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Current State

I would like to welcome everyone here today to this brown lunch events that’s being hosted by the library in conjunction with the Teaching Center, the place I represent. The topic of this session today befits the theme of this week - Open Education Week. I would like to make this session as informative as you want it to be and as interactive as our brains need it to be in order to take in the essential bits that you need for your own understanding of the matter. This is why I would like to add a few elements that allow you to share information, experiences and/ or questions with your partners to your sides and with all of us in this room.

A word up front concerning the materials and references I use to present the topic. I will share those openly and have posted the links on my twitter account. My twitter account is also the place to go to for the very first activity which I would like to task you with to help us all get a better idea of who we are and why we are here. I suppose that there is a different range of familiarity with OER in the room, and I would like for us all to know where on that scale I will meet the most of you and which needs might have to be met at maybe another point somehow. Open Education is a vast field and the hour we have today can be the start of a more profound discussion if you so wish.

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No need to login in
Just google twitter and my name
Then click on link

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Dimensions Open Education
The 5 R’s
Late Bloomer Canada
Impact Research
Repositories
OER at Uleth
Potential

Having gotten to known each other better, I am glad that my session is planned in a way to cover most of the questions and fields of interest that brought people here. If at any point you feel, you want to know more - feel invited to raise your questions any time or provide them as feedback at the end of the session.

As this outline shows you, there is a combination of things that make up the current picture of OER. To understand the situation today, requires a quick run through the steps that got us here, starting from the coinage of the terminology and early beginnings, to the development of legal options to grant others the free use as indicated in the Open in the word Open Educational Resources. We will also look at the research being done in this field to see how the results of that research connect to the situation today and to the questions what OER could mean in the future - generally across the globe and very specifically here at home on our campus too.

Before I go into the individual parts, however, I would like to tell you how I am personally tied to this topic and what my motivation is to advocate and practice Open Education.

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0

1

By Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK (Studium Uploaded by tm) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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1998

1000

2002

The first anniversary goes back farthest in time and relates to the day when the concept of ‘open content’ got first defined almost 20 years ago by David Wiley (a mover and shaker in the OER scene and then PhD today he is Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning,^[1] Education Fellow at Creative Commons,^[2] and Adjunct Faculty of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University) who then meant to describe all materials accessible in digital format for others to use and to share

In 2002 the term OER got into people’s vocabulary when at the first UNESCO Global OER forum on Open courseware it got first used to designates "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.

During the time that Wiley had labelled sharable digital materials with the term open content, I was lucky to have gotten a scholarship to England, where I learned to my amazement that a university education was not free - on the contrary, my British fellow students had to take out heavy student loans and even more shocking still was to me the fact that my foreign friends from outside the EU had to invest at least triple the amount of EU citizens. I said I was lucky, and I truly was because the right of not having to pay study fees in Germany applied to my exchange year at Manchester University as well. So I was standing in front of that library quite a few times wondering how it could be that there were so great disparancies bw me and my peers in the classes that I took.

Reference:

Picture Manchester University Library By DPOrman (Photograph taken by DPOrman) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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By WiNG (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

1000

2007

Picture by Shuttleworth Foundation

That theme of inequality in access to knowledge and education came up again a few times 10 years later too, when I would take the ferry to work, for instance, which meant that I would approach the skyline on HK island and thus be facing the centres of immense wealth, where I knew many Hongkongers worked, but didn’t truly benefit from. Many of my students at the time told me the reason why they were planning to wait with marriage and kids just for the sheer dread of the costs that family life would involve.

So speaking of the year 2007 leads me to the second anniversary I hinted at earlier. That year a small meeting was held in Cape Town, the aim of which was to accelerate efforts to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education. Hosted by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation, the meeting brought together people from different nations who discussed ways of potential cooperation. The first outcome was the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It is meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow. In Cape Town, meeting participants explored how their separate initiatives could work together to achieve much broader, deeper impact. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, authored jointly by all those who attended the meeting, was the first concrete outcome from these discussions. A number of additional collaborations on open education projects have also emerged. Among the participants were representatives of Rice University (for project Connexions), Wikimedia, CC, Utah State Uni, Cape Town Uni, Dept of Ed Uganda, African Virtual Society, Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Australia, Commonwealth of Learning

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1000

2012

The 3rd of the major OER anniversaries related to an event that has proven most influential in the course of OER acceptance and use so far. The event was the World Open Educational Resource Congress which was held at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters, in Paris in June 2012 and resulted in the Paris OER Declaration.

It builds upon several United Nations and UNESCO declarations and conventions, like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26.1), that state “Everyone has the right to education”; The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 13.1), which recognizes “the right of everyone to education”

Because education is regarded as a universally human right, the declaration calls on governments for action to realize the benefits of OP. The declaration contains a list of 10 points that in their totality can foster awareness and use of OER – contributing to social inclusion and lifelong learning.

· Facilitate enabling environments for ICT – bridge the digital divide.

· Reinforce the development of strategies of policies on OER.

· Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.

· Support capacity building for the sustainable development of materials – support institutions and teachers in building OER.

· Foster strategic alliances for OER.

· Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.

· Encourage research on OER.

· Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing OER.

· Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.

2012 marks also the year when I moved here and got to take advantage of the different forms the realisation of the goals to lower barriers to education took as they affected my teaching of languages then too because resources got more plentiful that helped my open up my language classrooms to more students too - started teaching online and use resources openly available - tech tools

Reference:

http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/Events/Paris%20OER%20Declaration_01.pdf

Beaven, Ana; Comas-Quinn, Anna; Sawhill, Barbara. (Eds). (2013). Case Studies of Openness in the Language Classroom. Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2013.9781908416100

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OER in greater context

OER are just one of the aspects that Open Education encompasses. Besides the resources or content as it is called here, it also includes tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide. Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21^st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.

OE is a basic human right, and it is also an essential tool for individuals and society to solve the challenges of the present and seize the opportunities of the future.

Reference:

Inamorato dos Santos, A., Punje, Y., Castano-Munos, J. (2016) Opening up Education: A support Framework for Higher Education Institutions. JRC Science for Policy Report, EUR 27938 EN; doi: 10.2791/293408

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Definition: OER

"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."

Definition by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

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Dimensions Open Education
The 5 R’s
Late Bloomer Canada
Impact Research
Repositories
OER at Uleth
Potential

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5 ‘s

David Wiley. (2014) The Access Compromise and the 5th R. Retrieved March 3, 2017 from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

For Wiley (1): Introduced a framework for the use of OER first in 2007. Back then, he’d described 4 activities as the core of thinking about the bundle of OER resources and those permitted activities as he called it then the right to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. For him that meant that resources would fall into the category of open and educational if they allowed free and unfettered access to the resource, and gave (2) whatever copyright permissions that are necessary for users to engage in the 4R.activities.

When publishers started to move away from selling educational content to leasing access via subscriptions as a way to respond to the different model of operation undertaken when using OER, Wiley started thinking about what implications that new business model had on ownership and personal property of students and educational institution. Against the logic that digital access should make content more readily available in contrast to past times when publishing was still an expensive enterprise, publishers continuously increase their prices and actively promote their leasing models as ingenious access routes without actually naming it as what it is an “attack on personal property”

Change slide

This was why Wiley thought that a redirection of focus would first have to come from the OER movement and he thereby proposed an expansion of the definition of OER and their use by the additional r

– Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content

– Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

– Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

– Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

– Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

For redistributing verbatim copies of this page: This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

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While a free and perpetual grant of the 5R permissions by means of an "open license" qualifies a creative work to be described as open content or an open educational resource, there are two factors that can impede with the levels of openness, namely technical choices and legal restrictions

Open licenses requirements like the mandate that derivative works adopt a certain license and restrictions like the prohibition of "commercial" use make open content and OER less open than they would be without these requirements and restrictions. With regards to the technical choices that content publishers make - their choices can interfere with the freedom to exercise all 5 of the Rs if

Editing tools are extremely expensive so that cost might prohibit from revising or remixing
The Level of (technical) expertise that is required is too high
The content is l published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document

References:

Varying Degrees of Openness retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/

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Licensing Basics

Intending to venture into the realm of OER becomes easier when one understands the basics of licensing. For all the fine print that comes with individual sets of preliminaries and regulations, you do have the experts on our campus/ in our library to consult with, if you wish gain a more profound insight - today it will have to suffice to know that OER are usually licensed in ways that allow a number or all 5 of the rs we’ve looked at earlier. Two ways to publish your work freely - that is to grant permissions on top of your copyright - are the two license types below.

The double c here stands for the creative commons that offer 6 different license types that differ in their range of openness depending on the restrictions that they lack of include. The public domain assembles all works for which creators have willingly given up all copyright - as a donation or gift so to say or in the case of or whose work has passed on into the PD after a set period of time that waive all legal rights to CPR shared with the community or the works of people who have a passed a set amount of time ago when their works have then entered the public domain.

CC and the public domain are commonly referred to when talking about OER, but the set of available options is by far not yet exhausted as we can see here

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License types

There are many more open licence suits out there - all of which require familiarity with the legal terms attached to not infringe any rights that might affect any of the actions we summarised under the five R

I didn’t want to go into detail with this slides, just show you the range of options that include Copyight and Copyleft licenses which are often not automatically compatible. So again my reference here is to contact Rumi if you need specific advice on matters relating to a more profound understanding concerning your open licensing options. Especially the copyleft licenses listed here - the one that require that any changes/derivative works must be available under the same terms/ preserve invariant sections/ distribution only with full text of the license do often not allow a transfer in the CC licenses for the reason that attribution and sourceneed to be disclosed only at bare minimum.

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Creative Commons

Let’s return once more to one of the best known suites of open licenses that have become a global standard to promote sharing, collaboration and innovation by making it very easy for everyone to freely access and use OER are CC.

The iconograph on the right shows the different licensing types that can be attached to a work dependent upon the creator’s wish as to how open that license should be. In the yellow area on the bottom, we see the more closed options that come pretty close to what copyright stands for. While sharing is still allowed, we see that no changes can be made (ND), the materials cannot be used to make a profit of them (NC) - use as it, but with no financial gain.

All 5 rs are possible only with the 2 licenses on the top - for which only attribution is necessary, but you are otherwise free to change things, mix, earn money.

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Distribution of ~ 1.3 billion of CC-licensed works across 9 million website in 09/ 2016

To give you an idea of how license types are distributed, I put up the slide of the left to show you that the freer licenses typeswith fewer restrictions are more frequently used

2015: Active cc communities on all continents when cc licesing hit 1 billion mark

License chooser available in 34 languages and prominently featured on affiliate websites worldwide
Since Nov 25, 2013 there is a global licence - 4.0 that was rebuild in a 2-year process with an international user base in mind, eliminating the need to create custom versions for each jurisdiction. Build on 3.0 licences that had been adapted to the laws of more than 35 countries.
The 4.0 international licenses include provisions related to database rights, personality rights, data mining.
They have been endorsed by the European Commission for use by public sector institutions and the White House for federal gov datasets
14 countries have made national commitments to open education (among them UK/ Scotland/ US/ CN/ Australia/ NZ/….)
Big foundations like Hewlett followed suit with progressive governments by adding an open license requirement to their grants
UNESCO adopted OA policy in 2013, requiring that UNESCO publications be licensed under CC SA 3.0 IGO

Amount of OER media under cc licence e.g. utube - videos, bandcamp - music, https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/data.html#data-notes-and-acknowledgments

Reference:

State of the Commons - Slide on left. Retrieved from https://stateof.creativecommons.org/report/

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Dimensions Open Education
The 5 R’s
Late Bloomer Canada
Impact Research
Repositories
OER at Uleth
Potential

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Timeline OE(R)

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By Connormah (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

OER achievements in Canada are still few in numbers, but considerable in scope and impact considering the short period of time Canada has been an active part on the global OER scene regardless. It’s been only 5 years ago that CA entered the OER conversation.

2012 Then it became obvious that the BC gov seemed to have taken the recommendations of the Paris OER declaration to heart because it addressed the crucial topics of transparency of knowledge, the power of sharing, access to ed, student debt, community involvement and collaboration by launching the Open Textbook Initiative for which it provided $1 million to fund the the creation of 40 textbooks for the highest enrolled HE subjects in BC. The focus was on modification of existing materials and adapting it to fit Canadian context and the resource pool BC OTI was drawing from were American repositories like the OpenStax + OTN which had peer-reviewing processes in place to vet the quality.

2013 click BC government funded 20 more tbs with another $1 million (This was also the year the Financial Consumer Agency of CA recommended Canadian students to budget $800-1000/ yr for tb

In 2014 click Alberta took an active stance by joining the OER discussion the provinces of SA, BC - which resulted in the Memorandum of Understanding on OER (BC, AB, SA) a document that lays out the intention to work collaboratively on creation and sharing of OER

2015 click BC Campus receives $25,000 for 3 yrs from William&Flora Hewlett Foundation. It’s also the year the College Textbook Affordability Act was passed that emphasized the need to expand the use of Open tb in order achieve savings for students. The same year an increase in research into efficacy and effeciency of OER use was undertaken. In Alberta the ABOER Initiative started their Phase 1 - in which grants were awarded for awareness campaigns and review of OER resources. This then resulted in more creation and adoption of resources across the universities in the province. See ABOER website for more info.

2016 click BC Campus OTP comprises of 168 Open Textbooks (78 peer-reviewed) and 82 ancillary resources. A total 702 books have been adopted by 20,000 + which equals savings of 2.5 million to students. According to BCC the success factors are gov support, awareneess, communication, hands-on support, empirical evidence, encouragement and incentives. The same year announces OER Policy Development Tool for governance officials at HEIs in the US and Canada/ BC

2016 ABOER Initiative Phase II: Adoption grants awarded and 3 major OER events organized in Calgary and Maskwacis

Click this leads us to look at the present and see what the current state of OER is -

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‘tree growth’ by __skwrl__

CC-BY-NC 2.0

via flicker

Use + acceptance

1 quality materials

2 high-profile projects/ programs

3 institutional focus

4 media coverage

5 technological advances

Current State:

I chose this picture for the reason that it shows some fresh vivid young growth on the tree and in the background, which I think suits the description of the current state of Open Education and OER rather well because the

Click overall use and acceptance of OER is on the rise, not only in CA, Northern America, but worldwide. This is due to a number of factors. Click

While just a few years ago educators were worried about the small pool of materials and also were not sure of the quality of what they could find, those use expectations are less prevalent because the number of high-quality materials available in well-reputed repositories is growing as we speak.
Click The biggest impact on OER adoption and creation is due to high profile and high quality projects and programs like MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching of California State Uni), OpenStax (UoRice) and the Open Textbook Network (Uo Minnesota) that have reputed peer-review systems in place

Click 3+4+5 Media coverage and increasing support of OER on the institutional level, faculty incentive programs as well as technological advances have made alternative materials more attractive to an increasing number of faculty

Speaking of OER, many people focus primarily on textbooks as the major academic resource and the rising cost of them has attracted much attention over the past years, especially because it turns out that as textbook prices are rising, average student expenditures on them stays flat which is due to a few factors, such as uni and bookstore initiatives geared towards containing cost. There is some concern, however, too that fewer students are actually buying their tb and may therefore miss out in terms of outcomes and learning. Click

Reference:

Salem, J.R. (2016) Open Pathways to Student Success: Academic Library Partnerships for Open Educational Resource and Affordable Course Content Creation and Adoption. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 43, 34-38. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133316301409

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Can you Guess by how much prices have risen?

Have people guess - The course of textbooks is going up faster than any other consumer product, and as prices are getting steeper, the cost of and access to course materials has emerged as a student success issue.

Click

References:

NBCNews Video http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/show-me/video/how-rising-textbook-prices-mirror-rising-drug-costs-495097411779
Popken, B. (August 2015). College Textbook Prices Have Risen 1,041 Percent Since 1977.Retrieved from http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/freshman-year/college-textbook-prices-have-risen-812-percent-1978-n399926
Salem, J.R. (2016) Open Pathways to Student Success: Academic Library Partnerships for Open Educational Resource and Affordable Course Content Creation and Adoption. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 43, 34-38. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133316301409

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What effects do high textbook costs have?

In how far is that really a student success issue you might wonder, so maybe give it a moment to think about the effects that rising textbook costs have. Ask participants to come up with a few in a brief exchange with their neighbours

Some of the effects you just mentioned were empirically collected in a student survey of a grander scale at Florida Virtual Campus last year and were listed on this slide which I have taken from a talk that Robin DeRosa, an American literature prof and outspoken Open Pedagogy practitioner in the US has given in BC a few days ago. After she had realised that many of the students she worked with were similarly affected by the often kind of unplanned for hidden costs of higher Ed, she’s made drastic changes to her practice.

Reference:

Robin deRosa (March, 2017). Beyond OER: The Promises, Pitfalls, and Potential of Open Education.Presentation at Langara College, BC.

https://stream.langara.bc.ca/media/t/0_87tsjkq1

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Dimensions Open Education
The 5 R’s
Late Bloomer Canada
Impact Research
Repositories
OER at Uleth
Potential

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OER Research: Impact Studies

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As far as efficacy is concerned, a review on 16 US studies published by John Hilton last year showed that OER have a potential to make HE more accessible to students. He looked at 16 empirical studies for which OER that replaced traditional tb had been used in comparison with the traditional tb. The studies that looked at st success rates and outcomes generally compared students in treatment and control groups showed that students in the treatment groups had higher test scores, lower failure rates and lower drop out rates. In terms of perception faculty and students are reported to like low cost factor, the quality and up-to date content of OER.

References:

US: Outcomes and perception

Hilton, J. III. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Education Tech Research and Development, 64(4), 573 - 590. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x

CA: Jhangiani & Jhangiani (in press). Investigating the perceptions, use, and impact of open textbooks: A survey of post-secondary students in British Columbia. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Retrieved from https://mfr.osf.io/render?url=https://osf.io/wn9fz/?action=download%26mode=render

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Jhangiani, R.S., Pitt, R., Hendricks, C., Key, J., & Lalonde, C. (2016). Exploring faculty use of open educational resources at British Columbia post-secondary institutions. BCcampus Research Report. Victoria, BC: BCcampus.

Retrieved from https://bccampus.ca/files/2016/01/BCFacultyUseOfOER_final.pdf

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Dimensions Open Education
The 5 R’s
Late Bloomer Canada
Impact Research
Repositories
OER at Uleth
Potential

One of the barriers that is often being mentioned by people who are interested in adopting OER - is the fact that the wealth of information and resources can be overwhelming and to navigate purposefully. Among the recommendations generally given by adopters to newcomers is the task to first discern the teaching/ learning purpose before the start of the OER hunt. With a clear idea of objectives it becomes easier to determine what kind of resource could be utilised to achieve that goal - like let’s say a video to help visualize a certain process students need to grasp or a picture that can help make a point. The key is to start out slow.

In my own journey as a language instructor as well as in my role as consultant with the Teaching Centre, I have been browsing the net for OER for a while now and the result of my perusal is shared on a virtual whiteboard that brings together many of the major repositories in one place. Click

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Browse the Wealth of Repositories Links to original sites appear in pink

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Align OER with SDG 4 and others

A recently published global education monitoring report for the UNESCO highlights the importance and urgency of the SDG4 - a goal that was set for 2015, namely that 70% of low income countries will see their kids finish primary is projected for 2030 now, and only if governments collaborative internationally . The benefits and potential of OER can be harnessed to help change educaton in accordance with global changes so that the skills people learn help guarantee a more sustainable development.

This study has argued that the primary purpose of UNESCO’s contribution to international collaboration on OER should be to facilitate policy and practice in mainstreaming OER at all levels of education and to have more structured information sharing through a regular reporting system.

OER can be used to teach the public they need to know as citizens of a democratic society. Education and solving SDGs are connected. Citizens need the connection to the govs and ed system. As SDGs are constantly changing the information around them needs to be updated in real time. This can be done with OER due to their digital nature.

Why connect OER to SDG4? (1) OER can be the education resources to teach the public about and are continuously updated by working on SDGs. (2) It would connect education institutions and people to solving SDGs, forming a new, positive connection between governments and their public education systems. (3) Global challenges / SDGs are constantly changing and OER can be updated in real time. (4) As learning spaces shift to open pedagogy, students can contribute to improving the open curriculum, work on complex and authentic SDG challenges, and have their work be used in their fields. (5) As working on SDGs is meaningful and the stakes are high (e.g., climate action, zero hunger, gender equality, no poverty, etc.), students are motivated to work smarter, learn more deeply, have an opportunity to contribute to society – by producing, revising, and sharing OER about SDGs – while they earn their degree.

References

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Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about open educational resources, but previous little has been written about how OER – or openness more generally – changes the practice of education. Substituting OER for expensive commercial resources definitely save money and increase access to core instructional materials. Increasing access to core instructional materials will necessarily make significant improvements in learning outcomes for students who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the materials (e.g., couldn’t afford to purchase their textbooks). However, there are much bigger victories to be won with openness.

Using OER the same way we used commercial textbooks misses the point. It’s like driving an airplane down the road. Yes, the airplane has wheels and is capable of driving down on the road (provided the road is wide enough). But the point of an airplane is to fly at hundreds of miles per hour – not to drive. Driving an airplane around, simply because driving is how we always traveled in the past, squanders the huge potential of the airplane. So what is the analogous additional potential of open educational resources, compared to commercial textbooks and other commercial resources?

References:

David Wiley: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

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ᖹᒧᐧᖹᖱᔪᒣᖽ 🔼Thank you 🔽 merci