Transcript

PRESENTER:

As Jonathan’s already said, there are many implications for Open Education Resources in sort of mediating these teaching and learning opportunities. One is granularity with the size. Well, at The Open University, we use the term big OER and little OER. And to some degree he was talking about big OER being institutional projects, and little OER things that an individual might be doing.

But the same applies to, is it a whole course? That’s a hundred hours’ worth of study. That’s like a textbook. Wow, that’s big. How do I take and modify? It could be good for a learner to take it like that, but as a teacher, you might say, well how do I pull apart and use something that big? As opposed to going right down to yes, I’m using the animations.

I’ll just create the animation. Oh, I don’t have to do that. That’s very neat. I can just take that two-minute animation, I can take that, drop that into my presentation, to my education resource. It’s that great difference between there. And of course, in terms of thinking about educational resources in the roundabout educational practices in general, and for any things ...

Well, I like to think about it in terms of judging that appropriate mix between pedagogic support, which is built into the content. You might provide the scaffolding, the structure, within the content to help a learner be a self learner and work with it, and not require too much input from you as a teacher, or a supporter, or whatever. There’s also thinking about what’s the personal support.

What is that learner bringing to the equation? The peer support – are they doing it on their own? Will they have that peer interaction so they can also talk to fellow learners at the same time? And of course the professional support. It’s what we do. We provide the professional support. And of course with an Open Education Resource on a website, out there, you’re only got the first one.

Think about it from the learner’s point of view. What assumptions do you make about what learners can cope with? Do you change what you put out there because you think, oh, there’s going to be lots of people looking at this who haven’t got A-levels. But it could be anybody looking at it.

Does it need something up front to help explain it, or do you just put it out there as it would be, as you’d use it in the classroom? Does it make a difference? That’s something I never really thought about, but that’s an issue. What are you trying to present if you’re putting Open Education Resources out there? Are you mainly aiming it at the education or the teacher audience?

And are you also thinking, this is out there to a student, a learner audience? So what things do you have to put in to that? Those types of things about personal support and peer support. I mean, on Open Learn, they use Moodle as the platform, meaning we could have forums, every free course, a little sample from every module out there. There’s plenty have forums around it.

We’ve enabled, made it possible for people to communicate with each other. It’s another issue as to whether they did much or not, but in other words do you also put that within what you do, or do you just say, oh, we just stick our resources into Jorum, that’s just the repository. It’s just a warehouse for stuff. We just put it in there and have people access it.

Because it’s in Jorum it’s mostly going to be teaches getting it, or are we going to have a nice, glossy institutional repository, which is a public face of our institution? In which case, we’re to do. So it’s something when you start thinking about it, it’s not quite so simple as necessarily you can just take what you do in the classroom and put it out there.

Or you can take something you’re doing, and try to adapt it or modify it and create it, but you’ve also got to think beyond is this something just you’re doing in a little corner for your own students? Is it a departmental, is it a faculty issue? Is it a whole institution issue? We all talked about that to a certain extent.

And of course behind all that is all these social computing technologies, these Facebooks and things. What do we do about that? It’s an issue of in general a face for our students as we do more and more e-learning. We move more away from just purely face to face to more blended, more e-learning. What do we do and not do? How do we take account of that? And there are all those different aspects.

But behind it all, we have to remember, is it about greater sharing of practice amongst teachers and learners? In principle, we can be moving from individual to collective practices. Remember, and when you’ve got stuff out there, it’s not just about your students. It’s about students at other universities.

It might be about school students. At MIT, in OpenCourseWare, they found in all their surveys that not only do their own students look at MIT OpenCourseWare to decide which classes they’re going to study and to review, and go back over things of classes they had been to. They’ve also found that lots of students at other universities do the same.

Oh, you know, I’ve got this class on quantum mechanics. Oh, we’re just going to see what the MIT stuff on quantum mechanics is like. They’re starting to make those comparisons. Or they’re saying, I didn’t really understand what he was saying in that class. I’m going to go and look at somebody else’s stuff, see if I can understand it better.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:

There’s all sort of issues to do with teaching style, as well. I mean, I was at a committee meeting the other week, and the students were saying that they were looking at somebody’s lecture materials from a third-year undergraduate degree to understand what they were doing at the postgraduate level, because their lecturer wasn’t so good at the postgraduate level.

Or they perceived it. And saying that some of the material was saying conflicting things, and they got confused in that. And that’s just within one institution of both degrees were at the same place.

PRESENTER:

Of course. That is one of the issues. This is one of the consequences of being open, and having much more material out there, is that some of those clashes might not have been as apparent before. They were always there. They were always there in the sense you’ll get one lecturer say X in this class, and somebody will say Y about the same subject.

Interestingly, that was happening at MIT. Now I know from talking to people at MIT that what they found was, as they got more and more of their courses online, is that some of the professors were starting to look at what the other professors were teaching, and they were suddenly realising, god, I see you’re teaching about this sort of mathematics, you’re teaching it that way, and I’m teaching it this way.

No wonder they get confused about it. Because we’re going about it in totally different ways. Both valid ways, but it’s just that they weren’t recognising those students were having to cope with having this varying stuff. So they can then start talking together, and start saying can we have better articulation?

But even if there are these different ways of approaching it, you make this explicit rather than just leaving students floundering, and saying, oh, god, he said that and he said that. Who’s right?

But equally, what I’m saying is where stuff is out there, and there is more and more stuff out there, you’ll find your students will increasingly be looking to see, oh, can I find anything on the MIT, on the Harvard website, on the Yale, on the Oxford? Can I find something on this? I didn’t understand this, can I find ...

More so than perhaps going to a textbook now, they want to go and say, oh, a renowned professor from University X, surely he’s going to tell me how this subject should be thought about. And so that’s just one of those other things which needs to be taken into account. Keep pressing twice. And just coming back, yes.

Communities. It’s about open communities as much as open content, because it is about sharing. If Open Education Resources is about anything, it is about that sharing culture in many ways between teachers and learners, teachers and teachers, learners and learners.

And sharing between institutions, which I’ll come on to. It’s the whole philosophy behind it is about sharing. Sharing endeavour, sharing effort, sharing the pain in some ways.