Stephen Downes
Knowledge, Learning, CommunityGood afternoon, everyone. Thanks for coming to my talk. I really appreciate having you here. Happy New Year to you. All my name is Stephen Downes and I'm going to be talking to today on supporting open educational resources. And I'd like to thank LIS Academy of Bangalore for making this video recording and presentation to you possible. It really is a pleasure to be here with you.
In my presentation, I'm going to be basically doing two major things. I'm going to talk for a little bit about the history of open educational resources in order to set the context for us a bit and in order to think about just what it is that we're supporting, then in the second and longer part of the talk, I'm going to look at some key aspects of supporting open educational resources. I'm going to be thinking about them from the perspective of how other industries or other sectors address similar challenges, and then talk about what we can do in the field of learning and especially from the perspective of providing library and information services what we can do to support open educational resources.
So let's begin with the history of open educational resources (or I'll just say OER), and of course, we began sharing - and by 'we' I generally mean people here in Canada and in North America, but of course, I also mean people around the world, because sharing is not limited to our society by any means - we began sharing educational resources long before the internet ever came along. We would share paper-based lesson plans. I remember myself bringing in newspaper photocopies and sharing it with the class so that we could use the newspaper to analyze or to study material. We'd hand out worksheets, templates, maps, and of course, every school had a library with books, maybe magazines, later on videos and music, and these were key. The advantage of these methods is they were low tech. Everybody could use them, they were portable, you could take them home. But of course they were expensive. They weighed a lot and took up a lot of storage space, and of course, could be out of date fairly quickly.
Wwhen the internet began in the 60s and 70s, it was an open sharing medium right from the start. In fact, we don't really talk about open resources until the internet becomes commercialized and the 1990s. But before that happened, we had bulletin board systems. I used to run a bulletin board system myself. It was an open place. Anybody could phone in, I'd share files, software, whatever, with them. On the internet, there was a thing called useNet, which was like an electronic bulletin board that people would post messages on and advice, suggestions for software. We had shareware, and the idea of shareware was that we would just give our software away. For search, we'd have Archie and Yahoo and Google, which came along in 1997. And then for document storage, originally, we had Gopher, and then, of course, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the Wold Wide Web beginning in 1991 and file sharing became a big thing. There was Napster, there was bit torrent services, starting in 2002 and the race to share was on.
In the area of learning resources - again, a lot of people credit MIT's Open CourseWare as starting open educational resources, but in fact, we were sharing resources long before them. The well-known project Gutenberg, which makes open access versions of thousands of key texts and books from throughout history, began in 1971, and was refreshed again with a new internet face in 2000. ArXiv preprints of academic papers began in 1991. I still remember things like Geocities, which was a place where anybody could create a website and share that, which started in 1995. And also one of my favorite resources the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which also began in 1995. I was listed in it for a very short time for the guide that I created in that same year called Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies, that was a way to share a resource that I used in one of my classes with everybody on line. Merlot online learning resource library was created in 1997, Slashdot 'news for nerds' also started in 1997, and these spawned a whole range of similar sorts of services technology for sharing. And by 1998, we had something called rich site summary, which was used for content syndication, and then David Wiley in 1998 coined the term 'open content'.
We wecontinue with the development of Nupedia, which was followed by Wikipedia, which I'm sure you're all familiar with, which began in 2001. Nuwpedia was founded in 1999. LiveJournal and Blogger, again places where individuals could share their resources on line, began in 1999. Looking at academic or scholarly sharing, we had the Open Archives Initiative for academic papers and other kinds of archives, which launched in 2000, and you may know it from the perspective of things like the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting or the Dublin Core metadata standards, all of which were related to OAI in terms of licensing. We got the Creative Commons open content licenses which launched in 2001, and now 2001 is when we see the emergence of MIT's Open CourseWare. The United Nations made the formal definition and declaration about Open Educational Resources, and you see the logo on the slide there. That was in 2002. Services continued to spring up. One worthy of mention is Stack Overflow, which is a community question-and-answer site where people share their knowledge with other programmers. I use Stack Overflow a lot, that's why I mentioned it. The Massive Open Online Course, which was intended for content sharing, resource sharing, and the creation of an open learning community, was founded by myself and George Seamans, originally in 2008. And then, of course, by 2011, 2012, we saw companies like Coursera and Udacity launch, and in India is Class Central is a very significant chronicaler of Massive Open Online Courses. And then in 2009, the concept of open educational practices was introduced for the first time, and we'll talk a little bit about that.
So that's a very quick history and what are we to draw from that? Well what I draw from it is a list of what we would call perhaps the major elements of Open Educational Resources and and these elements are probably the main things that we need to focus on when we're thinking about sustaining open educational resources, either from a national perspective or from an institutional perspective, or as I often think about these things, from the perspective of creating a software platform or an array of services for students, staff, management and others to use.
So I've got a list of them here, but if you look at this slide, and this slide should be shown full screen for you. I've arranged these in in a model where we can sort of see them associated with each other. The major sections include:
- description and metadata, which of course is interest of interest to librarians and archivists;
- creation, editing, storage to get content into the system;
- and then the library system in order to organize and retain data in;
- search and retrieval services are also important;
- licensing and permission, of course, informs any open educational resource enterprise;
- as well as management, infrastructure and sustainability.
but that's just on a production and as we move to the part of the diagram where we're using and accessing and helping people learn with these resources, we're beginning to look at services, more advanced services, such as:
- curation review and moderation;
- as well as a network of communities or networks of people who use these resources and often contribute to these resources;
- there's also a need for what I've called here 'access to other services' because an open educational resource environment, doesn't just stand alone, it very often works along with a learning management system or perhaps some sort of distributed content analyzing platform or some other services is, so we need to make OER available from the services for all of us;
- we need to provide support and training;
- and then apply this to practices and pedagogies.
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And surrounding this diagram. We can see all of the different people who are involved all of the different types of people, everything from government and industry and to universities through to programmers designers. And experts yourselves is librarians and archivists community development people.
Social services companies trades and we don't want to leave out instructors and tutors or practitioners as well as learners, who may be adults children for that matter anybody in the community. So what I'm going to do now for the second part of this talk is to look in a little more detail at some of these areas.
I won't be able to cover all of them because that would mean I can't give enough time to any individual ones. But I will look at a number of the key areas and talk about them a bit just in terms of supporting OER from that perspective. So steak breath, we've been going pretty fast.
These slides will all be available for you later. So you'll be able to look at this diagram, this big. And also, in these slides, you will be able to find links and references to all of the things that I'm talking about as we go through them. So, here's the plan, this is what the second part of the presentation will look at.
I, at the top of each page, we're going to look at a barrier to the access and use of open educational resources. Now, this is not just me making these barriers up these barriers actually exist and they're documented in the literature and my references point back to where they're documented in the literature.
Then in this lower left hand corner of the slides. I'm going to use examples from other fields and other content types, and we're going to draw from a wide range of sources. I always find that if I draw inspiration from other places that really helps me in designing software and programs to support learning resources online.
And that's what I'll be talking about on hand side of each of these slides, How we can support OER services and platforms. So be some examples, some ideas, some software, depending on what we need. So let's move forward as, you know, probably the biggest barrier to open educational, resources is the physical barrier.
You know it. Well I know it. Well, I live out in rural Canada. So it's always a challenge computer equipment and electricity is of course a prime need as well as things like file storage and bandwidth in order to access it. Now, I've got reasonable computer here and a reasonable bandwidth, but of course, this is something that we always have to attend to and I find when I try to design learning resources.
I try to assume that people won't have the bandwidth and provide multiple forms of all of the resources that I use. So, how do we address these? Well often these are beyond us. Frankly, because it takes an entire society to provide electricity, computer equipment, file storage, bandwidth, in Canada.
We do have the national broadband initiative, which is ongoing India, as well. Not surprisingly has its own initiatives, such as Barrett, net and other programs. With respect to energy, we're all working toward an alternative energy futures, especially focusing on solar wind and nuclear. And in Canada we have the availability of hydroelectric power as well, platforms.
Very from something, as simple as raspberry pi to something is complex as framework a laptop that you can repair. That's to my mind, the best kind of laptop and for for bandwidth. We use everything from a USB to a local area network. So, in terms of supporting and OER infrastructure, what I've seen are a few types of initiatives that seem to have the most effect certainly providing support for mobile learning, especially since so many people are studying.
Well, away from home, they may be on a train, they may be on a bus and or they may be in an area where they don't have an actual wire, internet access point, so they need to use the mobile. I also find that in Canada, we had a network of community access centers.
These are key to supporting OER and then we have organizations in Canada across the country that support OER initiatives. For example, BC campus eCampus, Ontario and contact North. And I've worked with all three of those. The links are in the slides in the comments, and the slides, and, of course in India, there's the world famous initiative from the injury national opening university.
Very influential on all of us. A second concern, is the lack of open educational resources. And at this point, in terms of English language coverage, there's a great breadth of resources. Although, as we get into more narrow and more advanced fields, it becomes more difficult to find things. Especially we've also seen that in languages.
Other than English, there's not nearly the same range or breadth of open, educational resources. And that's why I've spent time for example, working with organizations, like Alexa for the Arab League, or for the Frankfony to work on open educational resources, in French to ensure that there is multilingual representation.
Another aspect is locale situations, culture circumstances, very quite a bit from place to place to place and so there's a need for OER that addresses this, these cultural and regional differences, Another factor that's been raised in. The literature is the lack of availability of resources in the proper format.
It's always tempting to use the most advanced file format possible perhaps to, you know, create something now in virtual reality or multimedia. But we need to understand that people around the world using basic devices need open formats and sometimes even hard copy formats. For example, a climate science field trip might the people might be using paper-based resources because they're going beyond the even the range of mobile phones to address the lack of open educational resources that have been a large number of content production initiatives.
And perhaps a good example that we can draw from is the way government news media and entertainment media have produced content. For example, in Canada, we have the Canadian broadcasting corporation in Britain. They have the BBC. These are funded by the governments and in Canada as well. Other media companies have what we call Canadian content regulations.
So as part of their licensing, they're required to produce content in Canada. The other major source that I have found for new open educational, resources is the community itself have just surfing online. You look at YouTube, flicker, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia stack, overflow. All of these, I mentioned earlier, the people out there in the community, create fast quantities of very often high quality content and I've learned tons of things, My wife trusts made us a lovely holiday meal based on everything that she learned about how to prepare the meal from from videos and and recipe sites For open educational resources.
Specifically, we've seen a lot of government or institutional moves being supported and populated with content. Also open course where repurposed content from other uses from materials that we're being created for in class uses. And then, of course, community generated content. Probably the best example that I can think of is OER, you open, educational resources, university and the like is there, and they're definitely worth looking at.
Also something to be aware of is the need for content, authoring and version control tools for myself are using number of desktop tools like word or Google docs or slides etc. But we also need to attend to supporting web authoring the most common or blogger and wordpress. A lot of people these days are using GitHub or get lab as platforms for writing and not just for software development because they allow for good, versioning control and also community participation.
So large number of people can contribute. Press books is another platform which is popular and widely used. And then for the creation of audio and video content audacity open broadcasting system. Open shot and even use my phone, which you can see here to record contents. And what I like about my phone is that it produces a text-based transcript as I'm talking and, and that's really important because we want to have content in multiple media, not just audio, not just video, but you'll audio video text.
I try to make sure there are versions of all the resources that I create Another weakness noted in the literature is awareness and there's a recognized need for material that is free and available and it's free and available. So you'd think people would want it but they don't know about it.
So it needs to be marketed and needs to be collated in a database properly because there are well intention professors who have no idea, the stuff exists, Probably the best example out there in the field that I know of is NASA and the national aeronautics and space administration in the United States.
And if you're not familiar with the stuff that they're doing on online to support open content, have a look at their website. They have a wide range of support not just for producing the content, but for creating awareness as on the slide here, this is one of the posters that they produce for each.
One of the space missions that they do. This was STS 131 and they particularly the handle mailing lists, newsletters, their social media, they have conferences. They even have programs where they bring people into NASA, or they have programs in different communities, you know, like kid astronaut kind of programs, which are very popular and very good from marketing for open and where open educational resources, we can draw from that there's, you know, organizations like the creative commons, open learning platform.
There's the open education conference, which is very focused on awareness. The OER comments and OER, hubs is, well, our good for promoting awareness. And if you're not familiar with them already, I would point you to the common wealth of learning who's been involved in this for many years. Another aspect of open educational resources, that is of a concern to people, is the perception of quality.
Now, most people survey most teachers in instructors, surveyed feel that OER is of sufficient quality, but they do have a lack of time to evaluate OER. And then, of course, there is the perception of the wider community, which isn't strong as the people who are working directly with the content.
Well, how do we assure perceptions of quality in other fields? Mostly the examples that we can look to are things like the ISO standards and certification product testing and reporting organizations and then mechanisms for review and moderation, this is an area, which is well known in other fields. Everything from cars to food quality.
All of these things, come with certifications reviews and testing. And a similar approach is recommended for open education or resources and this is sort of being brought into place. But any institution that is supporting OER should be thinking about what is the best way we can certify it, what is the best way we can?
Make sure it is reviewed and tested. There's a thing out there. And again, the links in the comments on the slide called the tips framework, and these four elements can be monitored and assessed for an insurance of OER quality. So you attend to the teaching and learning processes and used by the resource, the information and material content making sure that it's accurate.
Making sure that it's fair making sure that it's reliable and non-discriminatory looking at the presentation product. The and the formats you know is the presentation, even readable is an accessible to people. And then finally if you're using a larger system, looking at the technical and technology for the system, just simple questions of, is it available or just it?
Go offline from time to time? Is it usable can people navigate their way through it? Things like that. And so looking for notifications or at the very least standards for these things is recommended to ensure that people perceive the quality of open education or resources, Libraries and librarians, play a major role in the next item curation is an integral part of the normal workflow of data.
And of course therefore applies to open educational resources. Good examples of this can be found in media in journalism, where they deal with curation questions on a day-to-day basis because they're not just producing the news or the television programs for today. They also mean a very large library of all of these resources so that they can go back to historical sources compare.
What happened in the past with what's happening now and use resources that they've previously collected in order to add to today's new story, you'll often see on TV news. For example, they'll have like file footage. That's part of the curation processes, in terms of library, services related to curation, probably support for scholarly.
Communication is the most prevalent. But as well. There's a need for subject liaisons and of course administration direct support to the teaching and learning function and providing public service and reference for the wider community. Are also very important related to this is the concept of open data and when we talk about open education or resources, we don't talk about data nearly enough but especially as a time has gone.
By we're more and more interested in immediate access to real world data to support our open educational resources. This can be difficult and tricky but we really see the need. Look at our response, our global response to the covid-19 pandemic. In order to address this with services, protective equipment, vaccines medical support, it's cetera.
We required a global open data network of medical results shared research. Shared resources to facilitate the collaboration needed to, to address this worldwide phenomenon. What we're doing in open, education isn't as immediate as the coronavirus, but it's just as important. And so, within the field of OER, we need to be thinking about, not just documents.
And and, and, and pages, and worksheets and, and things like that. But also open data sets and if you look at OER comments, you'll see a list of open data sets. It's very limited to start with, there's another resource in the links as well. Things to keep in mind are how to provide also, how to access this open data.
Typically we use what's known as an application programming interface in order to access it, there's a whole science to that, like I can't get into. But as a supporter of OER, you will want to be able to enable and support people working. With this data will typically use a platform or an application like Jupiter notebooks or a kaggle which is an easy way to access and Jupiter notebook which is kind of like a combination of text and data and programming all mixed into one platform discoverability.
This is an issue that's frequently cited as a concern by people looking at open educational resources to quote, one of them. We need to know where to go for high quality resources, that will fit with our course goals and that can be easily adopted by us and our students.
Well, they're in the world. We see discoverability all the time. Most of us turn right away to search services like Google being or even duck duck, go for anonymous search services but also we use other tools and techniques. Like for example a hashtag where we label our own data to make it findable.
We also rely quite a bit on things like subscriptions in podcasts. I subscribe to a number of nailing lists. I also subscribe to a number of podcasts and these are ways where the material comes to me. I don't have to look for it and then I also use artificial intelligence to scan a large body of literature and pull out the resources that are related to projects that I'm working on.
And example of this is feedly. They have a application called Leo, which does this for me, In terms of managing our own resources when we're creating them and curating them and storing them. We want to be attended to five, key principles under the acronym. Fair, we want them to be findable, interoperable accessible, and reusable.
And so, as long as we're attending to these things are open, educational resources will be discoverable and that's simply discoverable. They'll actually be usable by the people who discover them, They'll be usable in the formats that they need. They'll be able to be used in different platforms in different applications supporting open, education or resources, finally is a key area as well.
And again a number of publications point to the need for institutional support. It's critical for any innovation or staffing engagement but what's key here is that what you're in? Its institutions policies are will reflect how staff will approach OER. You know, staff always look to what the policies are, what the people at the top are doing.
And if they're supporting open educational resources, then the staff will how to make this happen, I work for a government agency and when we want our managers and administrators to support something, we have to perform some kind of an impact calculation. So this will consist of a logic model or theory of change, showing how the specific practices that we undertake will result in impact.
We have to identify and track outputs and more importantly, outcomes are actual changes in the environment using what are known as key performance indicators. And I know it sounds very reductive and mathematical but you can't convince people about something without providing an actual measurement of the sort of thing that you're talking about, you need to be able to show them.
And finally need to be in terms of what are called benefits. And that is to say the actual improvements in the lives, the learning, and the prospects of the people that your servicing In the world of open educational resources, this means documenting the impact. There are number of publications out there talking about the financial savings that can be realized, but also as well and equally important, the outcomes and the student learning that is promoted as well.
In terms of supporting OER showing the staff and and, and students in the institution that it is valued through such mechanisms of promotion and tenure for people participating in OER, initiatives is a significant way of seeing support and increasing purchase of patient and of course the probably shouldn't go with how it's saying training and development, support are also needed.
Maybe not necessarily in the form of actual courses. The organizations that I look at sometimes I'll offer courses, they'll also offer training resources, they'll have seminars, they'll have peer supporters, a range of professional development support opportunities that they create in order to make it easier to access OER. Finally, looking at the funding models, there's a range of funding models.
I studied these in 2005, they still continue to be within the realm of possibilities today, everything from endowment. If you can find a rich person to support, what you're doing to memberships of organizations or even individuals looking for donations looking for ways that you can add value added services that help pay for your core OER work, finding sponsors finding institutions, that'll fund the work finding governments, that'll fund the work.
And to me, that's always been the most reliable way of actually getting support. And then, of course, we cannot forget the role and the evolvement of the community itself in supporting and sustaining open educational resources. And in fact, I would say without engaging and involving the community. That's instructors and tutors that's learners.
Whether they be adults or children. And the wider community, unless they're actually contributing maybe not in terms of money, but certainly, in terms of resources, it becomes without that contribution. It becomes very difficult to sustain open educational resources. Well, that's been a very quick trip through the subject and I hope you find this useful.
And in some ways, perhaps enlightening. I wish you again, a good afternoon. Thanks once again to LIS Academy in Bangalore, for supporting this talk. It's been a pleasure to be with. You have a happy New Year. I look forward to seeing you again. I'm Stephen Downs. Thank you very much.
And giving any meds yet, it was the quantum, exhaustive.
Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca
Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 2:36 p.m.
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