TOUCANS Project Blog

Enabling universal access to higher education via openness and collaboration? Open webinars in March

Gabi Witthaus — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:55:18 +0000

The UN has noted that there are approximately 100 million adults in the world, mostly in developing countries, who are eligible to enter higher education, but cannot afford the enrolment fees. As part of our contribution to Open Education Week (5-9 March), we are hostng a series of three Webinars entitled “Enabling universal access to higher education via openness and collaboration?” at the University of Leicester. Speakers will exchange ideas on how the emerging culture of open access, combined with the existence of new collaborative partnerships such as the OERu (Open Educational Resources university), OERtest and others, might enable access to higher education – and accreditation - on a massive scale that would previously have been unthinkable. Initiatives such as the OERu are actively piloting new models for the sharing of resources and expertise in higher education, to enhance the quality of their existing provision and address needs beyond the boundaries of their traditional constituencies. To find out more, see the “Five things you should know about the OERu Network Plan”.

Click here to register (Or fill in the registration form below.)

Dates, times and confirmed speakers:

Tues 6 March, 9.30-11am UK time: Jim Taylor (University of Southern Queensland, an OERu Anchor Partner), Grainne Conole (University of Leicester) and Vasi Doncheva (Northtec Polytechnic, New Zealand – an OERu Anchor Partner)

Tues 6 March, 3.30-5pm: George Siemens (Athabasca University), Anthony Camilleri (EFQUEL – European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning; OERtest) and Gabi Witthaus (University of Leicester)

Wed 7 March, 9.30-11am UK time: Martin Weller and Patrick McAndrew (both from the Open University, UK), Sandra Wills (University of Wollongong, Australia)

(Watch this space: there are still some surprise speakers to be added!)

The webinars will be jointly hosted by the TOUCANS project and the ELKS community at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester. Many thanks to the speakers and their institutions for their support in enabling this sharing of knowledge.

Registration (it’s free ):

If you want to attend, please fill in the registration form below.

If you cannot see the embedded form, please click here to register.

Latest happenings at the OERu

Gabi Witthaus — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:29:42 +0000

There’s been a lot of activity amongst OERu (Open Educational Resource university) members over the last month – I’m going to summarise it in this post, as there doesn’t seem to be any single point of reference to find all this info.

Happening right now: an open course on open content licensing. There are over 800 people from more than 80 countries participating. In true OER spirit, all the course materials are available from the Wiki site (including some great quizzes to test your copyright knowledge – should be required tasks for everyone involved in OER projects!)
Possible future collaboration with MITx: MIT has launched a new platform, MITx, whereby informal learners will be able to not only access course materials, but also participate in online discussions and related activities, and obtain attendance certificates – for a nominal fee. There was some discussion on the OERu Google Groups list about liaising with MITx to establish whether there were any areas of productive collaboration – more to come about that in due course no doubt. There has also been some informal discussion on the mailing list about collaborating with OERtest, a Europe-based initiative which has similar aims to the OERu.
The summary of the Inaugural Meeting of OERTen partners, held in Novermber 2011, has been completed, including all the video and audio recordings. It’s a very well-structured and easy-to-read/view record of a significant milestone in the global open access movement in education.
An Australian newspaper reported on a free, open course in Politics, the Community and the Common Good that was run at the University of Wollongong over the 2009-10 summer. ‘Subject co-ordinator Glenn Mitchell said the course had a great impact on students who had never been involved with a university: ‘‘It took those students to places intellectually and academically that they had never been before,’’ he said. ‘‘For some of the students it excited them so much that they either began to seriously think about going and doing a degree or some actually enrolled in a degree.’’ The University of Wollongong will use this course as a model for its participation in the OERu.
An excellent summary of developments in the OERu to the end of 2011 was written by Jim Taylor for the Australian publication, Campus Review. (You need to create a free account to read it.) Paul Stacey also gave a great summary of developments in the OERu over the past year, in his blog post “2011 The Year of Open”. Tony Bates referred to the OERu as the “most noticeable” development in open educational resources in 2011.
An assessment and credentialisation practice survey was carried out in December: “This survey is designed to collect information regarding the various credentialing paths and existing practices for assessment and credit transfer at universities colleges, and polytechnics. The aim is to identify existing practices which could potentially provide opportunities for OER learners to gain formal recognition for their learning to assist with the planning of the OER university network.” No results available as yet, but they will no doubt make interesting reading when they’re posted.
A great discussion took place about how to get volunteers involved and actively engaged in the OERu. An example – one interesting idea from Joyce McKnight of Empire State College/State University of New York : “We could develop a pre-evaluated free training course using ScopE (moodle) that would teach folks how to be volunteers, teach some basic listening skills, program planning techniques, how to work with OER’s and how to help students maintain a record of their learning. For evaluation such a course could require reflective papers and volunteering with a set number of students (between five and ten, maybe) who would be asked to anonymously evaluate their work, Their reflective papers and the feedback from students could be evaluated and credit awarded to the volunteer who could then use it for PLA as part of their own OER-u materials. If it were an Empire State College course I would probably recommend that it be offered for two advanced level undergraduate credits that could be used to meet the college’s educational planning requirement. A more intensive course could be offered for graduate level students.”
Thirteen courses were proposed as “prototypes”, and members voted on the suitability of these courses for the OERu pilot, which will start in September 2012. (Look down the left hand panel of your screen for poll results.)
The list includes one course produced by the Saylor Foundation (Art Appreciation and Techniques (Saylor ARTH101B)), as well as mention of the Saylor Foundation in relation to a proposed Psychology course – a very encouraging sign of potential collaboration.
Some informal discussion has begun on APL (Accreditation of Prior Learning) policy in relation to all of the above activities.

Altogether, an impressive list of activities, most of which took place over the holiday season. If I’ve left anything out of this list, I hope someone will send a comment or drop me a line!

Open to sharing in higher education – from Leicester to Durban

Gabi Witthaus — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:50:35 +0000

This morning I gave a presentation at the Durban University of Technology’s E-learning Festival. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to join the audience in beautiful Durban, so I presented via Blackboard Collaborate. (Link to recording to be added soon.) My theme was open educational resources, which was a relatively new concept to the audience. I started by giving a potted history of OERs and open courseware, and then introduced the OER university concept, as one possible future in which OERs could meaningfully address the problem of lack of access to quality higher education opportunities in developing countries.

Open to sharing in higher education

View more presentations from witthaus

The post-presentation discussion focused on how students and teachers in rural areas might be able to access these computer-based resources, and we talked about the importance of offline access to resources, as well as multiple formats of OERs, ensuring that text-based materials can be accessed electronically (without requiring proprietary programmes such as MS Office) and then distributed on paper. There was also some discussion about the cultural aspects of materials being used by a global audience. I made reference to a paper by Andy Lane at the Open University, who found that in the early stages of OER creation, authors had attempted to transform their materials to make them more appealing to a global audience, but this had been very resource-intensive and there was no evidence to show that it made the materials more usable by others. Research by the TESSA project in fact showed that teachers in African contexts did not mind the “Euro-centricness” of UK-produced OERs – they understood that the materials had been produced for use in a specific context, and that they needed to be adapted and mediated for learners in other contexts.

We also discussed the kind of support that might (or might not) be needed for students trying study alone with the help of OERs. The example of Sugata Mitra’s “hole-in-the-wall” project was mentioned as evidence that not all learners need an expert teacher to guide them through the learning process. Mitra’s research focused on young children however, and I am extremely curious to see what kinds of strategies adults adopt when faced with opportunities to engage in formal education in a relatively unstructured and unsupported way on the scale envisaged by the OERu.

I’ll end with a few quotes from the text box during the presentation, which give a flavour of the excitement within the audience towards the concept of OERs and the OERu:

Hooray for Creative Commons- a library vision for some of us in DUT!

This is radical and exciting, viva! the world is changing with incredible speed, for the better.

Thanks to my colleagues at Leicester – Ming, Pal, Paul, Ale and Terese – who shared of their wisdom as I created (and discarded) earlier drafts in preparation for today’s presentation And a big thank you to DUT colleagues for the great opportunity to participate in your festival today. Please feel free to continue the conversation in the Comments thread below.

Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal speak about Athabasca University and the OERu

Gabi Witthaus — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:07:06 +0000

This week I’ve had the good fortune to interview both Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal, who were visiting Leicester for a meeting with colleagues on a new, EU-funded OER project called POERUP (Policies for OER Uptake). I asked them both to give me their thoughts on how Athabasca was going to go about its participation in the OERu in terms of the four areas outlined in the graphic below. Both noted that they would be speaking more from a personal perspective than from a formal, institutional perspective, as the plans for the OERu are still in their infancy. A few highlights from the interviews follow.

: The four issues discussed in the TOUCANS interviews

Curriculum

There are no fixed plans for the curriculum for the OERu pilot yet, but Athabasca has some materials on Astronomy and Business that could be used. As a longer term strategy, Rory was keen on the idea of working with the Saylor Foundation and using some of their courses that have already undergone a rigorous evaluation process by academic peers. Another longer term objective would be to offer all of the 300-odd courses which have very small numbers of student enrolment as OERu courses, as this would be way of benefitting from the “long tail” of potential students available in the worldwide OERu pool. A win-win situation for everyone, I’d imagine.

Assessment

Athabasca offers students the option to take “challenge exams”, whereby they can sign up for the exams without going through the course via the usual, tutor-supported route. At present only a small minority of students choose this option; with the OERu these numbers could increase dramatically. Terry explained to me how the “at-home” exam system might be managed in future to validate identity of the person doing the exam and to minimise cheating: it involves a setup whereby the student’s keyboard is monitored (using biometric info based on a sample of the student’s physical typing ); the student’s computer is completely locked down so that no browsers or apps are available during the exam; and a webcam with 180 degree panoramic vision of the room is installed. Exams are then monitored in real time by virtual invigilators (who may be in another country, such as India), watching several screens simultaneously. According to Terry, the Western Governor’s University does 20,000 exams a year by this “at home” method, and a pilot is planned at Athabasca for next year. It’s an amazing system, and one ideally suited to enabling inclusivity of education to all, even in the remotest areas of Canada with its vast distances between cities.

Accreditation

Whereas the requirement to recognise credits obtained by students at other institutions internationally seems to be something of a sticking point for some universities in the UK when the OERu is discussed, for Athabasca this is no problem at all. They already recognise credentials from all around Canada (and their own credits are recognised at all other Canadian universities apart from one), and they would have no problem in recognising credits given by the other OERu institutions for the pilot – although no prior arrangements exist with the University of Delhi and some equivalency testing would be needed there.

Student stupport

Terry shared with us his vision for a student support system that is based on the ELGG platform (recording here). The beauty of this system is that it is entirely student-driven, which makes it seem very suited to the aims and principles of the OERu. Rory’s vision is that students who learn through the OERu will eventually go on to become mentors for future students. He proposes offering these student mentors a reduced fee for their own future assessment via the OERu. The business rationale for that is that, simply by their presence, the mentors would enable a greater number of students to complete their courses, which would increase the scale of operations and enable the institution to afford the discounts to mentors.

I’ll end with Rory’s words of encouragement to everyone who wants to understand how the OERu will work:

Cost effectiveness is the key… How do we educate these 97 million learners … in a cost-effective manner? This is the first idea that I’ve seen that practical implementation is possible. And this could work. And the way it’d work is this: if we could get a cadre, so we get ten percent of them through, so that’s ten million students, but that means there’s a cadre of students who’ve done it, in all these little villages and towns all around the world, and they’re an example to the others, and then you can build on that and build on it and build, and that’s the way you do it. But not only that; we have developed self-motivated learners, and that’s what you need - you need a person who is a self motivated learner. That’s more important than anything they learn. And so we build that up and we’re away…

A very big thank you to Rory and Terry for their generosity with their time and wisdom.

18 Nov 2011

Note: This blog post was edited on 19 Nov. In the original post I had mistakenly indicated that Athabasca was already doing the “at-home” exams; however this is not yet in practice – it is under consideration and will be piloted next year. I had also referred to the “challenge exams” as a system, whereas they are currently being practised on a rather ad hoc basis with some systemic features. Thanks to Terry and Rory for the corrections.

Image credits: donkeyhotey; flipplinyank; ivanwalsh; erikcharlton. All published under a CC-by licence.

OERu Inaugural Meeting Day 1 highlights

Gabi Witthaus — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:46:33 +0000

It’s 3.30 am and I’m propped up in bed with my laptop… just finished watching the very interesting proceedings of day one of the inaugural planning meeting of the OERten (OERu tertiary education network) members which is being streamed live from Dunedin in New Zealand. The energy level in the room seemed high, and there really seems to be a sense of everyone working together towards a common purpose. Remote participants engaged actively on Twitter and Identi.ca, which made me feel as if I was (almost) in the room with everyone.

A few highlights:

Reps from all 13 of the universities in the OERten network were present. They introduced themselves briefly at the start of the session and explained why their institutions were involved in OERten. The rationales included a commitment to social responsibility, a belief in collaboration with other HE institutions in order to deliver to scale, a good business opportunity, the need for sustainable delivery models, and a desire to disrupt education.

Rory McGreal described the concept of “challenge exams” at Athabasca University in Canada, whereby students can opt to just sign up for the exam without having received tutorial support. Course materials and module outlines etc are made available to these students (for a fee).

Phil Ker from Otago Polytechnic gave a persuasive argument for the business case of the OERu concept. He has done a cost analysis and has concluded that assessment and accreditation services could be offered for 20-40% of the standard students’ fees. Courses with limited assessment (such as business studies, in his example) would be at the lower end of that scale, while courses with more formative assessment (such as carpentry) would be at the top end.

Jim Taylor from USQ coined the terms “free range learners” and “organic learning”. He stressed that we now have the technology to enable a pedagogy of discovery. He also mentioned the idea of creating e-tivities (with due credit to Gilly Salmon for the term and the accompanying five-stage model) for OERu students, and there was some discussion about the possibility of “continuous cohorts” of students who would work through the e-tivities as part of a portfolio assessment requirement.

A video that I had made to introduce the TOUCANS project to the OERten members (see link below) was shown. (Watching this as a remote participant was a weird experience. There was a massive lag in the video, making me appear severely drugged… Fortunately the slides and my voice seemed to be fine!) I’m grateful to Wayne for including this in the programme, as it will reduce the amount of explaining I have to do when I make contact with OERten members to interview them for TOUCANS.

The session ended with Jim Taylor putting forward a prototype for a 2012 pilot, along with an evaluation conducted according to CIPP principles (context, input, process and products, with reference to Shufflebeam). He suggested that the pilot should aim for around 100 students per course, with funding to ensure that they can all access the OERs at no cost. The official launch of OERu is expected to take place in 2013.

All in all a very interesting session, and worth staying up all night for

To be continued tomorrow…

Links:

Agenda: http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/2011.11_OERu_Meeting_Agenda

Live stream (and hopefully recording afterwards): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oeru

Proposal by Paul Stacey and SCOPE team at BCcampus for inaugural credential: http://wikieducator.org/images/e/e9/InauguralOERuCredential_(1).pdf

Etherpad discussion on the inaugural credential: http://abbott.bccampus.ca:9001/p/OERuSession2a

Virtual participants list: http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/2011.11_OERu_virtual_meeting_participants

Video introducing TOUCANS project to OERten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDKVosg8tpc

Five things you should know about the OERu network plan: http://wikieducator.org/images/7/7d/OERu.pdf

Visual representation by Judith Murray of Thompson Rivers University showing how they are seeing the shift from the current model of “Our students, our faculty, our materials” (three intersecting lifecycles) towards a model more suited to the OERu, which she described as “Any students, with anyone supporting them, using any materials, but with our assessment and accreditation”. Thanks to Vasi Doncheva for the picture: http://pic.twitter.com/xuCVmks0

Introducing TOUCANS to OERten

Gabi Witthaus — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:59:39 +0000

On 9th and 10th November, I will be attending the OERu Anchor Partner Meeting virtually. In a Skype call with Wayne Mackintosh last Friday, we discussed the possibility of me having a few minutes on the programme to introduce myself and the TOUCANS project to the OERten network. In the meantime, I’ll use this blog entry to summarise what the TOUCANS project is about and why it may be of interest to OERten members.

TOUCANS is a research project under the auspices of the Open University (UK)’s SCORE fellowship programme, funded by HEfCE, and it runs until the end of June 2012. My main research aim is to ascertain the attitudes and perceptions of stakeholders in the UK Higher Education sector towards the OERu concept, considering the notable absence of UK-based members amongst the Anchor Partners to date. I also hope to generate some guidelines or recommendations for institutions in the UK which may be considering participating in the OERu.

I will be the principal researcher on the project, supported by my SCORE mentor at the Open University, Dr Patrick McAndrew, other members of the SCORE fellows community, and my colleagues at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester, in particular Dr Alejandro Armellini. For more info about me, please see my bio.

One of my main research methodologies will be interviews – both with stakeholders in UK HE institutions and with committed OERten members. I will therefore be making contact with representatives of the OERten network after the inaugural meeting to try to set up interviews with them.

A few indicative questions for these interviews:

What courses or programmes are you planning to contribute to the OERu?
What is your business model for participating in the OERu? (Or: How will you ensure that your institution’s OERu offerings are financially viable?)
How are you planning to approach requests for recognition of accreditation given by other institutions in the OERten network?
What kind of support, if any, will your students be given?

I will then be arranging for a series of online webinars to raise awareness about the OERu amongst stakeholders in UK universities, and to start sharing findings from discussions with existing network members, such as options for business models, and ways of approaching accreditation frameworks. Interviews with UK stakeholders will follow.

I will be blogging here throughout the project – and also at Open Learning News.

I am very much looking forward to engaging with members (existing and potential) of the OERu community over the coming months on my research journey. Comments and feedback on my blogs will be welcomed.

Hello world!

Gabi Witthaus — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:59:07 +0000

This blog will focus on the research I’ll be carrying out over the next eight months for my SCORE fellowship, which I am doing from my base at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester, with the support of the Open University.