All posts by Steve Greenlaw

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Welcome to OER Week of OpenLearning’17

Open Educational Resources metaphorOER, which is an acronym for Open Educational Resources, seems like a no-brainer to me. In my 30+ year career teaching Principles of Economics, I have used a variety of books, including traditional commercial textbooks, books written on economic subjects for lay audiences (in lieu of a standard textbook), and no text book at all. I’ve concluded that most intro books are pretty much the same, and that any experienced instructor can teach effectively using pretty much any intro text. Why then should we ask our students to use commercial textbooks that cost $75, $175 or $375, when there are free or very inexpensive alternatives available? Yes it takes some time and effort to adopt and transition to using a new text. I don’t discount this, but as professionals don’t we have an obligation to do that if we think it would be better for our students?

Over the last few years, I’ve adopted OER for my intro courses. Before we go further, let’s get a few myths out of the way. When I talk about OER this week, I’m not referring to class materials, bits of content, what used to be called learning objects. I mean open source, complete printed or digital texts edited and published by organizations with solid reputations. These are not self-published books.

For faculty who don’t have experience with OER, there are five key questions we will explore this week:

1. What is OER?
2. How good are open source textbooks?
3. What do instructors and students who use OER think of them?
4. How do we find OER in our discipline?
5. What comes after adoption of OER?

Monday: What is OER?

Open educational resources are much more than simply free resources. In addition, OER give students and teachers the following five rights:

  1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  2. 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)
  3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

While you may not yet fully understand the “5 Rs,” as David Wiley calls them, but understand this: they dramatical change the role of a textbook in a course (or at least they offer the potential for that).

And/or

And

 

  • Join in – Open Dialog Session: The Open Textbook Library
    Are you concerned about higher education access and affordability? Open textbooks can help ease the burden of textbook costs for students and provide faculty with high quality, customizable course content. Join us for a discussion of textbook costs and student success.

4pm EDT; Tune in via Zoom & submit questions via Twitter.

Tuesday: How good are open source textbooks?

How can we be sure that the quality is equal to that of traditional commercial textbooks? Are open source textbooks peer reviewed? Do they go through a comparable quality control process?

And

 

  • Join in – Conversation with John Hilton III about the research on OER efficacy. http://OpenEdGroup.org
    12 noon via Zoom conference

Wednesday: What do instructors and students who use OER think of them?

  • Faculty panel on OER usage (recorded video)
  • Student panel on OER usage (recorded video)

 

  • Join in – Twitter chat 2:00-3:00 pm

Thursday: How do we find OER in our discipline?

  • Interview with Open Textbook author, Caitie Findleyson (recorded video) Twitter

 

  • Join in: Q & A with Caitie Findleyson, TIME: tbd

Friday: What comes after adoption of OER?

Some have called open source textbooks the gateway drug to something more bigger. As the week comes to an end, we can pursue two possible threads

1. Perhaps the best attribute of OER is not that it’s free, but that it makes instructors think profoundly about how they teach the course.

2. Digital Courseware as a textbook alternative

And/or

And/or

Join in – Twitter conversation 2pm – 3pm

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Civic Engagement + Digital Literacy = Liberal Learning in the 21st Century

I’ve had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head so far in 2017. This week, they are starting to come together. As I try to articulate them, you may wonder what this has to do with open learning, but please bear with me.

Dr. Troy Paino, our new president at the University of Mary Washington, gave a speech last month in which he presented his vision for our future. I found his remarks both traditional and progressive. He asked what UMW should become, given our history, culture and geographic location.

UMW is a public liberal arts and sciences institution. While we have colleges of business and education and a growing number of masters programs, liberal education is our core. UMW was originally created as a normal school, a women’s college to train teachers. Subsequently, it became the women’s college of the University of Virginia, and then a public liberal arts & sciences school in the mid-1970s. Located in Virginia, half way between Washington, DC and Richmond, UMW has had a rich background in American history, from colonial times when George Washington grew up nearby, to the American Revolution with Patrick Henry, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and others who built this republic, to the civil rights movement in which former UMW faculty member James Farmer played an important part.

President Paino argued that UMW should build a future using a two-pronged approach: First, to create students who are civically engaged. Second, to create students who are digitally literate. These, he argued, are substantially related.

Students, Paino said, should understand the relevance of their liberal education to the problems of the world. But that’s just the start. Students need then to engage with the community, to make the world a better place, initially as part of their undergraduate studies, but then implicitly through their lives beyond university. This is what civic engagement means. A few years ago, I asked students if they had come to UMW because it was a liberal arts & sciences institution. Almost none of the students said yes. We need to do a better job of helping our students understand why that matters, and why fundamentally higher education at a school like Mary Washington is more than just completing one’s major.

Students also need to become digitally literate. UMW has a long and well recognized history in this area led by our Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and encompassing UMW Blogs, which provided a blog server for faculty and students who wanted to engage with the digital world, our Online Learning Initiative, which sought to imagine what liberal learning could be in a blended or online course environment, to the Domain of One’s Own Project, which started at UMW, giving all students their own web domain and the resources to build those out in whatever way they chose. Despite a new major in communication and digital studies and a minor in digital studies, I think it’s fair to say that digital literacy does not currently play a central role in our curriculum, and most graduates do not take advantage of the opportunity to incorporate this into their degrees.

President Paino asked how can we adapt the liberal arts and sciences education provided at UMW to the digital world in which we now live. He observed that the world has changed from one where information was scarce and the goal of education was to provide that information, to one where information is abundant. In the latter, a key role for education has become to help people critically evaluate and filter the flood of information. How then, can we teach students to be critical thinkers in the world today? This is not a trivial question. This week, the Association of American Colleges & Universities released On Solid Ground, the initial results of a study of student achievement as measured by the AAC&U’s VALUE Rubrics. The study included results from 92 universities and looked at, not standardized test scores, but actual student work to evaluate learning in three areas: Written Communication, Critical Thinking and Quantitative Reasoning. The findings were encouraging, but also showed room for improvement. To quote from the press release:

“In the area of Critical Thinking, students demonstrate strength in explaining issues and presenting evidence related to the issues. However, students have greater difficulty in drawing conclusions or making sense out of or explaining the importance of the issue studied.”

Despite what the new U.S. Secretary of Education said yesterday, our job as faculty is to teach students not what to think, but how to think.

I may be the last person to realize this, but as I was participating in this week’s OpenLearning’17 activities, listening to Bryan Alexander’s Monday introduction to information literacy, reading the ACRL Framework for information literacy, and watching the NMC webinar on Digital Literacy, it occurred to me that in this age of alternative facts and fake news, there may be nothing more important than teaching citizenship and civic engagement through information and digital literacy. President Paino claimed as much in his speech, saying that beyond traditional notions of liberal education, “our fundamental purpose [today] is the preservation and advancement of our representative democracy.”

These are strong words. To make them real, we have much work to do. But if not us, who?

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Virginia’s Faculty Collaboratives Project

I am excited to work on the AAC&U’s Faculty Collaboratives project. The project is being implemented at the state level. Half a dozen states were in the first cohort, which began last year. Virginia is in the second cohort, which means we have benefited by learning from the experiences of the first cohort.

The nominal goal of the Faculty Collaboratives project is for each state group to develop a collection of faculty development resources to increase awareness of how to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning, especially in the liberal arts & sciences. These resources will be based on the findings of learning science over the last few decades–findings of which I suspect most rank & file faculty are unaware. I don’t know about you, but learning science was not part of my graduate program. AAC&U has conducted a number of initiatives in this area, including the two I’m most familiar with: LEAP and VALUE. The challenge is to get these resources into the consciousness of faculty.

Gardner Campbell, who is leading the Virginia initiative, expresses the challenge this way: How can we help students (and faculty) see general education requirements as more than checkboxes on the road to the student’s real education (e.g. in the major)? How can we help students and faculty see general education as more than just a set of hurdles to be gotten past? How can we help students and faculty see general education as a foundational part of their undergraduate studies as well as lifetime learning?  In short, how can we do what we’ve always valued, only better.

What approach are we taking in Virginia? We decided early on to use open educational practices as the model for our approach. Virginia has a vibrant open education community, so we have both resources and interest to draw from. David Wiley describes what we’re planning as rethinking general education requirements as if the Internet existed.

Open education can be pursued from a variety of angles, including open pedagogy, open access, open educational resources (OER), and more. There is no universally accepted definition of open education, which allows a diversity of approaches to be tried. It’s probably best to think of open education as a philosophy of teaching and learning, a set of practices, rather than a specific technique or set of skills. One can try some, but not all practices, and that’s fine. If this sounds imprecise, we will be exploring these concepts in more detail soon.

Our project will operate at several levels.

  • We want to create an online platform to showcase a set of teaching resources and practices.
  • We want to make the resource organic and sustainable so that the platform doesn’t die when the project is over.
  • We want to model what we’re presenting, using open educational practices.
  • We want to assess whether the platform makes a difference in faculty teaching practice and effectiveness.

Not too ambitious, huh? Beginning later this month (January 2017), we will conduct an open online course to explore open educational practices. The idea is to give interested faculty the opportunity to learn by doing. The course is designed for anyone who would like to learn more about open education, regardless of your background and experience. Everyone is welcome!

The course will be organized by topic. If you are only interested in one or two topics, you can simply participate those weeks.   Of course, you’ll get far more out of it if you participate in the whole course. If you have tried taking a MOOC (e.g. Coursera, Udacity) before, you will find our course very different. It will be based on the Constructivist MOOC model developed by George Siemans and Stephen Downs and exemplified by DS 106. For additional information on the course and how to participate, check out the project hub at http://openlearninghub.net. I hope to see you there.