Tag Archives: openscot

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.

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.

Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference

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Last week I went to the Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Paris where I presented two Cetis papers on the Open Scotland initiative and technology challenges from the Jisc / HEA UKOER Programmes. Both papers were well received and there was considerable interest in Open Scotland from colleagues from Norway.  The papers are available to download form Slideshare here:

Technology Challenges from the UKOER Programmes by Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell

Open Scotland by Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker, Sheila MacNeill and Joe Wilson

EADTU Conference, Les Cordeliers, Sorbonne

EADTU Conference,
Les Cordeliers, Sorbonne

This is the first time I’ve attuned the EADTU Conference, with its focus on distance education provision in the HE sector, it’s a slightly different community from the one Cetis usually engages with. However there were many well known faces there and it was good to see such a large contingent from the Open University UK present. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to arrive in time to hear the opening keynote presentations however the papers I heard in the parallel sessions were excellent and the closing keynotes on the first day were suitably thought provoking. Inevitably MOOCs were a prevalent theme but I was encouraged that there was still a lot of discussion about other forms of open education practice and open education resources. It was also good to see Li and Stephen’s MOOCs and Open Education Cetis whitepaper quoted by one of the delegates from Lisbon.  Here’s a few of the highlights.

Variable cost minimisation business models in higher education
– Yoram Kalman, Open University of Israel

This excellent talk presented a coherent analysis of the nature and characteristics of business models and exploded many of the myths surrounding the ability, or not, of MOOCs to disrupt HE business models. Yoram’s presentation raised so many relevant issues that I’ll try and write a blog post summarising his main points.

Sketching the user interface of digital textbooks applied to formal learning environments
– Luis Fernandes, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Unfortunately Luis himself was unable to be present but his paper was ably presented by his colleague Andreia Teles Vieira who demonstrated Luis etexbook implementation based on HTML5, EPub3 and CSS3. The implementation included book marks, annotation, and discussion groups, the ability to share via social media, rearrange and reorganise book content and compare different versions of books. Cetis have recently been discussing the potential of ePub3 and its ability to interoperate with other specification such as QTI, so I hope we can find out more about Luis work.

Do MOOCs announce a new paradigm for higher education?
– John Daniel and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic

Daniel suggested that while MOOCs are not a new paradigm for education, they may usher in other new paradigms and are accelerating three trends in HE:

• Shorter courses
• New types of awards such as open badges.
• Accelerate the move to online learning.

In response to these trends universities must develop new policies, execute online courses well and pay attention to quality. Uvalic-Trumbic developed the theme of quality and suggested that new courses and forms of assessment and accreditation need new forms of quality assurance, adding that open badges don’t take quality into account. I’m not sufficiently up to speed with open badges to know if this is actually true, so I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on the matter.

While I agreed with some of the points raised by this presentation I strongly disagreed with Sir John Daniel’s assertion that “Most MOOCs are OER with added assessment.” As I see it, most MOOCs have little to do with openness and even less to do with OER!

Foresights on Open Education 2030
– Yves Punie, Institute or Prospective Technological Studies, Seville

Yves presented the outputs of Imagining Open Education 2030 initiative, which called for vision papers covering three sectors; school education, higher education and lifelong learning. The vision papers and outputs of this exercise can be found here: http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/

The following key tensions were distilled from vision papers and scenarios.

  • At the core of open education 2023 are unbundling, abundance, networking, flexibility and personalised learning
  • Learning services will not necessarily be free, under an open licence and accessible to all.
  • HE institutions will not disappear but need to redefine their role in the open education landscape – existing funding and quality mechanisms are not sustainable.

Yves also highlighted the SURF Policy paper e-InfraNet: ‘Open’ as the default modus operandi for research and higher education which can be downloaded here: http://www.surf.nl/en/publicaties/Pages/e-InfranetOpenreport.aspx

I haven’t had a chance to look at this paper but it does include this diagram illustrating the range of “opens”.

range of open

OpenupEd as a European answer on MOOCs: a student centred approach
– Fred Mulder, OUNL and UNESCO

Fred introduced the EU Opening Up Education initiative, which appears to be gearing up to become a direct competitor to US MOOC providers such as Coursera and Udacity. Opening up education is a subtle change from open education and shows that this is a process; there is no fixed model for education over time, there will always be diversity.
The term open is used widely but is not well defined. OER is one of the few terms that is well defined. The Hewlett Foundation defines OER as:

“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”

But OER is not open education, there are five components of open education:

Supply side components
1. Open educational resources
2. Open learning services
3. Open teaching efforts
Demand side components
4. Open to learners needs
5. Open to employability and capabilities development

Opening Up Education is a globally linked and decentralised model that will provide a distinctive quality brand with high visibility and marketing potential. Participants will be able to engage with partners’ experience and expertise in developing MOOCs and evaluating and monitoring them from an institutional perspective. In addition partners will also have the opportunity to join cross-national projects with external funding. I also got the impression that there is, or will be an Opening Up Education platform, but that’s something I need to look into in more detail.

SQA to explore the potential of Mozilla Open Badges

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“We believe that the infrastructure promotes and supports greater flexibility for learning and the recognition of achievement.”

– Joe Wilson, SQA

Following two years of discussions, SQA has announced that it will work in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation and the Scottish Open Badges Group to support the adoption of Open Badges across a range of Scottish education sectors.  Rather than being a top down project, SQA’s announcement represents a “commitment to be open about open badges” which will hopefully encourage more traditional parts of the education sector to engage with innovative open approaches to recording achievements and accomplishments.

Press release as follows…

SQA investigates opportunities with Mozilla’s Open Badges

SQA has announced its intention to investigate the opportunities presented by an innovative approach to displaying individuals’ learning accomplishments online.

SQA is working in partnership with Mozilla, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the democratization of the web, to explore the benefits to learners that can be achieved through their Open Badges.

Mozilla’s Open Badges project intends to make it easy to earn, issue and display digital badges that recognise and communicate individuals’ skills and achievements.

The badge project infrastructure allows individuals to display their real-world skills and achievements in online environments – such as social media profiles – in way that may help with future career and education opportunities.

Joe Wilson, Head of New Ventures at SQA, said: “We believe Mozilla’s Open Badges project enables greater flexibility for learners to demonstrate their achievements. Open badges have the potential to allow individuals to display the accomplishments they make along each step of the learner journey, and receive recognition for a single skill or packages of learning that cover a number of skills in relation to a particular task.”

Joe continued: “SQA will work with Mozilla to explore how we can adopt Open Badges. We will encourage our partners to investigate how they could benefit from adopting open badges to support learners across Scotland in addition to the recognition we offer teachers and college lecturers through our CDP courses and training we will explore how we can integrate open badges into our certification processes.”

Erin Knight, Senior Director of Learning and Badges at Mozilla, said: “We are really excited that SQA, as Scotland’s national awarding and accreditation body, is actively exploring how best to implement Open Badges as a means to give learners and institutions the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and accomplishments through digital badges.”

Joe will be speaking at the Mozilla Festival in London on Saturday 26 October about SQA’s work with Mozilla.

A Good Week for Open Education?

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Because I am a true believer in the power of reusable, repurposeable, remixable open content I have repurposed part of this blog post from an e-mail David Kernohan sent to the OER-Discuss mailing list earlier this week titled “A big week for open learning in the UK”.  Cheers David! 🙂

There’s certainly been an explosion of activity in the open education space this week; in addition to the announcement of the winners of the Reclaim Open Learning Contest, the publication of the BIS Maturing of the MOOC report, and the launch of FutureLearn, all of which David mentioned, this week also saw higher education institutions in Wales announce their support for open education principals, the Open Knowledge Conference, which took place in Geneva, featured a panel on Open Education, and, back in the UK, Jorum relaunched.  Okay Jorum actually relaunched last week but it still good news so lets not be pedantic!

 Welsh HEIs Adopt Open Educational Principals

To my mind this is possibly the most significant and encouraging development of the week.  Times Higher Education reported than the vice chancellors from Wales’ eight universities would be committing to adopt open educational principles to support open education practice and the use of open education resources. The aim of this initiative is to encourage universities to share content, mostly in the form of lecture notes and course materials, which can be reused across the sector and beyond.  The resources will be hosted by individual institutions but a dedicated portal will provide access to these materials and act as “showcase doorway”.   In an e-mail to OER-Discuss, Hayden Blackey, Prifysgol De Cymru,  confirmed that  Higher Education Wales had agreed to a  “common statement of principals which will be available form their website shortly.” You can read the full THE article here: Welsh universities commit to sharing course material online

I’m hugely encouraged by this very positive step taken by the Welsh Higher Education sector, this is exactly the kind of commitment we hoped to encourage through the Open Scotland initiative.  I sincerely hope that Scottish Higher Education is taking note, and will be inspired to follow suit.

Reclaim Open Learning Innovation Contest

Congratulations to DigiLit Leicester and Phonar Ed at Coventry University, who won two of the five prizes awarded at the Reclaim Open Learning Innovation Contest.  The contest, which is sponsored by  MacArthur Foundation, the Digital Media and Learning Hub, and the MIT Media Lab, aims to embrace a model of open learning that focuses on the use of openly licensed reusable content and collaborative modes of peer to peer learning.

The Maturing of the MOOC

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills published their literature review of massive open online courses and other forms of open distance learning: The Maturing of the MOOC by Stephen Haggard.  So far, I have only had time to briefly skim the review, but it looks like it will be a valuable addition to the growing corpus of reports, commentary and data relating to all aspects of MOOCs.  It’s also great to see that the review makes frequent reference to the Cetis whitepaper by Li Yuan and Stephen Powell MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education.

FutureLearn Launch

FutureLearn launched with much fan-fair and equal parts enthusiasm and cynicism from the ed tech community.  I’m not going to say too much about the launch as so many blog posts and reports have already covered that ground. On balance the first courses look rather interesting, though I am curious to see how they will distinguish themselves from other MOOC offerings.  I still find it rather disquieting that the whole FutureLearn brand seems to be predicated on exclusivity, which rather calls into question their commitment to openness.  Of course this is a criticism that can be levelled at other MOOC providers, but it does rather beg the question,  can you be open and exclusive?  I really don’t know the answer to that.

David’s e-mail to OER-Discuss kicked off a very interesting discussion on FutureLearn’s decision to include the following prohibition in their Code of Conduct :

“As the FutureLearn community’s first language is English, I will always post contributions in English to enable all to understand, unless specifically requested to do otherwise.”

Kate Bowles has written a thoughtful blogpost about this issue here: For all to understand, and you can follow the OER-Discuss conversation here.

New Jorum Launches

I’ve been involved with Jorum since it was just a glimmer of a proposal in the project team’s eye so it’s great to see that the service has come this far, and is continuing to go from strength to strength.  Jorum relaunched at the beginning of the month with a new look and a host of new features that will make it easier for users to search for and select resources.  In addition, new reporting features have been added to provide access to resource usage data that can be viewed and exported in a range of formats. And last, but by no means least, the long awaited Jorum REST API, which will provide direct access to content usage data and metadata,  will be released in October.

Open Knowledge Foundation Conference

I wasn’t able to attend the OKFN Conference in Geneva, but I followed as much of the live stream as I could online.  I was very pleased to see that one of the topics covered by the conference this year was Open Education.  Doug Belshaw facilitated a panel that included Jackie Carter of Mimas and Mathieu d’Aquin of the Open University, which looked at facets of open education – resources, data and culture.

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

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 :}