Views from the Haystack

What is OER and OCW?

OER stands for Open Educational Resources and describes a digital asset that is freely available online for use by any person with online access. These digital assets carry and open creative commons license, which means that anyone can be free to use or alter the material for their own non-commercial use. Depending upon the type of CC license, the most general use of these digital assets carry an intellectual property license which is free from copyright, thus the asset can be freely used and repurposed by the end user.

OER materials are often used in open learning forums like MOOC’s, distance education or Open Courseware  (OCW) courses given by leading tertiary institutions.  Each digital asset may refer to an entire course, course materials, etexts, videos or online data stores or any tools that are accessible. These OER materials may be created by the course instructors, institutions or by the learners themselves and posted online.

OCW are OER materials are assembled in order to present unique learning opportunities for the students, using free, open, online and accessible materials.  The goal is to provide greater access to learning materials that are non-proprietary, non-commercial in nature and this are normally open and free. The range and quality of these materials has steadily increased and allows for greater self-publishing of ones own work.

Many people believed the creation of OER materials would be a great alternative to proprietary content repositories such as textbooks. However the shift has not yet occurred to a great extent, although there is a decline in overall textbook sales, attributed to abundance of quality OER resources, and the textbooks high cost. However the demand for digital learning resources is increasing forcing publishers of traditional print assets to convert more towards the etext formats and this trend will likely continue..

The recent announcement from Apple Inc., has disrupted education textbook adoption by partnering with leading educational publishers and producing etexts in smaller booklets fashion. These digitally packaged fragments contain more than text, but also contain video and interactive materials to support the learning content. However this etext format still contains proprietary content and thus is still sold commercially, as we have seen in the recent announcement by Apple, thus these materials are not consider OER materials

The OER materials are essential components of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and are created by the course presenters and many of the users who freely share and learn from the connected network. These materials are assembled into aggregators often through the use of RSS feeds or learning management systems to be presented as part of the learning concepts using these resources for learning. This enables all learners to collaborate and discuss their findings, ideas and share with the group. The growing trend is for each user to create and share OER materials and it is the end user that must navigate the web to weave a connection between the objects of their own choice.

OER has some very clear merits but also some that question their validity. This will be explored in future posts

Being involved in my own start-up, there has been quite a discussion on pricing models and almost certainly the final resolution on pricing will shift during development of the site and its final launch. Even after a successful launch, upon adding users and analyzing results, there will be the constant refresh of pricing for quality education content.

Education appears to be heading down the freemium model of pricing and there are many new initiatives that certain highlight this fact, including Khan Academy, who continues to develop video tutorials and post them to YouTube. The announcement of MIT-x as free accessible courses from MITx sets the direction of premium quality materials at a price everyone can afford. Then there was the change that Mathalicous announced, a pay-as-you-can-afford policy in response to a growing number of educators indicating they can no longer afford the pay as you go costs for math quality math lessons. And finally I should mention the many types of OER and Creative Commons materials that also exist as free share-alike resources.

The free pricing model challenges current pricing schemes from publishers,  content providers and software vendors that sell direct to schools or on a subscription basis. The shift to free means the purchasing power shifts to the teachers and students themselves, and less on the department,  school or district. This is where the biggest impact should be made and this is the true benefit of the freemium business model.  Making more quality materials accessible to the masses that require them and minimize the systemic cycling model of content distribution via school or district can only be beneficial.

How does the freemium model of distribution impact publishers, software vendors and content providers? This will be addressed in a future posting.

It is now the first day of 2012 and after what appears to be many months of neglect, I start the year off with a short blog post.  Audrey Watters at Hack Education actually had a post of “Under Construction”  as she addressed her hosting issues and informs her readers that there will not be a post for a few days.  Thanks Audrey for the kick start to my thinking, as it seems, I have been ‘under construction’ for my web presence for too long. I think my best website was back in the late-nineties and even I can be critical of my own lack of attention to my website and blog! It seems I put time into design and progress reporting for my clients sites and justifiably so, but there is value in writing down my thoughts so here is where I share  my thinking.

Is this the year? Is 2012 the year where I formulate a better operating system and regularly share my thoughts on a wide range of education matters.  Perhaps. Check back regularly and let me know how I am doing.

Future of mobile learning survey – analysis of results

The future of mobile learning survey presented a good summary from two distinct groups, K-12 and higher education instructors. Although there was specific interest to canvas views from other professionals the number of respondents does not constitute a significant faction for segmented analysis.

The low number of total respondents may be due to several factors, possibly due to the fact it coincided with end of year procedures in schools or lack of active mobile learning programs among current polled respondents. There is still some uncertainty regarding what constitutes a mobile device as some may consider a laptop or notebook as a mobile device, whereas I do not. True mobile for me means no additional power source is required during active use. All too often we still need to be tethered to a power source and this is a barrier to further exploring the mobility factor with those devices.

Having just attended a mobile learning session a few days ago, it has confirmed my thinking that most schools still have in place a NO MOBILE USE policy. These devise have been considered distractions in learning situations and that this form of connecting and communication should be removed from active classrooms so that attention is focused on the teacher. Although this paradigm is fading rapidly in an era of broadband WIFI, networked connections, online content and reverse instruction it still is primary mode of thinking in the K-12 sector.  With advances in silent ringtones and rapid text modes, students still find a way to use these tools and progressive educators are also finding ways to establish this tool in learning often in contradiction to school policies. However, not surprising to find that ‘bathroom breaks’ by students are now texting stations, and that most texts (66%) come from parents, who are certainly aware of school rules.

Personal mobile devices are carried by many learners yet schools once again widen the gap between the context of the learning situation, online content and tools that learners have. The survey results contribute to the fact that significant changes in this reform are occurring.

The three most interesting survey findings include:

1.  I was somewhat surprised to learn that the 55% of respondents already utilize mobiles in formal learning situations, the largest group more than 50% of the time. This is relatively unseen in the K-12 sector since the number of respondents in this sector was 1.5 times larger than tertiary level and their primary role was as a teachers/instructors. Given these results, it is clear that advances in use of mobiles are occurring despite the restrictions imposed on learning situations by higher authorities.

2. A second surprising link is that in the K-12 sector, librarians make up the largest additional role behind teachers and instructors. Given that the survey was completed by such a large group of librarians, there appears to be migration of reading text to mobile platforms, e-readers or ipad tablets. This greater focus on utilization of these devise to promote digital literacy curricular goals and citizenship are aspects of a multilayered approach to access online reading resources.

3. There is greater focus on cloud based tools and resources that allow for immediate access to online content  and storage areas. Use of DropBox, Evernote, GoodReader, twitter and email access were primary tasks of respondents. This is along the lines for communication, storage, text and email. Resources such as FlipBoard, Ebsco are secondary points of interest and finally, specific teaching apps (MathBoard, BrainPop and Dictation) comprise only small focus of mobile use. This is in keeping with the trend that mobiles continue to be used by consumers for personnel reasons such as texting, access to email, and access content through YouTube but has only been partially embraced as a full learning tool.

Overall, the survey has provided insight into the future of mobile learning, however greater research needs to be conducted as to the value of mobile learning devices and learning outcomes.