Chris Lott

Having finally negotiated the administrative paperwork necessary to proceed, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) has officially begun its open education initiative– uLearn– by becoming a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium (OCW). We don’t have a cool site to debut ala BC Campus’ Free Learning site (from which we plan to liberally crib) or even a single course put up yet! But we do have plans…

We at the UAF Center for Distance Education couldn’t spend much time on uLearn until it was approved and personnel time allotted, so the existing site is essentially just an announcement… but an announcement signaling an important step forward for UAF, representing a change in institutional philosophy about– and support for– open education. There is a strong moral imperative to embrace an open posture w/r/t learning– a force that is by itself reason enough for me. But we also needed to justify to others who will be providing resources for the project specifically why we wanted to join this growing movement and, more importantly, what we had to contribute.

I’ve written before about some of the reasons for joining the OCW and other open education resource (OER) efforts so I won’t belabor them there. But I do want to note a couple of specific offerings we intend to provide, many of which will be significant transformations of existing material or wholly new efforts whose development is guided by the fact that the materials are destined to be part of uLearn:

Information Fluency
You’ll be hearing much more about this topic from me as we are in the midst of developing a library science oriented curriculum for a beginner’s course in developing information fluency skills. Every day I become more convinced of the importance of information fluency as a framework for coherently understanding and integrating Connectivist learning theory, personal learning environments, emerging literacies, and social networks into our educational offerings.

iTeach Faculty Development Curriculum
Over the last five years of offering iTeach faculty development intensives in online teaching and learning we have developed a large amount of material for faculty who want to learn to teach better online and/or using contemporary social media and network tools.

Ocean Science Laboratory
At the Center for Distance Education we have developed one of a very few wholly web-based Ocean Science laboratory courses that will be– in its current configuration– particularly useful to faculty wishing to deliver a– or enhance an existing– ocean science course to distance students. Our geographic location and current events have demanded a particular emphasis on climate change, sea ice, and other circumpolar concerns that make this course unique. We hope to develop a version of this course that will be as useful to independent learners as it already is to those in a guided education environment.

Literature of Alaska and the Yukon Territory, Geography of Alaska
Obviously, these are areas in which the University of Alaska has a special interest– and existing, proven curriculum. Long term plans include sharing material from other geographic and institutional specialties: rural development, mining, arctic and petroleum engineering.

I think distance education programs, faculty, staff, and designers are a natural fit for open education resource initiatives, and we look forward to contributing to this important cause!

I like the term open teaching (OpenTeach?) because it helps distinguish one kind of open education goal– provision of open materials (though, as I discussed earlier, that goal can and does stem from widely divergent motivations)– from the necessarily (?) related objective of teaching an open class. Of course an open learner might be taking part in or making use of open materials in any of the three major ways: as a guided learner whose guide is using open materials in a closed course, as a student in an open course, or as an independent learner.

"Open Education" is a vast area with many different territories. "Open Learning" encompasses a diverse group with some strikingly dissimilar needs. An "Open Course" might refer to a list of readings, a "complete" course without instructor, or a guided course. And then at some point a course becomes large enough or guided enough or at least some kind of schedule is suggested and it becomes a "Massively Online Open Course".

Then there are those labels and titles of initiatives that seem to cut various slices of the open education pie: OCW, OER, OpenEd…

It’s a bewildering array of options that makes discussion about accreditation (amongst other topics) difficult because I, at least, am unsure what kind of open education is being discussed at any given time. If "Open Accreditation" is referring to ways in which to confer some kind of material value to the learner who has succeeded in an "Open Teaching" environment, the road to accreditation hacking Shangri-La is a bit less hazy– a slightly smaller step– than providing the same service to the independent learner. The biggest problem is that of assessment. In an open teaching class, there is at least someone who could conceivably perform, facilitate, or coordinate assessment activities… in the independent learning scenario there is no one in that role.

[image by yomofo]

As we work on the goals for our impending entry into the OpenCourseWare fracas in order to formulate something approaching a strategy to make it happen, I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to the purpose and use of open course materials. Adding ourselves to the growing list of OCW consortium members (not to mention the wide array of other, similar initiatives, formal and not) and contributing materials in the same way is valuable, but of limited interest. Given that, why join in such an initiative? What do we hope to achieve?

CDE is, course, motivated in part by many of the same factors other open course sharing institutions are, having distance classes that are relatively unique and/or approaching a state of revision already and/or particularly suited to our institutional needs and interests. That’s a given. As an organization, CDE is committed to the (much abused) idea of innovation and a posture of continual experimentation. We prioritize projects that are interesting and challenging– and often with wholly unanswered questions. Where possible (and when successful), we hand those projects off to other organizations for regular production and operations. In her recent post Visualizing OpenCourseWare, Carol Gering shares some research into characteristics of OpenCourseWare materials from a couple of representative institutions. Through working with Carol, and reading and discussing the topic of open education with various colleagues, I’m starting to refine the areas that are of particular interest to me:

Addressing the Independent Learner (and Educator)

Most of the FAQs and mission statements and declarations of philosophy of various organizations involved in providing open educational materials in some way mention a global audience for their work. But much of the actual materials don’t really address the needs of a few core group that I feel a moral imperative to serve: the independent learner seeking a comprehensive educational experience and the educators and facilitators helping unaffiliated learners gain that kind of learning experience. I believe there is immense value to many populations– the most obvious being under-privileged populations and those residing in developing nations where access to institutions and the resources to pay for that privilege are scarce. An English Composition class that is designed to do more than provide random information access and be something other than a resource for professional educators and their students will look quite different from the same course designed for a student working their way through such a course independently, seeking a significant educational experience, with or without the help of a non-expert educator or facilitator. For the latter, a course needs to have a significant and useful amount of practice, modeling, self-assessment and reinforcement exercises that in other circumstances would (one hopes) be provided by the educator adopting the material.

Integrating Learning Community

Again, realizing that we are talking about addressing something other than what I take to be the relatively traditional users of open content– namely professional educators and learners seeking to address very specific needs akin to receiving training (Skip Via’s comment is well-taken)– my philosophy of powerful and productive education is one that puts a high degree of importance on integrating learning communities into the process. Learning communities include the traditional peer community of learners, but also the variously typed and organized communities of other learners affiliated with the same institutional sponsor, previous learners who used the same materials, hobbyists and prosumers applying what they’ve learned, and professionals actively engaged in work that uses the skills and experience obtained through taking a course.

How can we use the immense power of various kinds of social software available to us and already being actively integrated into the educational environment to benefit those engaged with open educational materials? Are there productive and manageable ways to store and share artifacts and promote discussions amongst (sometimes radically) asynchronous learners? Can we capture any of the responses and thoughts of educators to improve and enrich the materials? Are there methods involving transparency of progress and historical records of progress of preceding learners that could be used to guide and motivate those that come after? Can any of these community mechanisms be used to make progress on one of the most difficult aspects of open education geared towards independent learners: providing support and even evaluation?

Creating Fully Open Content

Though there’s no mandate to do so, it surprises me that so few courses are available that are based wholly upon media, readings and resources available for free to anyone, thus making the course much more useful to those for whom traditional textbooks and purchase of readings and subscriptions is beyond their means. Clearly this is easier to do with some courses  than others: developing a Romantic Literature course would be much easier to do based on completely free resources than a course in the modern novel… but wouldn’t the willingness to create such courses be a powerful partner and motivator for those working on Wikibooks and other open textbook (and similar) initiatives?

Interest-Based Design and Provision

OK, I just made that description up. And I know this isn’t at all an uncommon consideration. But I find myself confused and uncertain about how best to (literally) make open materials available. Is there a productive compromise between meeting the demands of portability and easy integration and addressing the needs of sustained learner interaction? Simple is often best, I know, but even the simple solutions turn out not to be when examined closely. And then there is the question of licensing: Creative Commons? Open Educational? One of the older, geekier alternatives?

Again, I want to reiterate that I know these are not original or unique concerns and issues… they’re just the ones that make a foray into this space particularly interesting and part of the moral foundation that guides me in the first place. Many of you are involved in creating and sharing curriculum and other media and materials… why do you do it? What are your goals? Who do you consider to be your audience?