Welcome to the free OpenLearn course on open education. This course runs over seven weeks and is focused around the subject of openness in education. The standalone free course is an adapted extract from the Open University Masters-level course H817 Openness and innovation in elearning.
The course operates an activity-based pedagogy, so within each week there will be activities to undertake. Many of these involve writing a blog post detailing your thoughts on a particular issue, and then Tweeting about your post to enable other learners to read different opinions. If you are not comfortable with making public your thoughts in this way, you can simply substitute the blog posts for entries into an unshared document, and omit the Twitter activity. However, we recommend that you do create a Twitter account and do the activities associated with it if at all possible, as this does add a great deal of value to your networking practice. We will look at pedagogy associated with open learning itself in Week 5 of this course.
The course is set out week by week as many learners prefer to structure their study this way. However, it is not essential that you study it in this manner. If your other commitments mean you have to work ahead sometimes or need to catch up, this is fine – there is a lot of flexibility built into the structure of the course. The course is aimed at a postgraduate, Masters level, with the expectation of approximately 16 hours of study each week.
Martin Weller, on whose materials much of this course is based, says that The Open University struck it lucky with its name. Forty years after its founding, openness is more of a relevant topic in education than it was then. If you were starting a new university now, then Open would be a good choice. But what is meant by open education has changed considerably, particularly since the advent of the internet and it is these new interpretations that we will be looking at. They include:
To get the most from this course we recommend you enrol. While this course is unsupported, we hope that you may find support from your peers via Twitter and blogs.
The course is structured around activities that will not only help you understand the subject area better, but will also help you to become a networked practitioner.
After studying this course, you should be able to:
As the course is about openness in education, in this first week you will explore some of the different interpretations of openness and consider priorities for research in this area.
The aim of this week is to familiarise you with some of the concepts and to get you thinking about some of the issues involved. We will then explore these in more detail in the coming weeks. The materials presented in this week are largely drawn from Week 7 of the Open University H817 course Openness and innovation in elearning.
After studying this week, you should:
During this course we will look at open courses in some detail, as well as the technology used to support open learning. For now, we will set out the technologies used in this course which, since the course needs to be open to all, are open technologies. You can familiarise yourself with these and do any setup required before the course starts.
Many of the activities will require you to post your answer or reflections on your own blog. If you do not have one already, then you need to set up a blog, using a free service such as wordpress.com, blogger.com, weebly.com and so on. There are often options to buy extensions or upgrades to these services, but for the purposes of this course, the free options are fine. If you have an existing blog, you are free to carry on using that (although you may wish to set up a distinct blog to keep the course material separate).
If you prefer to keep this blog private, then, for the purposes of this course, set up a separate one using one of the free services mentioned above.
As well as blogs and the OpenLearn environment, you may find it useful to use Twitter. This is not compulsory, but you will find it a useful way to find and connect with other learners’ experiences, past and present – and you can begin to build up your own network by following former and current students as well as academics whose work is referenced in this course.
If you post anything on Twitter that is relevant to the course, include the hashtag #h817open, so others can find it and we can gather together the conversation around the course. For example, a tweet about the course may go something like: ‘Just enrolled for the open course at the OU, looking forward to discussing with others. #h817open’. It is recommended that you Tweet about each piece of writing you make on your blog (for example when you are working on the activities in this course) which will potentially increase the audience (network) for your writing, and enable you to find and read others.
Familiarise yourself with the open environment we are using for this open course by doing the following:
The Open University (OU) is arguably in a unique position to consider the nature of what ‘open’ means in higher education. When the OU was founded it defined ‘open’ as meaning open access, which was realised through not setting any formal educational qualifications for entry, and using a part-time, distance education model. But with the advent of the internet and digital technologies, what it means to be ‘open’ with regards to education has begun to change. In the remainder of this week’s materials, you will explore these different interpretations of openness, to set the scene for the remainder of the course.
Choose two of the following resources on open education to read or view:
The resources you have just accessed provide views on different aspects of what openness means in higher education.
The key is to provide a representation that draws together the key concepts of openness as you perceive them. Save it in a form that is shareable, e.g. an image, an embeddable file from elsewhere (such as Flickr, Prezi, etc.), or a link to a web-based resource (ensure these can be accessed without needing to sign up for the tool you have used).
If you have difficulty with visual representations, then you can alternatively create a representation in another medium, including text lists, or audio.
Over the next two weeks you will look at one of the most prevalent, and successful, interpretations of what open education means, namely open education resources (OER). This is the process whereby universities, institutions and individuals make their learning content freely available. These can be whole courses, parts of a course, lecture notes, video lectures and so on. The key characteristics are that these learning materials are free to use and have a copyright licence that encourages reuse.
We will be looking at OER and different types of licence in more detail later but for now it is sufficient to think of OER as freely available learning content from universities or other providers. Much of the research around open education has been derived from the OER movement.
A number of key questions have arisen, which can apply to most aspects of open education, including:
During this course you will engage with these questions for different aspects of open education.
Imagine you are advising a funding organisation that wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.
In this activity you are just expected to start thinking about these issues, and to use your own experience and intuition; you are not expected to research them in depth. You will build on this work during the next week.
After creating your list of priorities, consider the following questions, which will give you some ideas as we move into the second week of the course:
Use the box below to record your thoughts.
Bates, T. (2015) ‘What do we mean by open in education?’, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources, 16 Feb [online]. Available at http://www.tonybates.ca/ 2015/ 02/ 16/ what-do-we-mean-by-open-in-education/ (accessed 12 September 2012).
CNN-1333 Open Course (2012) ‘The extended argument for openness in education’ [online]. Available at https://learn.canvas.net/ courses/ 4/ pages/ the-extended-argument-for-openness-in-education?module_item_id=52578 (accessed 12 September 2017).
Cormier, D. (2010) ‘Community as curriculm and open learning’, Dave’s Educational Blog, 17 Jun [online]. Available at http://davecormier.com/ edblog/ 2010/ 06/ 17/ community-as-curriculum-and-open-learning/ (accessed 12 September 2017).
Weller, M. (2014) ‘What sort of open?’, in Chapter 2 of The Battle for Open, Weller, M. (2014) Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn’t Feel Like Victory. London. Also available online at http://www.tonybates.ca/ 2015/ 02/ 16/ what-do-we-mean-by-open-in-education/ (accessed 12 September 2017).
Wiley, D. (2010) ‘Open education and the future’ [video clip], 3 June [online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M (accessed 12 September 2017).
This week you will be looking at arguably the most prominent manifestation of open education in recent years, that of open education resources (OER).
The materials presented in this week are largely drawn from Week 8 of the Open University H817 course Openness and innovation in elearning.
This week we will build on some of the initial thinking we did last week on issues in open education, and look particularly at open educational resources in more detail.
OERs, as they’re called, are probably the most mature and visible of the new flavours of openness. This week you will look at a bit of their history, consider the issues they face, and then explore some OER collections in detail as you try to construct a course outline.
By the end of the week you should have a good understanding of OERs, and an appreciation for how they might be used in practice.
After studying this week, you should be able to:
The OER movement (although even calling it a movement can be contentious) grew out of earlier work around ‘learning objects’. As elearning moved into the mainstream (around the year 2000), educators and institutions found they were creating often expensive learning resources from scratch. There was a relentless logic that, with the digitisation of content, these resources could be shared between institutions.
In the following activity you are asked to read an article by Stephen Downes, in which he sets out the case for learning objects and provides a comprehensive analysis of the subject.
Downes goes into detail on many aspects that are not necessary for this course. You do not need to read the article in detail – your aim is to gain an understanding of what learning objects were and why they were seen as important.
The vision of a large pool of shareable resources never quite materialised, despite the economic and pedagogic benefits they may carry. A number of criticisms have been raised regarding learning objects. We would now like you to take a look at some of these criticisms.
Three criticisms of learning objects are given below: you should read/watch at least one of these:
Part of the problem of learning objects was that it often seemed alien to everyday practice, so that getting educators to share their content in learning object repositories proved to be a barrier. Unlike sharing research findings in published journals, or sharing teaching resources informally within an institution, there was no real incentive or established practice for sharing teaching material on this scale. And, as Brian Lamb points out, there was a tendency to over-engineer the systems required, with specific standards that had a language of their own.
You might reflect here on whether you have, or would, share teaching resources using the learning object approach. What do you think would be the main issues for educators and teachers?
In 2001 the OER movement began when MIT announced its OpenCourseWare initiative. MIT’s goal was to make all the learning materials used by their 1800 courses available via the internet, where the resources could be used and repurposed as desired by others, without charge.
At the time this was revolutionary, since much of the accepted wisdom was that content was a key asset (the adage was that ‘content is king’) and it couldn’t be given away. The OpenCourseWare initiative also addressed some of the issues that were arising with learning objects, since it took existing teaching content and simply released it.
In reality, it wasn’t that simple to release the teaching content, since the material often required reversioning, rights clearance, or some form of adaptation. But nevertheless the initiative didn’t rely on individual educators engaging with complicated standards and adopting a new set of practices. Instead, OpenCourseWare built on existing practice by taking existing course materials and releasing these, rather than developing bespoke learning objects. However, there remain issues that have not been fully resolved, such as ease of reuse for different contexts and purposes. One approach, which is the one taken by The Open University with respect to OpenLearn, has been to produce short open courses based on longer original ones, using the content that most readily repurposes to an open environment.
Following on from the MIT announcement, an OER movement began, with many other universities following suit. In 2006, The Open University launched its own OER initiative, releasing distance education material via the OpenLearn project.
In the next activity you will look at some of these OER projects in more detail.
Last week you created a list of three priorities you determined for open education. This activity builds on that work, but is based on further research in the area of OER.
Based on your reading, write a blog post of around 500 words, setting out what you perceive as the three key issues in OER, and how these are being addressed. For instance, if you feel that accreditation of informal learning is a key issue then you should state why this is significant and link to some of the ways it is being addressed; for example through Open Badges or the Peer 2 Peer University.
If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post, including the hashtags #h817open and #Activity7. Spend no more than 30 minutes browsing others’ responses using these hashtags.
OER are commonly gathered together in repositories. These can be the output of one project or several projects gathered together. For example, the OU’s OpenLearn project gathers all of the OU’s open education material. The Ariadne Harvester project acts as a search engine across many repositories.
In the next activity you will explore the types of content found in OER repositories.
Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week.
Judge whether the resources suit your needs well, partially or poorly. (Spend no more than 45 minutes on average exploring each repository, so a maximum of around four hours for this task).
Use the box below to make notes.
Repositories often contain material from a wide variety of authors, and repositories take different approaches to ensuring the accessibility of these resources. Some make accessibility a requirement, while others offer guidelines. The accessibility of resources drawn from a wide range of authors is another factor in the use of OER that you should consider.
John Richardson (Emeritus Professor in Student Learning and Assessment at The Open University) some years ago drew together the accessibility policies of several OER repositories though some of these sites have now changed significantly, or ceased operating (clicking the link should download the document to your device).
de los Arcos, B., Farrow, R., Perryman, L.A., Pitt, R. and Weller, M. (2014) ‘OER Evidence Report 2013–2014’, OER Research Hub [online], http://oro.open.ac.uk/ 41866/ (accessed 1 July 2019).
Downes, S. (2001) ‘Learning objects: resources for distance education worldwide’, IRRODL, vol. 2, no. 1 [online], http://www.irrodl.org/ index.php/ irrodl/ article/ view/ 32/ 378 (accessed 22 May 2017).
Friesen, N. (2003) ‘Three objections to learning objects and e-learning standards’ in McGreal, R. (ed.) (2004) Online Education Using Learning Objects, London, Routledge, pp. 59–70. Draft available online at http://www.learningspaces.org/ papers/ objections.html (accessed 22 May 2017).
Lamb, B. (2009) Who the hell is Brian Lamb? (video), Barry Dahl blog, 26 October [online], http://barrydahl.com/ 2009/ 10/ 26/ who-the-hell-is-brian-lamb/ (accessed 22 May 2017).
McGill, L., Falconer, I., Dempster, J.A., Littlejohn, A. and Beetham, H. (2013) ‘Journeys to Open Educational Practice: UKOER/SCORE Review Final Report’, JISC [online], https://oersynth.pbworks.com/ w/ page/ 60338879/ HEFCE-OER-Review-Final-Report (accessed 8 September 2017).
Wiley, D. (2004) The Reusability Paradox, Connexions [online], http://opencontent.org/ docs/ paradox.html (accessed 31 May 2017).
This week you will continue to look at OER and, in particular, the issues of rights and sustainability.
The overriding goal of OER is reuse – if no one reuses a resource then it may as well be closed. The materials presented in this week are largely drawn from Week 9 of the Open University H817 course Openness and innovation in elearning.
Welcome to Week 3 of the open course on open education.
Having looked at OERs last week, this week you will be addressing some related issues. The first is around the nature of reuse. It is reuse that really defines OERs, that is the whole point of them, to be taken and reused by others.
There is often confusion around whether online resources, such as a YouTube video, can be reused, and this is where licences are important, so this week you will consider Creative Commons Licences.
You will also look at the issue of sustainability and OERs; that is, are they viable in the long term as an approach for universities?
And lastly you will look at what we mean by an open educational resource. Is it just material released through universities? Or is it any resource created that can be used in education?
Building on Week 2, by the end of this week you should have a clear understanding of OERs and reuse.
After studying this week, you should:
David Wiley (2007) has been one of the key thinkers and drivers in open content, and he originally proposed the 4Rs of Reuse:
Wiley (2007) makes the argument that the ‘open’ in ‘open content’ relates to licensing. It is about what the provider permits others to do with the content. It isn’t necessary for all 4/5Rs to be permitted, but the degree to which they are restricted can make a resource less or more open.
Many resources you encounter online have no rights information associated with them (think of most YouTube clips for example). This can place the educator in an awkward position – did the uploader have permission to use that video? If I use it in an educational context am I breaking copyright?
Most OER projects and repositories deliberately want to encourage reuse so they adopt specific licences to promote this. The most common licence is the Creative Commons licence, although other licences exist.
The Creative Commons licence has a number of ‘settings’, so the rights owner can choose whether or not to place a set of restrictions on the reuse of their material and what those restrictions should be. These are explained on the Creative Commons website. The following Slideshare presentation also explains the different rights and the logic behind them:
Alternatively, this blog post from a lawyer explains them: ‘Creative Commons Licenses Explained In Plain English’, or this infographic from the OER Research Hub explains them for teachers.
For its OpenLearn project the OU selected a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence. There are three elements to this licence:
These are actually fairly easy conditions to meet for most cases, and the key to the Creative Commons licence is that it assumes reuse as the default. So the user (or reuser) needn’t ask for permission to reuse the content if they meet these conditions. This doesn’t mean, however, that other forms of reuse are prohibited, just that they do need explicit permission.
The Non-Commercial licence is one in particular that causes some anxiety because what constitutes commercial use can be a grey area. For example, if you use some Creative Commons – Non-Commercial (CC-NC) material in a course and then charge students a fee to study that course, does that constitute commercial use?
In The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons – NC License (2005), Erik Moller argues that the NC licence is ‘harmful’, while Alma Hales and Andy Lane set out the reasons why the OU adopted the Creative Commons licence in Creative Commons and The Open University (clicking this link should download a document to your device).
For your blog posts on this course so far, consider which of the Creative Commons licences you would use, and justify your choice in a further blog post. Then think about two different resources you have produced previously, perhaps teaching resources if you have them, or perhaps something more personal like photographs of a famous landmark, and consider which licence you might choose for these – add your justification to your blog post. If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post, including the hashtags #h817open and #Activity9, and search the hashtags on Twitter to see what other learners have said.
One of the issues that is often raised for OER projects is that of sustainability. Many OER projects have received funding from bodies such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Producing OER and maintaining large projects with associated staff is not a zero cost activity, and so questions arise about maintaining such projects when the original funding ends. This is what sustainability refers to in OER terms.
In a report for OECD in 2007, David Wiley defined sustainability as ‘an open educational resource project’s ongoing ability to meet its goals’ (p. 5). Wiley proposed three models of sustainability, which he labelled:
You can use the box below to record your notes.
In The openness–creativity cycle in education (Weller, 2012), Martin Weller suggests that another way of thinking about OER is in terms of their granularity. We have seen large-scale projects such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare that can be viewed as institutional approaches to OER. It is these types of project that Wiley focuses on, and which we can classify as ‘Big OER’.
However, another approach to OER is to produce them at the individual level, as a by product of the everyday activity of educators, researchers and teachers. This embraces not only specifically designed teaching material, but also other types of content that could be used in a teaching context; for example, presentations, articles, blog posts, etc. This ‘Little OER’ approach is not in conflict with the larger projects but represents another means of tackling sustainability.
Common Craft (2013) Copyright and Creative Commons [online]. Available at http://www.commoncraft.com/ video/ copyright-and-creative-commons (accessed 23 May 2017).
Creative Commons (n.d.) Free to Learn Guide/Different Types of OER Meet Different Needs [online]. Available at https://wiki.creativecommons.org/ wiki/ Free_to_Learn_Guide/ Different_Types_of_OER_Meet_Different_Needs (accessed 12 September 2017).
Geffrotin, Y. (2007) Creative Commons: Spectrum of Rights [online], slidecast. Available at http://www.slideshare.net/ gya/ creative-commons-spectrum-of-rights (accessed 23 May 2017).
Hales, A. and Lane, A. (undated) Creative Commons and The Open University, internal document, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Moller, E. (2005) The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons - NC License [online]. Available at http://freedomdefined.org/ Licenses/ NC (accessed 23 May 2017).
Weller, M. (2010) ‘Big and little OER’, in: OpenED2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2–4 November 2010, Barcelona, Spain. Also available online at http://oro.open.ac.uk/ 24702/ 2/ 926FFABC.pdf (accessed 12 September 2017).
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 23 May 2017).
Wiley, D. (2007) On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, Paris, OECD. Also available online at http://www.oecd.org/ dataoecd/ 33/ 9/ 38645447.pdf (accessed 23 May 2017).
Wiley, D. (2014) ‘The access compromise and the 5th R’, Iterating toward openness, 5 March [online]. Available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/ 24702/ 2/ 926FFABC.pdf (accessed 12 September 2017).
This week we look at the emergence of massive open online courses and how these differ from OERs.
So far we have looked at open educational resources that can be taken and reused by other educators, or used by learners. Another approach to open education is to run courses that are freely open to all. These have been labelled MOOCs (massive open online courses) and are the focus of this week. The materials presented in this week are largely drawn from Week 10 of the Open University H817 course Openness and innovation in elearning.
This week we move away from OERs and look at a more recent development in open education, namely massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Whereas OERs are concerned with open resources that can be used anytime and adapted, MOOCs are courses that take place over a set time frame, studied with a cohort.
You will look at the background to MOOCs, the learner perspective and also compare different MOOCs.
Such open courses make a virtue of people being connected and networked. MOOCs generally provide only limited formal support from lecturers or tutors, so this peer support becomes more important. So the last activity in this week will look at what is called the personal learning network.
After studying this week, you should understand:
Although the ‘massive’ of the title implies that vast numbers of students are necessary, this isn’t always the case; some MOOCs can be relatively small in scale but many have attracted large numbers of students.
The term ‘MOOC’ was coined by Dave Cormier and arose after his analysis of one of the first MOOCs, the ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’ course (known as CCK08) run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Other early pioneers include David Wiley and Alec Couros, who both ran open versions of campus courses, whereby a course with fee-paying students with access to the course instructor was also made open to non-fee-paying participants who didn’t receive the direct support of a tutor or lecturer.
MOOCs need to be open to all, so tend to adopt a range of delivery mechanisms. The result is often a more distributed course structure than traditional courses, with learners using their own blogs or social media in combination with centrally provided resources.
One of the most innovative MOOCs in its use of technology has been DS106, the digital storytelling course run by Jim Groom. In this course learners keep their own blogs, which are aggregated together into the main course blog. There is also an assignment bank where learners suggest assignments, and a radio station that is open to anyone to use for broadcasts.
The early experimentation led to more mainstream adoption of MOOCs, and in 2011 two Stanford University professors offered an open course in artificial intelligence that attracted over 100,000 students. This was followed in 2012 by Harvard and MIT announcing the formation of edX, a joint initiative to offer open courses. In addition, the Stanford team founded Udacity, a commercial enterprise to offer open courses, and a number of universities started offering courses through Coursera.
This is a lengthy report so if you do not have time to read it all focus on the Executive Summary and the section entitled ‘Gaps in knowledge about MOOCs’.
There is a strong emphasis on learner independence and peer support in MOOCs. Partly this is a result of their scale and that they are free – the providers of the course cannot afford to employ sufficient staff to provide support. This approach has also derived from the values of the early adopters, who wanted to explore pedagogies based around social connections. This has led to some criticism that MOOCs are only suitable for more experienced learners and those who are technologically competent. Arguably, the MOOCs arising from commercial ventures have adopted a more traditional pedagogic approach.
The completion rate for MOOCs is very low, as this article in The Atlantic points out. However, if courses are free and people are trying them out, then a high drop-out rate might be expected, but it is worth considering whether this high attrition rate raises problems for MOOCs as a general approach, or whether we need to use different metrics to assess the ‘success’ of a MOOC.
Compare either DS106 or Rhizomatic Learning with offerings from FutureLearn or Coursera.
(You may not be able to access a course on these sites without signing up – you don’t have to do this but we recommend that you do, in order to gain a sense of the material in a MOOC. Some courses are only available over certain dates, so you may not be able to enrol on the MOOC of your choice.)
If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about them using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity14 and take a look at what other learners have posted.
Use the box below to make any notes.
In MOOCs, and also in other online learning communities, the phrase ‘PLN’ (personal learning networks) is often used to emphasise the role of the network of peers that are important in learning. As we saw with the idea of little OER, use of an individual network not only provides a means of disseminating and finding resources, it also provides a means of discussing ideas and connecting with peers.
The concept of a PLN grew out of earlier talk of a PLE (personal learning environment). The idea of a PLE is that with the advent of so many free, easy-to-use tools that are not formally controlled by an institution, people were constructing a set of tools that helped to structure their informal, everyday learning. This was in comparison with a virtual learning environment (VLE, also sometimes called an LMS or learning management system) for instance, which is very structured and is organised and hosted by the institution.
A PLN emphasises that it is the people in the network that are significant, and places less focus on the actual technologies. For instance, you may have a well-developed network of peers in Twitter that helps inform your professional practice, but if that network migrated to another tool, for example Google Plus, the personal value to you is derived from the people and their expertise, not the specific tool they use.
As with many new terms, PLN is used in a variety of contexts. The Wikipedia entry defines it as:
‘an informal learning network that consists of the people a learner interacts with and derives knowledge from in a personal learning environment. In a PLN, a person makes a connection with another person with the specific intent that some type of learning will occur because of that connection.’ (Wikipedia, 2016)
Use the box below to make notes.
Now you have your definition of PLN, think about the relationship between a PLN and studying on a MOOC. How do the two things interplay? How might developing your PLN aid your learning on a MOOC? How might undertaking a MOOC aid the development of your PLN?
Now:
Bates, A. (2012) ‘Daniel’s Comprehensive Review of MOOC Developments’, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources, 1 October [online], http://www.tonybates.ca/ 2012/ 10/ 01/ daniels-comprehensive-review-of-mooc-developments/ (accessed 23 May 2017).
Daniel, J. (2012) ‘Making sense of MOOCs: musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, no. 18 [online]. Available at http://jime.open.ac.uk/ jime/ article/ view/ 2012-18 (accessed 23 May 2017).
Downes, S. and Siemens, G. (2008) ‘2008: CCK08 The first Massive Open Online Coure (MOOC)’, The MOOC Guide [online]. Available at https://sites.google.com/ site/ themoocguide/ 3-cck08---the-distributed-course (accessed 12 September 2017).
Downes, S. (undated) The MOOC Guide [online], https://sites.google.com/ site/ themoocguide/ home (accessed 23 May 2017).
Kop, R. (2011) ‘The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: learning experiences during a massive open online course’, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol. 12, no. 3 [online], http://www.irrodl.org/ index.php/ irrodl/ article/ view/ 882 (accessed 23 May 2017).
McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G. and Cormier, D. (2010) The MOOC Model for Digital Practice, Charlottetown, University of Prince Edward Island, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Knowledge synthesis grants on the Digital Economy. Also available online at http://davecormier.com/ edblog/ wp-content/ uploads/ MOOC_Final.pdf (accessed 23 May 2017).
Rosen, R. (2012) ‘Overblown-Claims-of-Failure Watch: How Not to Gauge the Success of Online Courses’, The Atlantic, 22 July [online], http://www.theatlantic.com/ technology/ archive/ 2012/ 07/ overblown-claims-of-failure-watch-how-not-to-gauge-the-success-of-online-courses/ 260159/ (accessed 23 May 2017).
Weller, M. (2012a) ‘Amnesimooc’, The Ed Techie, 25 June [online], http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/ no_good_reason/ 2012/ 06/ amnesimooc.html (accessed 23 May 2017).
Weller, M. (2012b) ‘MOOCs Inc’, The Ed Techie, 28 May [online], http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/ no_good_reason/ 2012/ 05/ moocs-inc.html (accessed 23 May 2017).
Wikipedia (2016) Personal learning networks [online], 12 June 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Personal_learning_network (accessed 31 May 2017).
This week you will examine the pedagogy and approaches to teaching used in open education.
In the last activity you were encouraged to critically examine the term ‘personal learning networks’ and whether this was a useful contribution to educational technology or not. This can be seen as representing one of the key questions for those in educational technology, which can be summarised as: ‘How much of this is new and therefore requires new theories or practice, and how much is an extension of existing practice?’
This question is particularly relevant when it comes to the pedagogy adopted in open education approaches. It is this question that we will consider in detail this week, by examining some of the emerging pedagogic theory in open education.
Having looked at two recent developments in open education, namely OERs and MOOCs, this week you will consider what teaching and learning approaches are suitable for open learning.
Do we need new theories of pedagogy, or are these just adaptations of existing ones?
To answer this you will consider the impact of abundant content, and then look at two theories that are sometimes applied to open education, namely connectivism and rhizomatic learning.
For these you will be considering whether they help you in framing approaches to open learning, how you might implement them, and whether they are useful.
After studying this week, you should understand:
In North America, one particular form of OER that has gained interest over recent years is that of the open textbook. These are textbooks that are released with an open licence so they can be modified and adapted by educators or students. The digital format is usually free and the print version low cost. The initial motivation for open textbooks was to address the high costs of textbooks in higher education, where they can account for one quarter of a student’s expenses. This led to a number of projects, such as OpenStax and BCcampus, designed to produce textbooks for specific topics, usually those with high student numbers, for example introductory statistics.
Initial research focused on demonstrating the efficacy of open textbooks compared with traditional, purchased versions. This work demonstrated that student performance was as good, if not better with open textbooks, satisfying the ‘first do no harm’ principle. Further work in this area has also highlighted that there is no correlation between textbook cost and student performance. While it is important to establish the basis for adopting open textbooks and to remove objections on the grounds of quality, most of the open textbooks were being used in much the same manner as existing ones, so while there were savings for students, there was no change in pedagogy.
More recently however, educators have started to explore the open aspect of these books, in that it allows them to engage students as modifiers and co-creators of a textbook. Robin Red Rosa explains how she used an open textbook to enable her students to annotate, add and edit the resource, with the aim of future courses using it.
Connectivism has been described by George Siemens, its original proponent, as a learning theory for the digital age. As such, connectivism is often referenced when people talk about MOOCs or learning with OER. Most learning theories were developed prior to the digital, networked age and have been adapted to fit with it, whereas connectivism was developed specifically in response to the possibilities offered by a global network. The question ‘Does this give us anything new?’ is also relevant for connectivism, as some of the criticism about it has been that connectivism repackages existing ideas.
In the next activity we’d like you to read a paper by George Siemens outlining his theory of connectivism. We’d then like you to read a blog post by Stephen Downes in which he explains his perspective on what connectivism is, and also attempts to address some criticisms of it.
We can view connectivism as a perspective on learning, which places the network at the core of its approach. While other learning theories may be applicable in this context, none are so deliberately focused on the importance of the network. Connectivism is not without its critics, and the aim of this activity is for you to explore whether you feel it offers a useful framework for considering education.
Perhaps the best way to think about connectivism is to implement it, so that is what we’d like you to do in the next activity.
In this activity you will be devising a course that takes a strong connectivism approach, based on some key principles devised by Siemens:
- Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
- Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources.
- Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
- Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.
- Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
- Ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill.
- Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
- Decision making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
Another learning theory closely associated with MOOCs and open education is that of rhizomatic learning. This invokes the biological metaphor of a rhizome, likening learning to the roots of a plant. The roots can spread out laterally and horizontally, consisting of a series of nodes, with no distinct centre, beginning or end, and no defined boundary – the only restrictions to growth are those that exist in the surrounding habitat. Rhizomes resist organisational structure and chronology and instead grow and propagate in a ‘nomadic’ fashion. Seen as a model for the construction of knowledge, rhizomatic processes hint at the interconnectedness of ideas as well as boundless exploration across many fronts from many different starting points.
The rhizome work develops a metaphor proposed by French post-modern theorists Deleuze and Guattari (1987), but Dave Cormier has done most work on this as a theory in modern education. Cormier suggests that rhizomatic learning is a means by which learners develop problem-solving skills for complex domains.
For the educator, supporting rhizomatic learning requires the creation of a context within which the curriculum and knowledge are constructed by contributions made by members of the learning community, and which can be reshaped and reconstructed in a dynamic manner in response to environmental conditions. As Cormier (2010) puts it, ‘the community is the curriculum’. The possibly open syllabus represents the scope of the local habitat the rhizomatic learning process can explore, and provides the context for a community-negotiated curriculum. The learning experience itself may build on social, conversational processes, as well as on a personal knowledge-creation process, through the creation of large, unbounded personal learning networks that may incorporate formal and informal social media.
Some examples of rhizomatic learning are often found in MOOCs, where students are expected to operate in a networked, open manner and offer peer support. Dave Cormier ran an open course on rhizomatic learning itself, which naturally embodies the approach in its pedagogy.
Work with adolescent gamers by Kathy Sanford, Liz Merkel and Leanna Madill (2011) looked at how adolescent gamers’ experiences revealed the complex learning systems in which they contributed, created and participated in their gaming communities. The authors of the paper conclude that there is ‘no fixed course’ in gaming, and that their subjects actively blurred the boundaries of the following traditional identity categories: producer/consumer, teacher/learner and individual/collective.
The advantages of a rhizomatic approach are that, as with connectivism, it is more ‘network native’ as a theory than many existing pedagogic approaches. It promotes peer support, learner responsibility and an appreciation of the power of the network. You may like to consider the differences and similarities between connectivism and rhizomatic learning.
Dave Cormier
Embracing uncertainty was a presentation that I gave in New Delhi a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might be useful for me at least to go back right now and to take a look at what some of the ideas were inside of that, and see if I can pull them together in a ten minute piece to give to you guys, and see if I can’t get some feedback. So, Embracing Uncertainty, Rhizomatic Learning in Formal Education– it’s an attempt at trying to envision how to answer the question, ‘Why do we teach?’ And that presentation was really about pulling together five things that I thought, I think, about how to answer that question, and how rhizomatical learning in some ways can be an answer to that question.
So to me the first place that I always start when I think about learning and why I got involved in education and why it’s important to me are these two guys. And this is Posey on the right and Oscar on the left and they’re my little guys. And for me, thinking about the learning process and watching them learn is always a fascinating counterpoint to the work that I do in higher ed and to the work that I do online, and trying to see how they come through their own world.
And one of the things that I was thinking about was how there are some really primal lessons that we get involved in when we teach little kids and really these are lessons that go across cultures and they go across time. So the question of how we deal with fire is one of those things that I’m dealing with with my kids right now. They are three and six years old, or almost six, and they are walking by the stove, and things are hot and you’re trying to explain to them how that goes and we have this expression that ‘the burnt hand teaches best’.
We’re obviously not out there burning children but it does give this sense that there is an experiential nature to learning. That’s something that’s been around for a long time, this expression has been with us for a while. But the problem with that, and I think one of the ways in which our world is complexified and the ways in which our lessons need to be adapted, is that at one time it really was just fire we were talking about, right. There’s really just the places where fire existed. And then it gets more complicated: we get inside houses and there are other things that are hot, and we get into a world where that uncertainty about heat is there so maybe it’s steam that comes out as the hot thing, so it’s not just the fire it’s the steam. And the burnt hand on the fire or on the stove doesn’t quite warn you, you know, for the steam that might be coming out, or the hot car engine or whatever else is out there.
So the question becomes that the burnt hand teaches best – what’s really being taught there? So is it that fire is hot so don’t touch it? So there’s a behaviourist lesson there, I guess. I guess it’s a lesson you’re probably going to learn because we won’t want to touch it. And maybe the second lesson that’s built under there is when you say, ‘a burnt hand teaches best’, to some degree you’re saying you should do what you’re told. You know, had you done what you were told, this thing would not have happened to you. And I think of that as an undercurrent to that message.
But the third piece to that, and the one that I’m interested in for my kids, and the one that sort of is the foundation that I’m presenting here for rhizomatic learning, is this idea of uncertainty – is things are hot and we should check for them. And so in learning that things could be hot you can check for them in the future. You can prepare yourself for an uncertain world where things may or may not be hot. And you can learn how to approach those things and not touch them or get close to them and feel the heat emanating from them and know that those things should be checked for. So, ideally, what I’m doing is preparing my kids – not by letting them touch all the hot things to know that they’re hot, but to realise that things can be hot and that’s one of the various complexities of the world that they live in.
So the five things I think I think:
The best teaching prepares people for dealing with uncertainty and that’s sort of what I’m presenting as one of the potential core pieces of rhizomatic learning, is that what we are doing is trying to prepare people for uncertainty.
EdTechTalk is really an online community of webcasters, educators who come together, talk about their practice. We’ve been doing this for six or seven years. There have been twelve, thirteen, fourteen hundred radio shows. And it started in 2005, when we all got together on the website and got together on these live shows to start talking about our practice. And if you remember, in 2005 we had YouTube just starting up, WordPress was coming in, and we had a really great blogging platform that we could use and we had all these new things that were coming at us in education and technology that nobody really had an answer for. How were we supposed to use that? What’s the best way of doing this in our classroom? How can I make sure that my kids are safe? And these were questions we had no idea about. There were no books to buy, there was no place to go for reference, so reasonably the only thing we could do was come together and talk about it.
What we found out as we went along, is that just by coming together and talking about it we were learning. There was no set pattern for it, there was no agenda, there was no curriculum set out, but yet when I went to a meeting and started having a conversation about something, the things that came into the conversation, the connections I’d made, came together to give me answers. And I think that, that piece that I did at the community can be the curriculum to learning when there’s no answer, when you’re not sure what the answer is going to be, when complexity gets in the way, when you get to the point where nobody knows what the best way is, maybe there isn’t a best way.
And at that point the community really can be the curriculum. You can all come together to learn together. There doesn’t need to be an outside source of knowledge. So the response I normally get at this point is, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s networked learning. We understand. That’s the sort of thing that lots of people are talking about’. And to some degree I agree. But to me, rhizomatic learning is a particular kind. A rhizome is a particular kind of network and I’d like to sort of drop down into the rhizome metaphor here a little bit and take a look at it.
If you look at these models of networks, and this is just a random page pulled off GoogleImages to try to pull together that idea, you’ll notice that the majority of these networks are very tidy. They are all point to point, all the lines are connected, and it gives you this idea that the connections involved are really clean ones.
There’s one in the top right-hand corner that’s kinda mouched together, but if you zoom in on it you can actually see that it’s all dots and lines. And the same with the bottom left-hand corner; there’s a lot there but it’s dots and lines and all the dots are connected to lines. And there’s a sense of tidiness about that process, that to me somehow implies that the learning process is tidy, that the model is out there, that all we need to do is know what that model is and once we have it we’ll be fine.
The rhizome presents a different kind of model to that. Or at least it focuses in on a special kind of network. So these trees that you’re seeing in front of you, the aspens, they grow. That’s actually one plant, right, and they grow underground. The largest aspen grove is, I think, one hundred and six miles, square miles, and it just kind of spreads out and the shoots go down and they run across, and they shoot up in different locations. There’s no real start to the plant, there’s no real end to it, it’s not a tidy structure, right. You begin wherever you are, you follow the plant around, right, there is no necessary point where all the points are connected to lines. You can cut a whole piece out, move it somewhere else, it will continue to grow, right. It’s not a neat, tidy network.
This is another example of a rhizome: these are bamboo shoots and you can see how/where the rhizomes go out. They’re the sort of medium thick parts. When they come out and spread over, they go in different directions. And you can break off a piece and walk it away and drop it somewhere else, you know, and it will still continue to grow.
So there are some nice qualities about rhizomes that make them interesting to think about as ways in which things are connected. So they can map in any direction from any starting point, so there’s no set beautiful circle or ways in which it’s tidy and neat. They just take off in directions, they fit into an eco system, they adapt to the eco system around them. They grow and spread via experimentation, so they’ll try out this way, maybe they run into a rock, maybe it turns a corner, maybe it hits a wall but it ends up reaching out its tendril and trying to figure out whether it can find a place to grow, whether the nutrients are there, whether that’s a direction that’s gonna work out. And again I think this is a really nice metaphor for the learning process.
And they grow and spread regardless of breakage, so you can snap and twist them. Are there any of you who’ve ever had a nasty rhizome, like a Japanese knotweed or a Bishop’s weed in your garden? You’ll know that the tiniest little bit of it is enough to make it grow, and there’s something really nice about that too in thinking about network models.
I think when we talk about learning, the tidy network model to me gives the sense that when we have a group of learners together and they’re working as a network, if a piece breaks off, that piece that they are connected to has gone away. Whereas if you think of it as something more organic, something that can work when it’s broken or displaced or put in a new location, it gives it a new chance to grow. I like that kind of model as well. So the third thing is the rhizome as a model for learning, for learning for uncertainty.
So, I guess, what are we going to do this kind of learning for? And I’ve heard this probably a half dozen times at presentations, where people will say, ‘I don’t want my doctor learning this way’, ‘I don’t want this kind of community-generated knowledge stuff. There are things that are true and things that aren’t true, and we should be out there learning those things.’
I mean, I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t things we should learn, things that we should memorise, things that are not just about connecting to a community, although a community would be a good place to find out what those things are. But there are some basic ideas, whether they be language or whether they be best practices that underwrite any kind of context.
So this is a model: this is the Cynefin Framework. It’s a simplified version of that model by Dave Snowden, and what it talks about is how people make decisions in management. So we talk about simple, complicated, complex and chaotic decision making. We think about this in the context of learning. A simple piece would be something you can memorise; a simple decision where we can all agree on what’s true and what’s not true. So we can all agree that this thing over here is called a mouse. We can all agree that this is a computer, and that these are words and languages that are useful for us, that we all kind of agree on. And there are ways in which we have sort of automated responses to things that make our lives easier. So we point at things and we agree they are certain things, and that’s a good thing. And I think in any context, in any sort of grouping of learning, it’s important to get those simple things agreed upon. And I think anybody who is moving to a new field for the first time has to gather some of that information. Whether they need to gather it first is a different conversation, but they certainly do need it.
The second zone in the top right-hand corner, ‘Complicated’, is more of a – it’s good practice. So if maybe I’ve hurt my shoulder and we look back to our doctor example, if I’ve hurt my shoulder, well I could have it sewn back together or I could do physio. And they’re both reasonablly good practices and there are reasons to do one or the other. If you look really close at it and you bring an expert in, that person is going to be able to give you an evaluation. And odds are, there’s one or two or three or four different ways to do it, and those things are things that can be sorted out and decided between you. Not necessarily there’s one best answer, but like I’ve broken my leg, I need to put a caste on it but you know there’s a couple of options and choosing between them is something that we can do.
The Complex domain is really the one where the uncertainty lives. You know it’s the place where we don’t know what the answer is, we have to do as Dave describes: probe, sense and respond. You need to try something, check it out, see if this thing is gonna work out. And if it starts to be a little better, you do more of it. If it starts to do less, you do less of it.
So imagine somebody with chronic headache pain, for instance. You don’t necessarily know what the cause is. You don’t necessarily know what’s gonna help. You might try a little bit of medication; you might try a little bit of physio; you might try something else and try bits and pieces, see what works and do a little bit more of that if that goes through.
Those kinds of things are far more about experience, about trial and error and about trying to keep a general sense of what the possibilities are. Now that chaotic domain down there is more about acting right away and I think that there are different kinds of learning where you simply need a simple piece of information, you need it right now, you need to do something. That’s a different phase again.
So, when we look at the literature, when we look at the way some people are starting to talk about it. To take a medical example, ‘successful health services in the 21st century must aim not merely to change for change, improvement and response, but for changeability, improvability and responsiveness’. And again I argue that to have that inside a system we can’t be teaching people what’s right and what’s wrong, we need to be preparing them for uncertainty. We need them to be reaching out as part of that community and think of their learning and their knowledge as part of that community growth and seeing it change along with everyone else around them.
And this is one from management. This comes from Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge, written by Gary Wong. ‘When you finally come to grips you can’t solve today’s problems using present methods, you take the lead to venture to the Complex Domain’. You initiate a search, rally followers and try out these different things to see if you can change the paradigm. And again, it’s that same idea that at some point you get to the place where uncertainty is what you’re confronting, and I think of that as the important part of learning. It’s the place where you need to be prepared to be able to make those kinds of decisions. And I think in an education system that has definitive answers, that offers up a scenario in which somebody can get something right rather than make decisions between a variety of options, is one that does not prepare people for those kinds of uncertainties. So that in rhizomatic learning, that sort of exploratory probe/sense/respond kind of learning, where you’re in the complex domain, where answers aren’t clear, is what I’m talking about rhizomatic learning being best for.
So, I guess the final question is, ‘How do you do this on purpose?’
So how do you actually go about structuring an environment where everybody has the ability to probe and sense and respond, and the learners are able to react to their own environment and they are able to follow their own learning paths and still be connected as a community? And you don’t have a pre-established curriculum, and that’s something that gets built out over the course, how do you actually do that in any kind of practical sense?
So with my children (this is a picture of Oscar again) I’m trying to set up scenarios where, you know, it’s not a right and wrong answer, where you can actually grow and develop. And this is something I catch myself doing all the time, right, you know.
My boy is almost six, and I try to set up these, or engage with these really interesting learning experiences with him and I find myself going, ‘What’s the answer to that Oscar? What’s three times three?’ And I set up environments where the right answer is the thing that he needs to sing-song back to me, and again he starts to learn the world is a place where answers are right or wrong. And if he gets them right he gets rewarded; if he’s wrong they’re not rewarded. Where, in my experience, the most valuable things in the world are places where you need to make decisions between things that aren’t right and wrong, you know, and I find myself constantly struggling with that. I think for me the lesson for rhizomatic learning, which I’m constantly trying to relearn, is to try to make those conversations more complex, to offer complexity to him and let him make his own sort of explorations inside that uncertainty.
This ED366 is the course that I teach at the University of Prince Edward Island, Educational Technology and the Adult Learner. If you’re interested, if you do a search for that online you’ll see the syllabus that I have set up for it. Trying to set it up for that course is a challenge because I get students from all over. Some of them are teachers, some of them are trainers, some of them are faculty, some of them are people interested in teaching. So they come from all different walks of life, and we start without a curriculum and really they have to build their own, they have to build their own learning network plan. And the goal for that plan, in that course, is that they’re planning for themselves six months away. So how can you set up a textbook for you so that six months from now, when you’re trying to do something that has to do with technology, or has to do with trying to put together or understand one of these new concepts, that you’ll have something to work from, so that you’ve built it up yourself and it fits for your context?
It’s particularly useful for this group because they come from such different levels of literacy, both digital literacies and all kinds of different stuff, so it ends up being a real challenge. And for those of you who are familiar with the MOOCs, this structure for MOOCs again is designed to allow for that kind of flexibility. So this is from Five Steps to Succeed in a MOOC, which you can see is a four-minute video, that you can see if you search on YouTube: Orient, Declare, Network, Cluster and Focus.
So go out – find yourself a place inside one of these MOOCs, inside one of these open courses. Declare yourself so people know you’re there. Start to find people to work with, find groups, like a community that can slowly start to form. And then focus on your own work so that that community can become your curriculum and then you’re driving yourself towards the goals that you’ve set for yourself.
So, that sense of responsibility, that point where you are setting your own step, where I put Oscar, my son, in the place where he has to make decisions for himself, it’s not just about me parroting the right or wrong solution to him. My students are actually focused on their own learning, and their own goals and where the individual student in a MOOC is looking towards their own focus, as part of that community but the thing they are trying to get done, those are all about putting the responsibility for learning back on top of the student, right, and again it’s not only in their own learning but also when we’re working with communities, it’s the learning of those people around you.
So, as this was a presentation in India the question there is always, ‘How does this scale?’ Maybe you can do it with your son over there, maybe you can do it with those twenty people in your classroom, but what do we do when the numbers get big? What do you do when you bureaucratise that across a country? There’s three million teachers in the United States, how do you do this stuff across the way?
Well, for me, we need to stop measuring. People are always saying that they need to measure learning. And in this kind of scenario, in this kind of environment it’s extraordinarily difficult to do what people call ‘measured learning’. So if everybody’s doing something different how do I know what one person has learned? How do I know how this other person is doing? How can I guarantee that that classroom or that school is actually doing something because they need to measure learning?
And my argument to that is always the same: the fact that you need to measure learning doesn’t mean that it’s possible. I understand that people think they need to measure but I don’t think it’s possible to measure learning. And when I said this in the presentation, somebody said, ‘Well, you can sort of check to see if some of the effects of learning have happened.’ So, you know, if somebody’s learning to drive a car you can tell that they’re driving it. And I was, well – kind of.
You can measure around learning but trying to measure whether or not learning is happening, to me is a red herring, and I think we should stop trying to measure learning altogether, you know. If we’re trying to measure that someone actually has something in their head, we’re getting people to cram, right? So that right before the test they try to jam everything in, and it’s gone three days later. In my mind, that’s like cheating. Like, yes, you were able to produce something in the test but you haven’t actually learned it. You’ve remembered it for a couple of days and now it’s gone, so you never made it part of who you are. You never brought it into your context, you never connected it to those other things you know. You just were able to reproduce it based on the testing structure that I set up for you and that to me is not learning. It does prove that you were able to reproduce it but I don’t think that is learning.
So to me we need to stop that idea of measuring learning and start measuring things like effort and engagement and connection, and people’s ability to talk about the ways in which the things they have connect to the other pieces that they have. And we can let the robots count the rest of those pieces, you know. How many contacts they’ve made and whether or not they’ve researched stuff. There’s a lot of things we can count in terms of clicks but I think we also need to trust those teachers to look at people and say, you know, that person is getting it, and I can understand that, you know. The teachers that I know can answer that question and I think trusting the teacher is another really big part of this. So, if we can make the community the curriculum, membership in that community becomes how we scale them.
Cheers.
Write a brief blog post discussing your thoughts about rhizomatic learning and if you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity20.
Cormier, D. (2010) ‘Community as curriculm and open learning’, Dave’s Educational Blog, 17 Jun [online]. Available at http://davecormier.com/ edblog/ 2010/ 06/ 17/ community-as-curriculum-and-open-learning/ (accessed 24 May 2017).
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus (trans. B. Massumi), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Downes, S. (2007) ‘What connectivism is’, Half an Hour, 3 February [online]. Available at http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/ 2007/ 02/ what-connectivism-is.html (accessed 24 May 2017).
Embracing Uncertainty – Rhizomatic Learning in Formal Education (2012) YouTube video, added by Dave Cormier [online]. Available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VJIWyiLyBpQ (accessed 24 May 2017).
Sanford, K., Merkel, L., Madill, L. (2011) ‘“There’s no fixed course”: rhizomatic learning communities in adolescent videogaming’, Loading…, vol. 5, no. 8, pp. 50–70. Also available online at http://journals.sfu.ca/ loading/ index.php/ loading/ article/ viewFile/ 93/ 106 (accessed 14 November 2012).
Siemens, S. (2005) ‘Connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age’, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, vol. 2, no. 1 [online]. Available at http://www.itdl.org/ Journal/ Jan_05/ article01.htm (accessed 24 May 2017).
Weller, M. (2011) ‘A pedagogy of abundance’, Spanish Journal of Pedagogy, vol. 249, pp. 223–36. Also available online at http://oro.open.ac.uk/ 28774/ (accessed 24 May 2017).
This week you will explore the types of technology used in open education, and why they have been adopted.
The focus of this week is to really consider what it means to operate in an open context as an educator and a learner.
Firstly you will look at the issue of technological determinism and the significance of technology and pedagogy. This is a very large, contentious topic which we only begin to address here, but in areas such as open education, where technology is influencing practice, it is important to consider the interplay between the two.
There are then two activities which relate to this. The first is to consider what technologies are significant for open education. Your focus here should be on the open part of education in particular, and not just education in general.
The next activity is to think of the learner perspective and consider what skills, or literacies, are important for an open learner. Again the emphasis is on someone operating in this open context, rather than all learners.
After studying this week, you should understand:
There is often a tension between the significance of technology and pedagogy in educational technology. For some, the technology is not significant and their focus is on pedagogy. Others prefer to emphasise the possibilities that technology offers us and wait for theory to catch up. It is probably more useful to think of the two as being involved in an iterative dialogue. Technology opens up new possibilities and is used in ways that its designers never intended, which in turn drives theoretic development which feeds back into technology development, and so on.
This view of technology, and particularly how it relates to education, is addressed by Martin Weller (2011) in Chapter 1 of The Digital Scholar, reproduced below.
This talk of technology ‘allowing’, ‘facilitating’, ‘affording’ or ‘suggesting’ methods of working or approaches raises the issue of technological determinism. This subject arises in almost every discussion around technology and education, so it is worth addressing it early. Technology-related viewpoints tend to be dystopian or utopian in nature. Examples of such views are not only to be found in science fiction. Educational technology literature over the past twenty years shows the promises and fears that have been associated with a variety of technologies, including computers, CD-ROM, computer-assisted learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and videodisc. The Internet and social media are just the latest in this list.
What both the positive and negative viewpoints have in common is that they see the technology itself as shaping human behaviour, so-called technological determinism, a phrase first coined by American sociologist Thorstein Veblen. The technological deterministic viewpoint is that technology is an autonomous system that affects all other areas of society. Thus human behaviour is, to a greater or lesser extent, shaped by technology. This seems to remove human will, or ingenuity, from the social process, and is thus usually rejected as excessively mechanistic. However, there seems to be such an anxiety about being labelled a ‘technological determinist’ that many people in education seek to deny the significance of technology in any discussion. ‘Technology isn’t important’, ‘pedagogy comes first’, ‘we should be talking about learning, not the technology’ are all common refrains in conferences and workshops. While there is undoubtedly some truth in these, the suggestion that technology isn’t playing a significant role in how people are communicating, working, constructing knowledge and socialising is to ignore a major influencing factor in a complex equation.
As this book seeks to explore the ways in which approaches founded in new technologies can influence scholarly practice, the charge of technological determinism may well be raised. It is not my contention that the presence of the technology will automatically lead to certain changes. Indeed, many of the interesting examples of digital scholarship are entirely unpredicted, what is often termed ‘emergent use’, which arises from a community taking a system and using it for purposes the creators never envisaged. This is particularly a feature of the kind of fast, cheap and out-of-control technologies that constitute much of the social media/Web 2.0 collective. For instance, it has been well recorded that Flickr developed from a company which was aiming to manufacture an online game, and the photo-sharing application was just a simple tool to aid the game. As founder Caterina Fake commented, ‘Had we sat down and said, “Let’s start a photo application”, we would have failed. We would have done all this research and done all the wrong things’ (Graham 2006). Similarly, the proliferation of applications that have been built to interact with Twitter and Facebook were not predicted by the founders of those companies, nor the way in which people have used them.
A deterministic perspective would underestimate the role of people and the context in which the technology is used. Kling, McKim and King (2003) propose a ‘sociotechnical interaction network’, which emphasises the interaction between people, institutions and technologies. They analysed ‘e-scholarly communication forums’ to reveal the relationship between participants, resource flows, business models and other individuals and groups who do not participate in the network directly. Their work builds on what has been termed ‘social construction of technology’ (or SCOT), which is seen as a direct response to technological determinism (Pinch and Bijker 1984). In this perspective technology development is seen as the result of competition and negotiation between different groups or actors, rather than a finished artefact that is released (or inflicted) upon a rather submissive society.
SCOT is not without its critics, for example, Clayton (2002), and the detailed debate around the interplay between actors and technology is beyond the scope of this book. What the work of Pinch and Bijker and Kling et al. highlights is that it is possible to examine technology, technological influence and practice without falling into the trap of technology determinism. In this book it is the complex co-construction of technology and associated practice that is intended, with an iterative dialogue between the technology and the practices that it can be used for. Inevitably though, for the sake of simplicity and to avoid repetition, this complexity may be somewhat glossed over, and I will refer to a technology or an approach as if there is a direct line between them. For this I ask the reader’s indulgence and request that it should not be taken to be demonstrative of a technological deterministic mindset, while at the same time recognising the significance of technology in the overall process.
This tension between the role of technology and pedagogy is particularly acute in open education. Many of the approaches we have looked at would simply not have been possible without internet technology. But in turn, as we have seen with MOOCs, educators need to devise practices that will enable these possibilities to be realised. We now also need to develop concepts and theories to interpret what is happening, which is itself shaping the next phase of technology development to support MOOCs.
The focus of this week then is on the types of technology that support open education, as an understanding of these is important in appreciating the direction and possibilities in the field.
When you have completed your blog post, if you are content to share your thoughts in this way, Tweet about it using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity21.
What technologies are important in open education (rather than just online education)? This will depend on what you want to achieve, but we would suggest a few have been particularly significant in shaping the type of practice that has arisen.
Blogs were a relatively early technology adopted by a few practitioners in education. The informal nature of the communication that takes place in blogs, and the removal of the filter for publishing, meant they appealed to some educators. Ideas could be shared easily and, because blogs tend to link to each other and users comment on each other’s blogs, they soon gave rise to a community of ‘edubloggers’.
This type of exchange seemed more personal and intimate than the formal publication routes, and the publication route more immediate. This made blogs a useful medium for experimenting, sharing ideas and connecting with a global network of peers.
Vanessa Dennen (2009) studied a number of academic bloggers, and argues that they use blogs to construct an online identity, which forms a significant part of their overall academic identity. She highlights six tools used in constructing an identity on a blog:
The significance of hyperlinking was that it allowed easy connections to be made between content. The theory of connectivism is in many ways premised on the simple method of making links between one web document and another, using HTML.
This seems fairly obvious but almost as significant was the embed code, which allowed people to easily embed content from one site in another. For example, rather than linking to a YouTube video you could embed it into your own blog post by copying the embed code provided for every YouTube video.
The embed code was an essential element in the rise of what became known as ‘web 2.0’. This saw people creating content easily and also having a simple means by which to share and spread that content. There was thus a virtuous circle between the rise of blogs (and later social networks) where many people were now writing online regularly, and their search for content to link to and write about. Being able to embed content in your own site was invaluable in maintaining a blog, or later a MySpace or Facebook page, because it meant you didn’t have to send the reader to another site to view the content; they could view it in situ.
For open education this was significant as it allowed the easy creation of learning content that drew on different resources; for example, a Slideshare presentation, a document in Scribd and a YouTube video. It also created a motivation to create and share content, since it could spread in a viral fashion. This encouraged academics to adopt many of the web 2.0 tools as a means of dissemination.
The rise in popularity of social networks, most notably Twitter and Facebook, really became significant from around 2008. These can be seen as an effective means of combining the preceding elements, as they encourage easy sharing, connections and combinations of media. The use of social networks in education is varied, from individual educators having popular Twitter accounts, to course-specific feeds on Google Plus, to Facebook pages for universities or subject areas.
You will undoubtedly have your own opinion regarding social networks and their use in education. For open education they have been significant for a number of reasons:
Virtual learning environments (VLEs) or learning management systems, such as Moodle and Blackboard, provide many of the tools required for elearning in one system. They have grown in use since the early 2000s and now almost all universities have an institutional VLE.
They may seem a somewhat surprising technology to select in terms of open education, since much of the open education movement has been conducted in contrast to institutional VLEs. Many of those in the open education movement prefer open technologies such as blogs, and see VLEs as a closed environment that stifles innovation (see for example The VLE is dead debate at the ALT-C Conference in 2009).
However, VLEs have been significant in open education for two main reasons. The first is that they created the baseline competence for elearning for both educators and learners. It would be difficult for any open education to flourish if users did not have a common experience to build upon. Much of what happens in open education may be defined in terms of contrast with this experience, or building upon it: having a base set of knowledge around using forums and content has meant that not every enterprise in open education has had to explain the basics. VLEs provided many educators with their first exposure to elearning, and from this they have gone on to explore other approaches.
In addition to this core set of competencies, VLEs have also provided a useful platform for hosting open education projects. In particular, the open source VLE Moodle has been widely used. The Open University’s OpenLearn project is delivered via Moodle for instance, and many of the early MOOCs used Moodle as their platform for asynchronous discussion and content hosting.
We’ve suggested some technologies that have been significant in the development of open education. You may, or may not, agree with the list produced, and probably have your own suggestions for other technologies to include on the list. In the next activity you will be proposing one such additional technology.
What you include as a technology can be quite broad: for instance, it can be a general category (such as social networks), a specific service or a particular standard.
If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity22.
Marc Prensky (2001) coined the term ‘digital natives’, arguing that the younger generation is immersed in technology when entering education; they have a different understanding and relationship with technology than the ‘digital immigrants’ who have to learn it. This was an appealing idea and gained much coverage. However, its claims did not withstand scrutiny, for example Bennett, Maton and Kervin (2008) found as much difference in technology use of the digital natives as there was between them and the digital immigrants, and that the technology skills of the digital natives were often limited.
David White has rephrased the idea more successfully as ‘digital residents’ and ‘visitors’. This describes a range of online behaviours and the same person can operate in resident or visitor mode for different tasks. White and Le Cornu (2011) define them as:
Visitors understand the web as akin to an untidy garden tool shed. They have defined a goal or task and go into the shed to select an appropriate tool which they use to attain their goal. Task over, the tool is returned to the shed.
Residents, on the other hand, see the web as a place, perhaps like a park or a building, in which there are clusters of friends and colleagues whom they can approach and with whom they can share information about their life and work. A proportion of their lives is actually lived out online.
Read the introduction to Visitors and residents or watch this introductory video from Dave White.
The visitors and residents approach has been used to map individuals’ own engagement with different technologies using a grid. The horizontal axis represents a continuum from visitor use to resident use. The vertical axis can vary, but one commonly used labelling is personal to institutional. Watch Dave White’s explanation of a visitors and residents mapping exercise.
Create a visitors and residents map for yourself, considering the technologies you use (e.g. email, VLE, blog, Facebook, Skype, Google), using the personal/institutional axis as well as the visitors/resident one. There is not a definitive list of technologies; you should include any technologies you use regularly (for example, if you are a keen user of Flickr, add that). You can use a tool such as Word or PowerPoint to create the grid, or a drawing package if you have one.
Blog your map and describe the key points in brief. If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity23.
Did you find this a useful way of considering technologies and how you engage with them? Were your maps similar to other people’s? Were there difficulties in mapping some technologies?
There has been much talk of ‘digital literacies’, i.e. skills and competencies required to operate effectively in the digital, connected environment. These can be couched in terms of skills for learners, teachers or researchers. For example, Jenkins et al. (2009) suggest 11 ‘new skills’ for learners, arguing that, ‘Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape.’
The skills they list are:
The next activity asks you to read a JISC report from Helen Beetham, which provides a useful review of work in the digital literacies area.
Digital literacies subsume many other types of literacy and skills, such as information literacies. It is possible to propose that a set of ‘open education literacies’ may exist also. At the ALT-C Conference in 2009 Terry Anderson gave a presentation on open scholarship in which some of the characteristics of an ‘open scholar’ were proposed. In the next activity you are going to suggest a set of open learner literacies.
These should be based on what you have experienced and researched so far in this course. They should cover the types of skill you feel are important for an individual to learn successfully in an open learning context (whether that is using OER, in a MOOC or through informal, lifelong learning).
The level of detail is at your discretion: you may choose to operate at the abstract level, such as Jenkins’s list, or at a more detailed task level if you prefer.
The number of skills is up to you, although they should cover most of what you feel is important in being an effective open learner. Each literacy should be accompanied by some explanation and justification.
You can use the box below to start making your list.
If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity25.
ALT-C Conference (2009) ‘The VLE is dead’, 9 September, video, added by e-Learning Stuff [online]. Available at http://elearningstuff.net/ 2009/ 09/ 09/ the-vle-is-dead-the-movie/ (accessed 24 May 2017).
Anderson, T. (2009) ALT-C Keynote [online]. Available at http://www.slideshare.net/ terrya/ terry-anderson-alt-c-final (accessed 24 May 2017).
Beetham, H. (2010) Review and Scoping Study for a Cross-JISC Learning and Digital Literacies Programme: Sept 2010, JISC [online]. Available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ media/ documents/ programmes/ elearning/ DigitalLiteraciesReview.pdf (accessed 24 May 2017).
Clayton, N. (2002) ‘SCOT’, Technology and Culture, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 351–60.
Dennen, V. P. (2009) ‘Constructing academic alter-egos: identity issues in a blog-based community’, Identity in the Information Society, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 23–38. Available at https://link.springer.com/ article/ 10.1007/ s12394-009-0020-8 (accessed 12 September 2017).
Graham, J. (2006) ‘Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website’, USA Today, 27 February [online]. Available at http://www.usatoday.com/ tech/ products/ 2006-02-27-flickr_x.htm (accessed 24 May 2017).
Ingram, M. (2011) ‘Sure, RSS is dead - just like the web is dead’, GigaOM, 4 January [online]. Available at http://gigaom.com/ 2011/ 01/ 04/ sure-rss-is-dead-just-like-the-web-is-dead/ (accessed 24 May 2017).
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. and Weigel, M. (2009) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Chicago, IL, The MacArthur Foundation. Also available online at https://www.macfound.org/ media/ article_pdfs/ JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF (accessed 15 November 2012).
Kling, R., McKim, G. and King, A. (2003) ‘A bit more to IT’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 46–67.
Pinch, T.J. and Bijker, W.E. (1984) ‘The social construction of facts and artefacts’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 14, pp. 399–441.
Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Academic Practice, London, Bloomsbury Academic. Also available online at http://oro.open.ac.uk/ 29664/ (accessed 15 November 2012).
White, D. S. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) ‘Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement’ [online]. Available at http://daveowhite.com/ vandr/ (accessed 12 September 2012).
White, D. (2013) ‘Just the mapping’ [online]. Available at https://youtu.be/ MSK1Iw1XtwQ (accessed 12 September 2012).
White, D. (2014) ‘Visitors and residents’ [online]. Available at https://youtu.be/ sPOG3iThmRI (accessed 12 September 2012).
You are now at the end of the Open Education open course. To pull it together and help you check your understanding of what you’ve learned, we suggest that open learners do the following activity.
In this concluding week there are two activities to enable you to reflect on the course, and consider aspects of open education.
In this activity you will create a video and share it via your blog, using YouTube, Vimeo or other video-sharing sites. If you prefer not to create a video then you can use audio or another tool or medium of your choice, but avoid just plain text in this instance if possible.
In your video reflect on what you have learned in this course, covering both of the following elements:
Post your video to your blog. If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity26.
Create an extended text blog post (in text, video, or audio form as you prefer) about your experience of studying this open course (and previous open courses you may have studied) versus your prior experiences of traditional, formal education. Try to gather your reflections over at least two separate study sessions, so that you have time to register your initial reactions, and then post your subsequent responses to your initial reactions and how your thinking may have changed after a little more time.
Post your reflection to your blog.
If you are content to use Twitter to share your thoughts, Tweet about your blog post using the hashtags #h817open and #Activity27.
This is the end of the open course. We hope you have found both the content and the experience useful.
Openness in education is undergoing a period of rapid change, with different forms of openness being proposed in all areas of higher education. Sometimes this doesn’t turn out the way the initial proponents of openness hoped that it would, and we are seeing many discussions arising around what constitutes openness.
The intention of this open course has been to provide you with sufficient experience and knowledge to engage in these debates and discussions as the field progresses.
If you wish to explore Open Education further, take a look at The Open University’s Master’s in Online and Distance Education. Another recommended free course related to education, openness and technology is The digital scholar.
This course was written by Martin Weller and updated by Simon Ball and Tim Coughlan.
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.
The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:
Adapted by Martin Weller from Wikiversity logo for Open Educational Resources.
‘Who the hell is Brian Lamb?’ Brian Lamb speaking at WCET Catalyst Camp October 23, 2009. © Brian Lamb
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