthusiasm has put technology in the lead of the co-evolutionary relationship with culture.

4) “open scholarship is seen as a practical and effective means for achieving scholarly aims that are socially valuable”

I find this last assumption especially interesting. It is linked to the first assumption regarding aims of scholarship – which I agree with – but focuses on the means to achieve them. I am much more sceptical regarding this latter assumption. Without doubt, open access, open publishing, open education, networked participation – core elements of open scholarship – can be achieved more effectively, or are even only possible, relying on respective technology. However, as Veletsianos and Kimmons describe, they open the door to new dilemmas. I just had a look at the new discussion platform Kialo, which claims to enable anyone to participate in a debate on any topic. At a first glance I got the impression that this tool fosters a simplistic pro and contra structure, binary thinking and decision-making by sheer quantity of argument – certainly no aims that are scholarly socially valuable.

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American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences (2006) What is digital scholarship? Connexions [online]. Available at http://cnx.org/ contents/ 3e6519f7-9f9a-4060-a5af-567a8e959f2c@1 (Last accessed 16 May 2018).

Lane, A. (2009). The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning, 10(5). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i5.637

Veletsianos, G. and Kimmons, R. (2012) Assumptions and challenges of open scholarship. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, vol. 13, no. 4, 166–189 [online]. Available at http://www.irrodl.org/ index.php/ irrodl/ article/ view/ 1313/ 2304 (Last accessed 16 May 2018).

 

The learner experience in MOOCs

After reading Kop (2011), The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: learning experiences during a massive open online course, I have added a few thoughts about my personal MOOC experiences to my learning journals:

After a completely overwhelming experience in the first two weeks and a little time for reflection over Easter I feel a lot more comfortable with the MOOC by now. It definitely took me that long to understand that this is about being very selective regarding what to do and where to participate (well, apart from a few blog posts I have not really participated yet).

Most of the readings and some of the posts have been very interesting and I have learnt a lot more about open education already (…starting from zero), but for me the most important thing is the experience itself, including all the difficulties and despair sometimes. I think I have now a good MOOC newbie’s understanding of the effort to overcome these initial challenges and I could also imagine myself among the drop-outs had I not been an OU student.

Again, it has been a really interesting experience so far and it would be great to get to participating in some discussion eventually – but if I should not be able to do so for whatever reason, that would be fine as well.

What license?

In search for a suitable Creative Commons license for my Open Learning MOOC blog postings, I am referring to the 4Rs Framework:

1. Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
2. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
3. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
4. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Following the very handy Choose a License workflow available on Creative Commons, I decided to license my postings under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License:

I am happy for others to copy, distribute, transmitting and adapt any of my content as long it is shared under the same licensing conditions.  These postings are meant to be open reflections freely available to anyone interested, and I would not mind if this can be done for commercial purposes as long as proper attribution is ensured.

I have added the license in the About the section of this blog.

Exploring OER issues

An increasing number of public institutions and private organizations are supporting Open Education Resources (OERs) to make knowledge and learning available to educators and students alike.  Not to turn the great expectations connected to this new global movement of the last decade into disappointment, some fundamental issues need to be resolved, as for example how to ensure sustainability, regulate reusing resources without violating intellectual property rights, or overcome persistent access barriers to OERs.

Sustainability

The momentous role foundations like the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation or the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are playing in getting the OER movement underway in the first place is based on ethical ideals.  Globally unrestricted access to knowledge and learning are in line with article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or they can be promoted as a requisite of democracy or supporting scholarship and helping the general advancement of science.  But whatever the driving motives for funding OER initiatives are, lack of sufficient means to cover running costs and ensure that course materials are updated and quality ensured is a recurring issue in the OER debate (Caswell et al, 2008).

Relying on foundation money alone cannot guarantee sustainability of OERs and alternative funding options need to be found.  Offering basic courses for free and demand license or tuition fees for further services are one possibility, contributions to OER infrastructure, support or content in exchange for access and participation another (Downes, 2007).  Once working solutions to key issues have been found and established, OERs might even be able to offer very specific services as for example regarding copyright permissions (Yue, Yang, Ding, and Chen, 2004).

Intellectual property rights

One important driver of OERs is the reusability of materials, reflected in a the very common definition that they are about offering digitised materials “freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007, p. 10).  The possibility to freely use and reuse materials in a digital environment naturally creates issues of intellectual property rights which need to be resolved.

Because intellectual property law asks for highly specialized subject area expertise, a resolution of this issue is very difficult to achieve for an OER operator alone and is almost impossible to understand for individual users and re-users of open content. Nevertheless, a clear regulation of how intellectual property is protected in a community that is itself founded on sharing information is absolutely vital for the very functioning of this community (Fitzgerald et al, 2006).

One attempt to come to terms with the copyright issue are the Creative Commons licenses, which enables copyright owners to define in advance to which degree they are giving permission for re-using their intellectual property. 

Quality and perception

Even if financial and legal issues can be resolved, there are still barriers which prevent users of accessing OERs in the first place.  The technological infrastructure like bandwidth or internet hardware required to access online education are not available to a sufficient degree globally and hence the OER movement is still very much restricted to the developed countries.

While technical infrastructure barriers will eventually be overcome with the development and distribution of affordable internet devices and improved network access, the variety and quality of content available in OERs will continue to shape the perception of OERs in general.  In this context it is doubtful that quality can be  transparently measured by introducing – similar to copyright standards – common standards.  Moreover, such standards to a certain degree undermine the very idea of participatory OERs when it is less complete training materials that seems to best support creativity and willingness to contribute to OERs (Weller, 2012).  Therefore  other ways of measuring quality will need to be developed, like for example peer-to-peer evaluation.

 

References

Caswell, T. et al., (2008) ‘Open educational resources: Enabling universal education’. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol 9(1), 1–4. Available at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/469/1001 (accessed 23 March 2012).

Downes, S. (2007), ‘Models for sustainable open educational resources’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, vol. 3. Available at http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf  (accessed 23 March 2012).

Fitzgerald, B. et al (2006), ‘Creating a Legal Framework for Copyright Management of Open Access within the Australian Academic and Research Sector’, OAK Law Report Number 1, August 2006. Available at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/6099/1/Printed_Oak_Law_Project_Report.pdf (accessed 25 March 2012).

OECD (2007), Giving Knowledge  for Free. The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, Available at http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/38654317.pdf  (accessed 23 March 2012).

Weller, M. (2012) ‘The openness–creativity cycle in education’, Special issue on Open Educational Resources, JIME, Spring 2012 [online]. Available at http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2012-02 (accessed 21 March 2012).

Yue, K.B., Yang, T.A., Ding, W., Chen, P. (2004), ‘Open Copurseware and computer science education’, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 20(1)20(1), 178-186. Available from: http://portalparts.acm.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk  (accessed 21 March 2012).

Open Education

I have created a mind map depicting some of the key concepts of open education as outlined in Weller, M. (2012).

This visual representation is far from being complete and what is missing in particular is the idea of mutual dependence between openness and creativity: whilst creativity can be a product of openness (in fact, different forms of creativity as shown in the examples of little OERs and big OERs), it is also, in the form of the essential sharing of ideas and resources, described as a prerequisite of openness.

Weller, M. (2012) ‘The openness–creativity cycle in education’, Special issue on Open Educational Resources, JIME, Spring 2012 [online]. Available at http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2012-02 (accessed 21 March 2012).