Open educational practices

Open educational practices (OEP) are teaching techniques that draw upon open technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning.[1][2] They may involve students participating in online, peer production communities [3] within activities intended to support learning [4] or more broadly, any context where access to educational opportunity through freely available online content and services is the norm.[1] Such activities may include (but are not limited to [1]), the creation, use and repurposing of open educational resources and their adaptation to the contextual setting.[4][5][6] OEP can also include the open sharing of teaching practices[1] and aim "to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on an institutional, professional and individual level".[7] The OEP community includes policy makers, managers/ administrators of organisations, educational professionals and learners.[5] OEP are also viewed as the next phase in OER development that continues to transform 21st century learning and learners.[5]

The Scope of Open Educational Practices

A database or repository of open educational resources is not open educational practice. OEP have a lifecycle of creation, use, and management. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. They focus on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources.[8]

Definitions

There is no canonical definition of open educational practice, however various groups and scholars have given their definition or view. One such scholar is Ehlers (2011) who defines OEP "as practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path".[9] A definition used by others either in its entirety[6] or as basis for further development.[1][5][6]

OEP Areas

Best practice case studies identify a number of OEP areas.[11]

  • Business Model for OEP
  • Commitment
  • Creation of OER
  • Digital Literacy
  • Incentives and/or Motivation
  • IPR Framework for OEP
  • Mindsets and Attitudes
  • Open Educational Practices
  • Partnerships
  • Quality Concepts
  • Relevance: How to Convince Others of OEP?
  • Repurposing OER
  • Sharing OER
  • Skills and Knowledge for OEP
  • Strategy and/or Policy for OEP
  • Support Mechanisms
  • Tools for Sharing
  • Using OER
  • Vision of OEP

These areas surround the following topics, with other studies identifying categories and elements of Open Educational Practices.

topics[11]

  • Using OER
  • Innovation
  • Learning
  • Improving Quality
  • Something Else

categories[1]

  • open educational resources
  • open/public pedagogies
  • open learning
  • open scholarship
  • open sharing (of teaching practice)
  • open technologies

elements[12]

  • Infrastructure (tools)
  • OER Use
  • Open Design
  • Adoption
  • Policy

Impact

Adopting OEP can lead to opportunities for collaborative learning through the affordances of Web 2.0 tools. In this context, open also refers to the learning environment where learner's set their own objectives rather than being restricted by those set externally (a closed environment).[8]

Open educational practices can also provide the experience and tools to help bridge the gap between formal and informal learning, and potentially an open source curriculum or emergent curriculum.[8]

Levels of Openness

The trajectory to Open Education Practices lies between the use of open pedagogical models and, resource use and creation.:[9]

Initiatives

The OPAL Consortium

OPAL members[5] Country
International Council for Open and Distance Education ICDE Norway
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation UNESCO France
Open University OU United Kingdom
European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning EFQUEL Belgium
Aalto University AALTO Finland
Universidade Católica Portugesa UCP Portugal
University Duisburg-Essen UDE Germany

The Open Educational Quality (OPAL) Initiative define Open Educational Practices (OEP) as "the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on institutional, professional and individual level".[7]

For the mainstreaming of Open Educational Practices OPAL recommends:[5]

The International Council for Open and Distance Education sees OEP as those practices which support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational resources and regards that OEP are often achieved through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect. Learners are empowered as co-producers on their lifelong learning path. The scope of OEP covers all areas of OER governance: policy makers, managers and administrators of organizations, educational professionals and learners.[6]

The OLCOS Consortium

OLCOS members[13] Country
European Centre for Media Competence Germany
European Distance and E-learning Network Hungary
FernUniversität Hagen Germany
Mediamaisteri Group Finland
Open University of Catalonia Spain
project co-ordinator Salzburg Research / EduMedia Group Austria

Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project is a Transversal Action under the European eLearning Programme.[13]

The OLCOS Roadmap focuses on Open Educational Practices, providing orientation and recommendations to educational decision makers on how to develop the use of OER. To further benefit from OERs one needs to better understand how their role could promote innovation and change in educational practices.[13]

The Roadmap states that; delivering OER to the dominant model of teacher-centred knowledge transfer will have little effect in equipping teachers, students and workers with the knowledge and skills required in the knowledge economy and, lifelong learning. Downloading Web-accessible, open teaching materials for classes and, continuing a one-way channel of content provision, will likely mirror the little impact achieved with regard to changing educational practices following the massive investments in the e-learning infrastructure by educational institutions. Open Educational Practices aim to deliver a competency-focused, constructivist paradigm of learning and promote a creative and collaborative engagement with digital content, tools and services to meet knowledge and skills required today.[13]

SCORE

The Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) at the Open University (UK), was the second major initiative to be funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce). (The first being the UKOER programme, jointly run by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA)).[14]

Discussions and actions were moving on from how open educational resources are published to how they are used. Placing OER as an enabler, within a wider set of open educational practices. Over a period of three years, SCORE, initiated a series of activities and events that involved several hundred educational practitioners from the majority of the higher education institutions in England.[14]

There has been interest in how educational practitioners would accept and embed open resources into their practices (Geser, 2007 in [14]). Sharing is at the heart of the philosophy OER and probably OEP and thus collective and cooperative activities between people and institutions are likely to be a key factor in the sustainability of such practices. SCORE reports it succeeded in raising the profile of OER and OEP within UK higher education institutions by assisting existing communities of practice and by creating new communities of practice to form a much larger network of practice that will be sustained by its participants.[14]

Challenges

There are many challenges to the adoption of open educational practices. Certain aspects like technology have received greater attention than others[2] but all of the factors below inhibit widespread use of open educational practices:

Strategies & Recommendations

In order for there to be widespread adoption of OEP, legal and educational policy must change[5] and OEP needs to become sustainable.[15]

  • Endowment Model, e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Project.[15]
  • Membership Model, e.g. Sakai Educational Partners Program where member organizations pay a fee.[15]
  • Donations Model, e.g. Wikipedia and Apache Foundation. Even though Apache has modified it so that there are fees for some services.[15]
  • Conversion Model, e.g. Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSe. They convert free subscribers to paying customers for advanced features and support.[15]
  • Contributor Pay Model, e.g. Public Library of Science (PLoS) where contributors pay for the cost of maintaining the contribution.[15]
  • Sponsorship Model, e.g. MIT iCampus Outreach Initiative, which is sponsored by Microsoft & China Open Resources for Education, and Stanford on iTunes, which is sponsored by Stanford & Apple. They are free for users with commercial messages by sponsors.[15]
  • Institutional Model, e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare Project.[15]
  • Government Model including UN programmes, e.g. Canada's SchoolNet Project.[15]
  • Partnership and Exchange, e.g. Universities working together to create OER systems.[15]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L. and Littlejohn, A. (2012). "Open practices: briefing paper". JISC. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Benzato, Monica (September 2012). "A Case Study of Teachers’ Open Educational Practices". Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society 8 (3): 153–163.
  3. 1 2 COLT. "Open Educational Practices". Center for Open Learning and Teaching. University of Mississippi. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  4. 1 2 OPAL (2010). Beyond OER: Shifting Focus to Open Educational Practices.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Camilleri, Anthony F.; Ulf Daniel Ehlers; Grainne Conole (2011). "Mainstreaming Open Educational Practice: Recommendations for Policy" (PDF). European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Definition of Open Educational Practices International Council for Open and Distance Education Accessed April 29, 2012
  7. 1 2 3 OPAL. "OPAL Mission". OPAL. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Ehlers, U. D., & Conole, G. C. (2010). "Open Educational Practices: Unleashing the power of OER" (PDF). Retrieved 14 June 2013.
  9. 1 2 Ehlers, U. D. (2011). "From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices" (PDF). E-learning papers 23 (1-8). Retrieved 14 June 2013.
  10. Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2008). "Cape Town Open Education Declaration: Unlocking the promise of open educational resources". Retrieved 18 June 2013.
  11. 1 2 3 OPAL. "The OEP Best Practice Clearing House". Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  12. McAndrew, P. (2011). "Fostering open educational practices". ELearning Papers 23. Retrieved 14 June 2013.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Geser, Guntram (2007). ""Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap 2012". In: "Open educational resources" [on-line monograph]" (PDF). Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento (RUSC) 4 (1). ISSN 1698-580X. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
  14. 1 2 3 4 Lane, A. and Darby, J. (2012). "Fostering communities of open educational practice: lessons from the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education". In: EADTU 25th Annual Conference , 27–28 September 2012, Paphos, Cyprus. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Downes, Stephen (February 27, 2007). "Models for sustainable open educational resources". Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects 3: 29–44.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Schaffert, Sandra; Guntram Geser (February 2008). "Open Educational Resources and Practices". eLearning Papers. 1887-1542 (7). Retrieved 18 June 2013.
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