Open Educational Resources--Shifting the Landscape

The above video is one of a growing number of videos submitted to a contest where the video makers discuss why open education matters and what benefits it creates. Of the five I watched, this one was my favorite. I probably liked it because it spoke to me and opened my eyes about more than open education. Other videos talk about how we can help people in less developed countries. I agree that such help is needed, but I always like it when even the people here at home can receive benefits. Maybe it's because I'm selfish. Maybe it's because I know less-developed countries aren't the only places that need help. But the video also opened my eyes to something I'd never thought about--turning off our electronics in the classroom. I agree they're distracting. In fact, I had a fellow classmate that I never want to sit behind again, because her game of minesweeper was rather distracting. However, I think technology can be utilized better in the classroom, and I think this video makes the point better than I could.

Open Educational Resources

One definition for "open educational resources" is as follows: "Educational materials which use a Creative Commons license or which exist in the public domain and are free of copyright restrictions are open educational resources" (Wiley, Bliss, McEwen 2). It is difficult to actually define. The term open is quite open for debate. Some people define parts of the term separately in two or three pieces. In many definitions, copyright permissions come up, and there are generally assumed to be "four R's" that people are allowed to do with the open educational resources: reuse, revise, remix, redistribute.
Creative Commons Licenses for Open Educational Resources: They can combine BY (giving the creator credit), SA (licensing revised content under the exact same license as the original), and NC (not using the material for commercial purposes).
Models of Sharing OER: individual OER, open textbooks, open courseware. (The last two are more familiar and may help instructors who aren't as comfortable with technology.)
Models of Producing OER: institutional production model (from formal to OER: integrity model--as close as possible to original, essence model--only the main important features are kept, remix model--used as starting point for designing OER "specifically for web based delivery" (10).) The institutional production model is done by experts, so it is valued, but it possibly costs too much. The second model is the commons-based peer production model, which is done by individual people who are not motivated by money (e.g., Wikipedia). There can also be combinations of the two.
Benefits of OER: Motivations for participating in OER can range from mission-aligned to self-interested motivations. Institutions generate sales for courses and students save money on textbooks.

Challenges for OER:

1. Discovery problem

Some methods to solve it involve enabling it to be found on search engines (such as by searching for learning outcomes), creating sites that list OER and provide links, using features from social networking sites (such as tagging), and giving recommendations.
2. Sustainability problem

OER has promising results on small scale, but we need more research to better understand how it can be sustained and be more certain that this problem can be solved.
3. Quality problem

The problem stems from the question of how consumers can learn about the quality of OER. Computations and consumer ratings could work, but it also needs to be of quality to the individual user.
4. Localization problem

Consumers need to be educated about OER in order for them to localize it for themselves. I can't localize it for someone else as well as they could do it for themselves.
5. Remix problem

Few people actually revise and remix and such. Part of the problem may be that certain things that can be revised (pedagogical assumptions) lack visibility.
Future Directions for Open Educational Resources
Open education policies will need further research, and open assessment needs to be paired with OER in order to make them as great as they can be.

Online Self-Organizing Social Systems: The Decentralized Future of Online Learning

First, there is a Teacher Bandwidth Problem. Teachers can only hold (or teach) so many students effectively at a time. It is too expensive to have individualized instruction. But using technology enables more personal instruction.
BUT social interactions are important, so technology isn't a perfect answer. I remember one reason my mother wanted me to stay in public school instead of going to home school was for the social benefits. Even if highly decontextualized learning objects are the most reusable, they are the most expensive to reuse. And there are human elements to instructional design that computers cannot actually do.
So if technology doesn’t work, but teachers are too expensive, what is the third choice? “Students support each other.” (I have personal reservations about this approach. The paper convinced me in the end, but initially I remembered a teacher suggesting that the whole class not work together on a test, because the overall class scored lower in those situations. Of course, my memory could always be faulty.)
The phenomenon of self-organization
Humans are able to self-organize. Social interactions would organize districts in cities without zones being defined by an overseeing authority.
Online self-organizing social systems
With Slashdot, a ready example, moderators rate the quality of comments, and meta-moderators are given a counter power to rate the ratings of the moderators (e.g., fair or unfair). It’s a successful peer review process like that of academic journals.
OSOSS, learning objects, and online learning
From “facilitation” to “mediation” (10). OSOSS’s very structure needs to be one that can make it successful., since it affects the self-organization that occurs. It doesn't have same problems that normal learning objectives have. The burden is distributed when the community is large enough so that one person isn't bearing the whole burden.

The instructional design underlying OSOSS
These communities will need instructional design methods in them. The beauty is, some were found in an example conversation from PerlMonk, such as collaborative problem solving, goal-based scenarios, legitimate peripheral participation, and instructional design super-theory.
Potential problems with OSOSS and future research directions
It may be free of the flaws in normal approaches, but it has its own problems, in fact, it lacks certain strengths with curriculum, assessment, feedback, and identity and trust relations.
(Upon thinking [a dangerous past time--I know], I came up with a compromise. Where you have a centralized authority who establishes a curriculum and provides assessment and some feedback. However, then those students are deposited into a larger community of other students during the problem-solving phase. For instance, in the Japanese courses taught at BYU, there is a larger class with a teacher that breaks down into smaller classes with TAs. If the same sort of model is developed, the teacher would be required to give less feedback, because the students support each other. So they have a wider bandwidth. However, they also then get human-to-human interaction and a centralized curriculum to work through.

My impression of the MOOC Guide

It seemed pleasantly informal (not in a disrespectful way but a comfortable way). It made me feel more welcome. I think it helps with getting people to contribute. It's a good central site that's easy to navigate, so I could find my way to another site. It seemed to me like the people who contributed had an enthusiastic outlook on improving education, though acknowledging realistically that it will take work. I look forward to going more in depth with one of the sites. Stay tuned.