Tag Archives: open

Jisc RSC Scotland Open Education Joint Forum

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(Cross posted from Open Scotland)

Earlier this week I was invited by Jisc RSC Scotland to attend their Open Education Joint Forum which took place at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh.  It was a very well attended event that featured a packed programme of thought provoking and  engaging presentations that highlighted a range of really inspiring open education developments.   I’ve put together a storify of the event’s lively twitter back channel here and links to all the presentations are available from Jisc RSC Scotland here.

Open Scotland

Lorna M Campbell, Cetis and Joe Wilson, SQA

I kicked of the event with a short overview of the Open Scotland before passing over to Joe who challenged the audience to share their educational resources, before talking about about the benefits of openness and calling for changing mindsets around Open Education.  Joe also reminded us that there is a real strength in Scottish education, we have dedicated and talented teaching staff and by opening up education they can shine for learning.

Joe Wilson, SQA

Joe Wilson, SQA

Massive Open Online Courses: Open education  of course?

Martin Hawksey, ALT

Martin Hawksey, my former Cetis colleague, now with ALT, gave an inspiring presentation that placed MOOCs in the historical context of technology innovation and asked if we are now in danger of promoting a dogmatic approach to programming and technology innovation. Martin revisited Doug Englebart’s “Mother of All Demos” which, among many other innovations, demonstrated screen sharing and videoconferencing as far back as 1968.  In education we have a tendency to get stuck in particular ways of doing things, both students and teachers have specific expectations and can be very resistant to change.

Martin Hawksey, ALT

Martin Hawksey, ALT

Martin highlighted some of the tools, services, platforms and applications that can be employed to deliver MOOCs.  He also reminded us that every letter of MOOC is negotiable and suggested that the issue of MOOC completion rates is irrelevant.  Open or closed is not a binary thing, but there are huge benefits to moving towards more openness.  Martin concluded by telling is all that “openness is about feeling warm inside” and that we should all “ride the waves of innovation to a more open, more relevant style of education’.  Martin has written a an excellent blog post about his presentation which you can read here: Taking on the dogmatic approach to education with a bit of ‘reclaim open digital connectedness’.

Re:Source OER Repository

Garry Cameron, Scotland’s Colleges, Jackie Graham and Sarah Currier, Mimas

Gerry spoke about the need to change hearts and minds to use and develop open educational resources and called for a clear statement and a decisive stance on open educational resources from Scottish Government. Scotland’s Colleges committed to releasing resources under Creative Commons licences.

Gerry Cameron, Scotland's Colleges

Gerry Cameron, Scotland’s Colleges

Re:Source is an OER repository for Scotland’s colleges. The open platform is here and could be used by many across the Scottish education sector but policy drivers needed.  Jisc RSc Scotland is collaborating with Scotland’s Colleges to work ona  way forward. Librarians also have a crucial role to play in developing open repositories within Scotland’s colleges.  Jackie Graham went on to demonstrate the Re:Source repository before handing over to Sarah Currier who spoke about the Jorum repository which powers Re:Source.

Jackie Graham, Re:Source

Jackie Graham, Re:Source

Blackboard xpLor

Julie Usher, Blackboard

Julie Usher, Blackboard

Julie Usher, Blackboard

Julie Usher began by highlighting the potential of OERs but suggested that they can be hard to find; how do you fin and evaluate OERs, link them to curricula, including assessments.  To address this problem Blackboard have developed the xpLor content repository. xpLor supports OER discover and allows content to be pulled directly into Blackboard courses.  Creative Commons is baked into xpLor repository so content can be exported with  CC licenses.

Introduction to Open Badges and OBSEG

Grainne Hamilton, Jisc RSC Scotland

Grainne Hamilton, Jisc RSC Scotland

Grainne Hamilton, Jisc RSC Scotland

Open badges are a form of digital accreditation that can be displayed online.  Badges are like coats of arms, they are images that contain information and have meaning beyond the visual.  Open Badges incentivise informal, formal and work based education and break learning into manageable chunks. The Open Badges in Scottish Education Group (OBSEG), which is supported by Jisc RSC Scotland, has set up three sub-groups focusing on Learner Progress, Technology and Design and Staff Development.

A few thoughts on the launch of OERu

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Last week saw the launch of the Open Educational Resource university (OERu), a UNESCO COL project coordinated by the Open Education Resource Foundation and lead by Wayne Mackintosh (PhD) Director of the OER Foundation at Otago Polytechnic.

OERu describes itself as

“an international network with a philanthropic mission to provide first-class, accessible and affordable education to everyone – no matter where they live, or what their background.”

Unlike many commercial MOOC providers, the ethos of OERu is very much on open  –  open educational resources, open educational practices , open access, open licensing, open source, open philanthropy.

oeru

Another distinctive feature of OERu is that the initiative is being promoted as a route to formal academic credit.  Depending on the individual subject, OERu courses carry varying degrees of accreditation, with some partner institutions providing optional assessments for formal academic credit.  Students have the option of engaging with courses as self directed learners, picking and choosing topics and activities that interest them; alternatively they can receive certificates for active participation, on the basis of completed activities and interactions; or they can submit their work for formal assessment by designated OERu partners on a fee for credit basis.

During the project launch at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Sir John Daniel, former president of the Commonwealth of Learning,  stated that

“The OERu will reduce the cost of higher education dramatically. I believe that radical innovations in higher education must be accompanied by particularly robust frameworks of accreditation and credentialing in order to reassure the public. It’s all very well for evangelists to promote do-it-yourself accreditation from the personal safety of CVs replete with reputable qualifications, but ordinary people want the ‘beef’ of proper recognition too.”

The OERu currently has thirty two partners from five continents, though so far there is only one UK partner, Prifysgol De Cymru, the University of South Wales.

While I fully support OERu’s commitment to open principles and practice, I’m less sure about the imperative for formal accreditation.  The jury still seems to be out as far as certification is concerned, with some MOOC providers and participants suggesting that accreditation is not the be all and end all of online learning. However it’s also notable that many first generation MOOC participants are already educated to degree level, so perhaps Sir John Daniel is making a valid point about “ordinary people’s” desire for proper recognition.  (Though characterising any group of individuals as “ordinary” rather makes me baulk.)

I also couldn’t help noticing that, although there had been quite a lot of publicity about the OERu initiative in the run up to its launch, I haven’t seen a great deal of discussion about it since.  While Creative Commons and Times Higher Education published new items about the launch, the reception on the blogosphere has been rather muted, and it barely caused a ripple in my twitter feed.  After the hype that surrounded the launch of FutureLearn, and the distinctly hostile reception that Coursera founder Andrew Ng received during his Open Education Conference keynote earlier this week, it’s perhaps unsurprising that ed tech commentators are becoming distinctly jaded about yet another new / innovative / disruptive startup that will revolutionise online education as we know it.  If that is the case, then it’s unfortunate for OERu, as I think it’s a very welcome addition to the online learning / MOOC landscape, and if it really does stick to its open principals the it is is certainly to be applauded.

POERUP Policy Advice for Universities

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(Cross posted from Open Scotland)

poerup_2Policies for OER Uptake (POERUP) is a European Commission funded Life Long Learning Programme project, coordinated by Sero Consulting, which is carrying out research to understand how governments can stimulate the uptake of OER by policy means. The project aims to:

“convince decision-makers that in order to be successful with OER, they will have to formulate evidence-based policies based on looking beyond one’s own country, region or continent, beyond the educational sector they look after.”

POERUP have already undertaken a survey of open education policy along with developments in education, e-learning, internet and copyright in 26 countries and have produced a series of comprehensive reports which can be viewed on the Country Reports wiki.

The project is also tasked with producing OER policy documents for a number of EU nations including Scotland, and the team are keen to work with those who have been involved in Open Scotland. The project are also drafting three EU-wide policy papers for schools, colleges and universities on fostering OER uptake, which will act as aides-mémoire for the national policy documents. A draft of the POERUP EU-wide Policies for Universities is available here.

This document provides an invaluable overview of policy developments relative to open education from EU initiatives (e.g. Bologna, Europe 2020, Opening Up Education), OER projects, lobbyist circles (e.g. Opal, UNESCO/COL) and POERUP working meetings. From this evidence base, the following eighteen Policy Proposal Recommendations have been synthesised. In formulating these proposals care has been taken

“not to over-focus on OER as an end but more of a means towards educational transformation.”

To provide comments or feedback on these recommendations please contact Paul Bacsich of Sero Consulting at paul.bacsich@sero.co.uk.

Recommendations for European Commission and via EU for the Member States

Innovation – new institutions

1. The Commission should set up a competitive innovation fund to develop one new “European” university each year with a commitment to low-cost online education around a core proposition of open content.
Accreditation of institutions – new accrediting bodies and mutual recognition
2. The Commission should foster the development of transnational accrediting agencies and mutual recognition of accreditations across the EU.
3. The Commission should reduce the regulatory barriers against new kinds of HE providers (e.g. for-profit, from outside the country, consortial, etc).

Quality agencies

4. Quality agencies in ENQA49 should:  Develop their understanding of new modes of learning (including online, distance, OER and MOOCs) and how they impact quality assurance and recognition;

  • Engage in debates on copyright;
  • Consider the effects of these new modes on quality assurance and recognition;
  • Ensure that there is no implicit non-evidence-based bias against these new modes when accrediting institutions both public and private including for-profit (if relevant), accrediting programmes (if relevant) and assessing/inspecting institutions/programmes.

Bologna-bis: competence-based not time-based assessment

5. The Commission and related authorities developing the European Higher Education Area50 should reduce the regulatory barriers against new non-study-time-based modes of provision: in particular by developing a successor to Bologna based primarily on competences gained not duration of study.

Assessment and accreditation of modules

6. The Commission should recommend to universities that they should work to improve and proceduralise their activity on APL (Accreditation of Prior Learning) including the ability to accredit knowledge and competences developed through online study and informal learning, including but not restricted to OER and MOOCs, with a focus on admitting students with such accredited studies to the universities’ own further courses of study.
7. The Commission should recommend to the larger member states that they should each set up an Open Accreditor to accredit a range of studies which could lead to an undergraduate degree. In the first instance the Accreditor should focus on qualifications in the ISCED 5B area as this is most correlated with high-level skills for business and industry.

Funding mechanisms for institutions and content

8. The Commission should foster work into standardised syllabi EU-wide for undergraduate degrees in certain professions (e.g. medicine, nursing, mathematics, IS/IT) where this is appropriate for EU-wide action, and in the light of a successful outcome to such initiatives, foster the developments of common bases of OER material to support these standards, including relevant open repositories and (ideally jointly with publishers) open textbooks.
9. The Commission should ensure that any public outputs from its programmes (specifically including Erasmus for All and Framework) are made available as open resources under an appropriate license.
10. The Commission should encourage member states to do likewise for their national research and teaching development programmes, including for the public funding component of university teaching.
11. The Commission should encourage member states to increase their scrutiny of the cost basis for university teaching and consider the benefits of output-based funding for qualifications.

IPR issues

12. The Commission should adopt and recommend a standard Creative Commons license for all openly available educational material it is involved in funding. This should currently be Creative Commons 3.0 in unported or relevant national versions, updated from time to time. The Commission should also recommend this license to all member states.
13. The Commission should study the issues in the modern European HE system round the “non commercial” restriction and make appropriate recommendations for its own programmes and for member states.
14. The Commission should support the development of technological methods to provide more and standardised information on IPR to the users of digital educational content.
15. The Commission should mount a campaign both centrally and via the member states to educate university staff on IPR issues.

Training of academics

16. The Commission should support the development of online initial and continuous professional development programmes for teachers, focussing on online learning with specific coverage of distance learning, OER, MOOCs and other forms of open educational practice, and also IPR issues.
17. The Commission should encourage member states to do this also and should recommend the use of incentive schemes for teachers engaged in online professional development of their pedagogic skills including online learning.

Further research

18. The Commission should fund research into the verifiable benefits of OER, with greater efforts to integrate such analyses with its ongoing research on distance learning, on-campus online learning, and pedagogy; and recommend the same to member states.

Opening Up Education

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It’s been another encouraging week for open education with the launch of the European Commission’s Opening Up Education initiative.

The Communication on Opening Up Education

“sets out a European agenda for stimulating high-quality, innovative ways of learning and teaching through new technologies and digital content.”

The initiative aims to increase the use of digital content and resources in education, address inequalities in the use of ICT in schools across member states, to ensure that universities are ready to face the “digital challenge”.

Opening up Education focuses on three main areas:

  • Creating opportunities for organisations, teachers and learners to innovate;
  • Increased use of Open Educational Resources (OER), ensuring that educational materials produced with public funding are available to all; and
  • Better ICT infrastructure and connectivity in schools.

The initiative will be supported by a number of funding initiatives including Erasmus+, Horizon 2020 and EU Structural Funds.

In addition to launching the Opening up Education initiative the Commission have also launched the Open Education Europa portal, a “gateway to European innovative learning”.

Open Education Europa

Open Education Europa

The portal allows users to search for a wide range of open educational content including courses, MOOCs and resources. Search results can be filtered by subject, level, language and Creative Commons licence type. Although I’m usually pretty sceptical about the “lets build a giant portal” approach to managing and distributing open educational content, it’s great to see a truly multilingual resource.  It’s also good to find Jisc funded resources there,  including Jorum and Humbox, there may be others, but I haven’t had a chance to have a good look yet. Users also have the option of signing up to Open Education Europa to share blogs, events and groups, and the portal also provides access to a  range of papers, news reports, articles etc. There’s also a rather fun European MOOC scoreboard. Look, Spain are winning!

European MOOC Scoreboard

European MOOC Scoreboard

I’ve been following the Opening Up Education initiative for some time and I’m already very encouraged by the Commissions commitment to open education, open licences and open educational resources. I very much hope that the UK will be able to engage with Opening Up Education and build on the success of the Jisc / HEA UK OER Programmes.

Links: 

Opening Up Education press release: Commission launches ‘Opening up Education’ to boost innovation and digital skills in schools and universities

European Commission Communication: Opening up Education –  Innovative teaching and learning for all through new Technologies and Open Educational Resources (pdf)

Opening up Education – frequently asked questions

Open Education Europa Portal

Open Knowledge Foundation Glasgow Meeting

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Last night Sheila and I went along to the first meeting of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Glasgow. The meeting was hosted by the Electron Club and the room was packed to the gunnels with over thirty enthusiastic open data geeks. The event was introduced by Edinburgh University’s Ewan Klein, who has already been instrumental in helping to facilitate a successful series of Open Knowledge Foundation events in Edinburgh.

opendatagla

There were six fascinating lightning talks on a wide range of open data topics:

Glynn Staples introduced the Glasgow Future Cities Demonstrator project, which Sheila, Martin Hawksey and I have already had a little involvement with, when we presented a worksop on social media engagement strategies earlier in the year.

Lizzie Brotherston gave a presentation on the Learner Journey Data Jam which took place in Edinburgh in April, and which featured the work of Cetis’ very own Wilbert Kraan 🙂 It was interesting listening to Lizzie talking about the value of events such as the data jam, and reflecting back on the DevCSI hackdays and the earlier Cetis CodeBashes which ran between 2002 and 2007. We were ahead of our time!

Graham Steel’s presentation was called “Publishing research without data is advertising, not science” and to prove his point, he provided us with lots of useful links which you can find on his prezi here.

Bill Roberts, from linked data company Swirrl, reminded us about the importance of presenting Open Data for multiple audiences and introduced a sort of typology of data users which featured “hard core spaqrl junkies” at the bottom!

Neil Logan, of Amor Group, introduced the SFC innovation centres initiative and the Data Science Innovation Centre proposal. You can read more about Neil’s presentation on his own blog here. One of the points that Neil made was that “academics talk to industry because they want money for research”, which I suspect is true, but it did rather make me wonder about whether industry could also offer any investment in teaching and learning?

The final presentation of the evening was by Peter Winstanley of the Scottish Government who talked about the Cabinet Office’s Open Standards Hub. Peter also presented one of the most robust justifications for the adoption of open standards, including persistent resolvable identifiers, that I’ve hear in a long time. If I hadn’t been precariously perched on the edge of a rather high table, I’d have stood up and applauded!

All in all it was a really lively and thought provoking evening and judging by the energy in the room and the many positive comments on twitter, there seems to be real enthusiasm for future Open Knowledge Foundation meetings to take place in Glasgow, so here’s looking forward to the next one!

If you’re intereted in learning more about the first #OpenDataGla event I’ve posted a Storify here and Martin Hawksey has archived all the tweets here.

Open Scotland Follow Up

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Yesterday Sheila and I met with colleagues from the ALT Scotland SIG, Jisc RSC Scotland and Cetis to start taking forward some of the actions we discussed at the Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh at the end of June. I’d provide a link to my Cetis blog post summarising the event and outlining the deliverables and actions but unfortunately the Cetis blog server is down right now so you’ll have to trust me that I can remember what the actions were :} I’ll post the link as soon as the server gets rebooted. The Cetis blogs have now been restored and you can find the Open Scotland Summit Report and Actions here: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2013/07/04/open-scotland-report-and-actions/

One of the key actions was to establish a working group, similar to Wales and the Nordic countries, that can stimulate research in the area of open education and hopefully inform future Government initiatives. As several of the delegates who attended the Summit in June expressed an interest in on-going participation, there seems to be a real appetite for taking this forward. In the first instance we’ve agreed to set up an Open Scotland blog to provide the group with an identity and a platform to publish information, articles and commentary on all aspects of openness in education. We’ll also use the blog to link to other related groups, lists and initiatives e.g. the Open Knowledge Foundation, OER-Discuss, the Scottish Open Badges Group, etc. Unfortunately someone is sitting on the openscotland.wordpress.com domain so we’ve had to settle for openscot.wordpress.com. There’s nothing to see there at present, but we hope to have the site up and running by the end of September. Several colleagues have already offered to contribute posts on different aspects of openness and how these relate to education and education policy in Scotland. We also discussed setting up a mailing list to disseminate information but as there was some concern about the proliferation of mailing lists we thought we would try setting up a google group instead.

The second key action from the June summit was to draft a position paper providing evidence of the benefits of openness with examples of how these can impact on Government priorities. As a starting point for this activity we’ve agreed to look at the Scottish Funding Council’s Outcome Agreements for 2013 – 2014 and to highlight areas where different aspect of openness could have a positive impact on the outcome agreement criteria. Once we’ve done a first pass through the Outcome Agreement criteria, we’ll post the resulting draft in a public document that everyone will be welcome to comment on and contribute to. Hopefully this will help us to focus on real tangible benefits of open education policies and practices and demonstrate how these can help to address current strategic priorities and challenges.

Another activity we discussed is to take the 2012 OER Paris Declaration and to start identifying examples of practice, from Scotland and neighbouring countries, that address the ten key points outlined in the Declaration document. I’m also keen to develop some case studies about institutions that have developed open education policies, but that’s an activity that would require rather more resources than we have at our disposal at present.

We also discussed the possibility of future Open Scotland events and hope to be able to build on the success of the June Summit to broaden the debate further. In the short term we have a couple of dissemination opportunities coming up; Joe Wilson of SQA and I will be doing a short presentation on Open Scotland and the work of the ALT Scotland SIG at the Jisc RSC Scotland Joint Forum event on the 31st of October, and earlier in the month we’ll we presenting a paper “Open Scotland – Policies and strategies for opening up education in Scotland” at the Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Paris on the 24th- 25th October. (When I say “we” that means that we’re not sure who’ll actually be going along to do the presentation yet!)

If you’re interested in keeping up to date with Open Scotland, keep and eye on the #openscot hashtag and this blog in the interim, or feel free to contact any of those involved.

Phil Barker phil.barker@hw.ac.uk
Lorna M. Campbell lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com
Linda Creanor l.creanor@gcal.ac.uk
Sheila MacNeill sheilamacneill@me.com
Celeste McLaughlin celeste.mclaughlin@glasgow.ac.uk
Joe Wilson joe.wilson@sqa.org.uk

“The Mark of World Class Institutions”

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This week saw the launch of two admirable projects that stand to make a significant contribution to global access to open educational resources. In the USA the Getty Trust announced their Open Content Programme, and in India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development launched their National Repository of Open Educational Resources.

The aim of the Getty Open Content Programme is to make available, free of charge

all digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.

In the first instance almost five thousand images from the J. Paul Getty Museum have been made available, with plans to add images from the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute in the future. There are also plans to open access to the Getty Vocabularies and outputs of the Conservation Institute’s field projects.
In an article in The Getty Iris titled Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come, the Getty’s CEO, James Cuno, explained the motivation for the Open Content Programme:
getty_ocp_banner

The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief. This move is also an educational imperative. Artists, students, teachers, writers, and countless others rely on artwork images to learn, tell stories, exchange ideas, and feed their own creativity.

Cuno goes on to refer to the discussion of open content in the Horizon Report, Museum Edition which stated

it is now the mark—and social responsibility—of world-class institutions to develop and share free cultural and educational resources.

Adding “I agree wholeheartedly.” And so do I!

The approach adopted by the Getty Open Content Programme is interesting as they make no attempt to restrict access to their resources on the basis of how they will be used. Unlike the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum in the UK, who will only allow their images to be used free of charge for non-commercial purposes, there are no restrictions on using Getty images commercially.

When downloading an image users are presented with a simple form which requires them to select their status (private individual, not-for-profit organization, for-profit company, other) and how they intend to use the resrource (publication, personal, non-commercial, commercial, other). Submission of this information is compulsory in order to access the image, however the form states that the information is being collected so that “so that we may continue to improve access to our content.”

getty_download

There are a few conditions placed on the use of images, though it’s debatable whether these can be regarded as “restrictions” in any sense of the word:

Users are requested to use the following source credit when reproducing an image, Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

When using open content images, you should not suggest or imply that the Getty endorses, approves of, or participated in your projects.

The small print of the Open Content Images Terms of Use states that:

Some images may include people or objects for which a third party may claim rights such as trademark, copyright, privacy, or publicity rights. The Getty does not warrant that all of the images designated for downloading are free from rights claimed by third parties. As the user, it is your responsibility to ensure that there are no restrictions based on third party rights. The Getty assumes no liability for your use of these images if a third party makes an infringement claim.

And finally:

Getty would appreciate a gratis copy of any scholarly publications in which the images are reproduced in order to maintain the collection bibliography.

It’s also interesting to note that Getty have completely bypassed Creative Commons, and in fact their OCP images don’t appear to carry any licence at all! I’m very curious as to why this particular approach was taken and what the potential pros can cons are of releasing images without any obvious licence. That coda aside, I think this is a hugely admirable project and I hope other heritage institutions around the world are encouraged to consider opening access to the wealth of resources they hold.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development announced the launch of the National Repository of Open Educational Resources. The aim of the repository, which is build on a platform developed by Gnowledge Labs, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, is to:

bring together all digital and digitisable resources for the school system – for all classes, for all subjects and in all languages.

And it’s objectives are to:

• To enhance the quality of teaching-learning
• To facilitate teachers to create and share contextualized teaching learning resources
• To celebrate innovations in resource creation

india_oer

Although I haven’t had a chance to explore the collections in any great detail, far less to investigate the platform, one interesting facet of the project is that the repository uses a growing map of semantic concepts to group and organise resources.  The press release states that:

The concept map itself is a learning resource for teachers, providing an opportunity for critically assessing the curriculum and aiding the construction of their own unique learning themes for their classrooms. The digital resources – documents, audio-visuals, interactive objects, images are mapped to the concepts. This enables access to a library from which teachers can choose appropriate resources.

india_oer_concept

It’s an interesting approach and, if the repository really takes off, it will be fascinating to see how this works at scale.

The repository and all its materials carry a CC BY SA licence and while there are no conditions or restrictions placed on  downloading resources, users must complete a captcha before adding comments to resources held in the repository.

Although the repository already contains an impressive collection of content, the metadata is, dare I say it, a little thin at present. For example, images are accompanied by topic tags and the date and the name of the person who contributed them, however very little information is provided about the provenance of the image, where or when it was taken, and who the creator was. Hopefully this is information that will be added as the repository develops.

It’s great to see two high profile open content initiatives being launched within the same week and I very much hope they will encourage others to follow suit.

OER and the Only Solution

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Thanks to Cable Green of Creative Commons for flagging up a recent speech by Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, which highlighted the potential value of Open Educational Resources in helping to provide global access to education. The speech, Education is the Only Solution, which was addressed to the US Agency for International Development Global Education Summit, focused on the need to address global poverty and inequality to provide high quality education for all. A need that Duncan referred to as:

“a moral imperative, as well as a civic and economic necessity.”

Taking as his inspiration Malala Yousafzai’s address to the United Nations last month, Duncan acknowledged the role of “nations, multilateral organizations, NGOs and other partners” in working to make a better educated, safer, healthier world a reality by helping children, and girls in particular, gain the fundamental skills they need for success.

Duncan also reflected on the role of “game-changing” education technology

“that can help teachers personalize learning, and connect students and teachers with the best content the world has to offer, no matter where they live.”

And this is where Open Educational Resources come in:

“the fast-evolving field of education technology—from cloud computing to personal learning devices to Open Education Resources like the Khan Academy, which my two young children enjoy—has huge potential to transform education.”

Furthermore…

“Open Education Resources and other communication tools can help improve and expand teacher training and professional development—a huge opportunity in countries grappling with large teacher shortages and under-educated teachers.”

I know nothing about the political background and context of Duncan’s speech, but it’s hard to argue with the sentiments. (Though I found some of the language rather hard to parse – “Today’s global economy is not a zero-sum game. Instead, education is the new currency by which nations keep competitive and grow the pie for all.” – eh?!) And although I would caution against regarding open educational resources as a panacea for the world’s educational ills, it’s encouraging to see their potential benefits being highlighted at this level. And to be fair to Duncan, he did stress that:

“It’s important always to start with the education challenge, and then determine which technology, if any, meets the need and adds value to other solutions. It’s tempting to make it about new, glamorous gadgets—but that can distract from simpler and more effective approaches.”

Amen to that.

I was also interested to note that Duncan announced:

“we’re poised to make the first free, U.S. government-funded digital learning materials—designed to improve postsecondary training in high-demand careers—available for use and improvement.”

Does anyone know anything about this initiative? I don’t think I’ve heard anything about it before.

While the educational challenges that face the UK in general, and Scotland in particular, are quite different from those facing developing nations and the US itself, there are undeniably some commonalities. To quote Duncan again:

“Worldwide, just as in the U.S., we also need to focus on educational quality, attainment and completion.”

Quality, attainment and completion were among the issues discussed earlier this summer during the Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh that set out to explore the potential of open policies to develop Scotland’s unique education offering, support social inclusion, inter-institutional collaboration and sharing and enhance quality and sustainability. I can’t help hoping that one day, in the not too distant future, we’ll hear an education minister on this side of the pond acknowledging the potential of open educational resources, and open education more widely, to achieve these goals.

PS I thought it was interesting that Duncan flagged up Khan Academy as an inspiring OER initiative, given that Kahn Academy content is released under the relatively restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, however that’s a discussion for another blog post :}

Welcome to Open World

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Hello and welcome to my new blog which I’ll be using to post thoughts and reflections on all kinds of issues relating to open education, technology and innovation. For more years than I can recall, I’ve maintained a Cetis blog, however recent contractual changes, which are explained here, mean that there will be a bit of a hiatus in my work with Cetis. So, like my colleague Sheila MacNeill, I thought it would be useful to set up a new blog.

I’m also hoping to use this space to comment on more general topics and issues that interest me, and to link to other research I’m doing in the area of late 18th century social and naval history. (Yes really!)

As for the title of this blog, Open World, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it refers to the various open education initiatives I’ve been involved in over the years, and in some ways it does. However the title is actually lifted from the collected poems of Kenneth White, chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne and a writer for whom openness is an enduring and inspiring theme.