Acceptance of OER

INTRO MUSIC


HOST 
Welcome to our podcast exploring the barriers and challenges that come with moving from a copyright restricted educational environment to an environment  where resources are open, or open/adapted.  We will look at the hesitancy some educators have felt using and creating Open Educational Resources  and will examine how different organizations have overcome resistance to change and quality concerns.
We spoke to David Porter, the CEO of eCampus Ontario, who explained why barriers to K to 12 OER still exist despite a general educator mindset that is open to the sharing of knowledge. 


DAVID PORTER
I think that some of the biggest barriers often in the open realm, is lack of information and lack of understanding of the open context. I think most educators value the notion of shared information and that education should be a process of sharing knowledge among peers and also among students - from faculty and students to faculty as well. And so getting past some of those barriers about  what are some those mechanisms for sharing and how do the open licenses actually work?
And the barrier really was lack of knowledge, not really a lack of willingness to participate, for the most part.


HOST
Bill Fitzgerald, Director of the Privacy Evaluation Initiative at Common Sense Media, agrees that teachers have the willingness for openness, but they are hesitant to share their own content.


BILL FITZGERALD 
From what I’ve seen the vast majority of use is using existing OERs to teach. So it would be some line between adoption and curating. The remixing is definitely less frequent and often happens as part of curation, but sharing is, I think, where it really gets tricky. For a lot of the teachers that I speak with: they have a lot of things that are stored privately that they don’t share. And the most common reason I hear for not sharing is “Well it’s, it’s my notes. It works for me but it’s messy and I don’t want people judging me based on this.” So there’s a… I hear a lot of concern that people will be judged. That, you know, somebody will look at something and think that it’s sub-par. But my advice to that is always to take the time to share and you can put across the top “This is a draft. This is a work in progress.” You can indicate that it’s incomplete. But we all know what it’s like to create a draft. We all know the barriers that are in place between getting something from like, almost done to completely done. But if we don’t share this work out, and we don’t share it out even in rough form, we’re missing opportunities and we are also ensuring that the hard work we’ve done just doesn’t do any good if it’s just on our own hard drive.  You never know who is actually going to need something and you’re shoddy draft could be the gem that somebody else is looking for. I see a lot of people using. I see a lot of people curating. I see a lot of people remixing as part of the curation process, but unfortunately people often stumble and stop before they share.


HOST
TJ Bliss, a Program Officer in the Education Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, agrees that OER perceptions and awareness are barriers still experienced by teachers currently working within the confines of copy-restricted print and digital resources. He tells us how districts can be a part of changing lingering perceptions.


TJ BLISS
I think the common perception of OER in K-12 really depends upon we’re talking about in K-12. So, for teachers I think the common perception is that they don’t really differentiate OER from free content. Although I want to be clear that OER is not just free content.So that’s the most common perception of OER is a broader part of the stuff that’s free on the internet. More and more,teachers are starting to understand that OER is more than free and that it means that they can do things with the content that they could not do with stuff they just find on the internet  that is fully copyrighted but is freely available.  At the district level, I think that more districts are starting to understand the difference between open and free because the districts can do more probably than the individual teachers to leverage the open license that is found with OER because districts have more time and capacity to focus on that kind of work. And there’s actually more incentive for a school district to leverage the open license than there would be for a teacher. For a vast majority of teachers, free is enough. That’s actually what they’re looking for. That’s the value for OER for them and that’s fine actually. It’s really at the district level that the open license starts to really matter. And I think that for districts the common perception of OER is that there’s not much of it and it can be hard to find and I think it’s the same for teachers. There’s not much of it and it can be hard to find. But that’s changing. That’s changing as more and more content is being built, as better curation tools are being built, as technologies are catching up with that need and demand for people to find high quality content. So I am starting to see that shift. And then a recent report by Ed Reports, which is the consumer reports for educational content, is starting to note that there are many open educational resources that are of as high or higher quality than the stuff that the publishers are producing and that’ s going to start changing the perception of OER as well. 


HOST 
Sarah Weston, Director of Technology and OER at ‎Mountain Heights Academy in Utah, tells us how content gaps are also impeding the growth of OER. 


SARAH WESTON 
When I first began using OER back in 2009, the biggest barrier was lack of materials. There was very little out there. Now, interestingly enough, what has happened over the last seven years is it’s flipped on its head. Now there’s too much. What used to be a treasure hunt where I had to search so hard to find has now just become something you can drown in. And so that is wonderful in the fact that there are resources for the lower grades now that there didn’t used to be. I think one of the difficulties now is most of it’s STEM-related. So I have teachers who are in the social sciences that still struggle with OER because there isn’t as much available. And when you’re talking about STEM classes, you don’t need to do a lot of development. But some of the other ones, the arts and social sciences, teachers are still needing to do a lot of their own self-creation of OER and I’m not sure it’s making it back out into the curated collections yet. I’ll be interested to see what happens over the next 5 years, to see if those gaps in OER (the content gaps in OER) start filling in.


HOST
Royce Kimmons, a professor in Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University, recently researched the perceptions of OER of practicing K-12 teachers. He explains some of the barriers to OER identified by the research group. 


ROYCE KIMMONS 
So in talking of barriers to OER adoption our teachers identified 3 different categories. So, they identified macro barriers, local barriers, and then personal barriers. Personal barriers they thought were the least important. So these included things like: lack of desire on the teacher’s part to innovate, potential competitive loss, so if I share my lesson plans with another teacher  I lose my competitive advantage over them. Or maybe I sell some of my lesson plans online and I lose that additional income if I start sharing those openly. So teachers recognized that these were some barriers but those were like least important of the barriers that they identified. The most important they identified were basically just the time and the support necessary to adapt OER, to implement them into their curriculum, and then to create and share their own. So as we did focus groups with these teachers and then did follow up surveys with them it became very clear that they feel very stressed in their jobs. They feel like they have many, many expectations put upon them, that they are already operating at full capacity, they don’t have the ability to take on new projects or to do new things. And so, at the same time, they are constantly having new requirements placed upon them. And so even if they are faced with something that they think is really innovative and helpful like openness, and even though many of the them expressed their great potentials for openness, they nonetheless recognize that they are operating in institutions and within jobs that are highly demanding and that make it very difficult for them to either try new things or to grow and learn in the ways that they would need to in order to become more open in their practice.
The primary barrier that they identified at least in this group was economic equity and I think part of the reason for that was that many of the teachers we were working with in the target state, which is a very rural state, worked in rural schools and they felt like they were operating in their smaller schools on a smaller budget than maybe what their peers are at urban schools. And so they felt like the greatest importance of OER was that it would allow those that are working in harder situations, in terms of  access to resources, to have a more equitable opportunity to their other teachers that are working in richer school districts or more urban or suburban school districts.       
I think that everywhere, you know, technology infrastructure can be a problem.  If you’re trying to drive down cost by moving to OER and you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to support devices for every student in your class then that’s obviously a problem. Professional development could be a problem everywhere if teachers are not given sufficient training related to OER they might feel like they’re kind of left on their own.
I think that many of these barriers are universal, I think that though, if you were to interview or survey teachers in different states or in different countries the importance or their perceived importance of these barriers would definitely change.  
And so, again, I think these barriers could be looked at universally, they could be looked at anywhere,  and I think that you would find teachers that feel a lot of these things in pretty much any state or any country. But the relative importance of the barriers would vary.


HOST 
Kimmons goes on to caution that we need to be very careful about how we frame the conversation around the benefits of OER for new adopters.


KIMMONS 
I think that we need to be very careful and thoughtful about how we, you know, even talk about openness because, I think that openness provides great opportunities for teachers but if we aren’t making that explicit what those opportunities are then that’s a problem. So I talk about this in some of my work, in relation to cost, mainly because it’s not that I think that cost  is a bad thing to talk about, it is a great thing to talk about, it’s great to drive down educational costs. But if the conversation is dominated by just issues of cost then I’m afraid that we are going to miss the boat. I also think that OER have already been successful in driving down educational costs. Publishers are aware of what is going on and they are responding. They are driving down the cost of their resources and at some point as OER have become adopted at a greater and greater scale, publishers are going to have to come up with a competitive strategy to respond to them and I think that they’re in the process of doing that right now. 
If we’ve only talked about costs and if all of our conversations about OER are focused on costs, then once publishers move to that model that is competitive to the cost model of OER then we’ve lost the fight. And OER is no longer appealing to anyone because we’ve framed the entire conversation around cost. So I think that it behooves us to really think about and to talk about and to explore these other benefits because there is no way  that a publisher can ever provide the adaptability that an OER text can.


HOST 
Bill Fitzgerald describes how lack of teacher awareness can be addressed through OER creation events like Hackathons.  During a Hackathon teachers remix and play with digital  content and processes. 


BILL FITZGERALD
The hackathon or the barn raising model is really just a fancy way of saying “Let’s do this work together. Let’s do this work with other people.” And it just kind of gets at the idea that nobody really should have to or needs to do this work alone, and if we do it all together we can A: get more eyes going over the work, and  B: have a team of people who will just know things that we don’t. And instead of actually feeling like you need to do this in isolation, on your own, on your own time, you can actually do it with a group of people that can reduce the load, find common points of overlap, and  if you do this as part of a group, as part of a barn raising or a hackathon, you are already ensuring that the work you create is going to get broad reuse across a few different contexts. Whereas if you do it alone, you’re going to use it, but you don’t really have any even informal checks on whether it’s something that is more broadly useful.
The idea behind the hackathon is we would basically bring together people who have content level expertise with people who have technical expertise and see what we can build out of it.
We were working on actually creating an OER platform at that time which, as a lot of other people have done. And that is what drove them...we had a series of them. And they were very useful in actually learning some of the barriers. They were unfortunately less useful in creating a large body of sustainable OER. Largely actually because this was something we were doing on our own time and our own expense and didn’t have any dedicated funding for.  But one of the things that’s actually been interesting about it is since then there are a few organizations that have actually taken this approach and with funding streams behind it have been able to actually generate larger collections of OER. It’s actually good to see that happening.


HOST 
Fitzgerald goes on to describe the mindset necessary in creating our ideal learning system. 


BILL FITZGERALD 
I guess you can look at OER use as simply adoption, or we can look at OER use as a driver for the pedagogical changes we all say that we want to see happen. And I think when we focus on the second, when we focus on actually how we can transform teaching and learning through intelligent use of OER, we get to have a broader and ultimately more constructive conversation about what we want our learning system to be.


HOST 
Randy LaBonte, CEO of CANeLearn, describes how the Canadian system of siloed institutions and organizations can be a barrier to collaborative K-12 OER initiatives.


RANDY LABONTE
I would say that Canadian public education in the K-12 system is very much siloed. It’s similar for postsecondary, but the institutions in postsecondary remain far more autonomous whereas institutions or schools in K-12 are under educational authorities that also have a different layer of kind of policies or restrictions. So I really believe that in public K-12 education is, we operate much more in Canada in silos. That’s why we formed a national non-for-profit that can cut across those silos; cut across those walls that exist between provinces. And then it has to be rationalized down at the district level or the educational authority level as well. 
Whereas in the US education has both a national agenda, at the federal level, but also at the state level as well. It operates differently in Canada and that creates problems in terms of sharing across provincial borders. That’s what we’re hoping that CanELearn can do: help serve to support that sharing exchange across borders.


HOST
Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, also believes that Canadian provincial education systems are creating barriers by not working together. He suggests that there needs to be a concerted effort to move away from the historical domination of copy-restriction.  


RORY McGREAL
In Canada we have 13 different educational systems. In education, Canadian  provinces have more independence than European states. In Europe there are many educational initiatives at the European Union level. In Canada the federal government is prohibited by our constitution from interfering with education. And so we have curriculum departments in every province. Not only that in many provinces we have curriculum departments separate: Catholic and public curriculum departments. And in some provinces we also have French curriculum and English language, so English and French language curriculum departments that are different. And even in some provinces you even have English Catholic, French Catholic, English public and French public so it becomes quite a mess as far as dealing with curriculum because each one develops their own.   
These central departments order the textbooks or in some cases they decide which textbooks you can order and give you a limited choice and it’s always with commercial publishers. 
And these publishers have very close relationships with our curriculum departments in our school boards and in our departments of education, provincially. And these contracts and understandings go back for many many years. So it is very difficult to bring about change in this system.
The commercial publishers try to make out that the quality of Open Educational Resources is lacking and that they have the quality. But there have been studies that have shown that open-adapted textbooks were, have been evaluated as  having the highest quality: much more quality than  copyright restricted textbooks. And certainly in the matter of updating and keeping the content current - open educational resources are much more adaptable and available for use. And It’s important to remember that putting a C and restricting your copyright at the bottom of the page or putting a CC (Creative Commons) so as you can share the content has no effect on the quality of the content itself. And the real arbitrators of quality - the ones who know  the quality of the content are the teachers themselves.


HOST 
David Porter agrees that provincial educational authorities have substantial potential for considering and leading K-12 OER initiatives.


DAVID PORTER 
I think in the post-secondary sector, resources are developed differently than K-12 to begin with. So, in the K to 12 sector, a lot of the textbook and publisher  developed materials are done kind of at the provincial level, sometimes at the district level. Whereas in post-secondary, academic freedom is the rule and is the norm and so instructors make all of the choices about what is on the syllabus for a student to take during a course. And so, that’s a huge difference in terms of autonomy and structure and those differences to me would seem to argue for: it would actually be easier to implement open educational resources in the K-12 sector than the post-secondary sector. But I have a huge dark feeling in my heart that the people who make decisions in the K to 12 sector have a real strange relationship with publishers and that a lot of those publisher people were ex- K-12 teachers and it sets up a really weird dynamic about how decisions get made about the adoption of a particular learning and teaching resource for a particular subject in a K to curriculum.
If you were to going to work on an open educational resource strategy in K-12 in Canada, you’d probably have to confine it to the provincial level initially, where people are working to the same learning outcomes, where there are some provincial guidelines of what a curriculum must do and must have and what outcomes it must satisfy. So it kind of narrows the pool  for creativity and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues Canada- wide because of the structure of Canadian  Public K-12 education.


HOST 
Michael Canuel, CEO of LEARN in Quebec, explains how early adopters of OER can help to model the benefits of OER for other educators.


MICHAEL CANUEL 
To get different, more accurate perceptions of OERs in K-12 learning environments we have to keep at it. We have to get our educators and those who are the leaders, the early adopters to really continue to push and model for other educators the value and success that they have in using OERs. We have to avoid falling into the urge to succumb to cynicism and negativity. We have to find ways to integrate OERs in innovative fashions, but also in ways that make them acceptable to educators in general.
I think in every school  you will find a variety of school leaders who are looking to achieve their objectives in different ways. Some schools, you have school leaders and principals who really are open and receptive to trying a variety of different things, responding to particular needs of their students and their clientele in general. In other cases you do have principals who feel very satisfied with what they’ve done without ever using open educational resources. And in their minds, if they feel that they’re succeeding, that they’re meeting their educational goals, well that’s fine. They don’t have to use OERs, but the truth off the matter is that it’s highly unlikely that they would be achieving these goals. 
And I think that that’s maybe the single biggest challenge. How do you get people with closed minds to open their minds and to become receptive to it? And I think the only way to do it really is by providing them with an opportunity to see what’s going on, to live a particular experience.


HOST 
Royce Kimmons sums up how OER will help to re-define teachers as professionals. 


ROYCE KIMMONS 
I think openness can help change teacher mindset and professional practice by helping to re-establish teachers as professionals. By helping us to recognize that they are experts in their classroom. They are pedagogical experts. They are content experts and to allow them to use that expertise to not only convey pre-packaged content that we have approved for them to convey but to actually create their own content, to adapt content from multiple sources, and to do it in a way that meets the needs of the students that they are staring in the face everyday. It’s very difficult to make decisions for teachers when you have no idea who they are teaching. You have no idea of the dynamics of their classroom, you have no idea of the struggles that they face on a day to day basis. Teachers have to make a million decisions every day based upon the needs of their students and so, by giving them the power to adapt their curriculum and adapt content to the needs of their students, we re-invigorate them and we re-establish them as being the professional in the classroom. We give them both license to do that but we also set the expectation that they should be content experts. 
In order to be an open educator, however, you have to be an content expert because again you are creating your own  resources, you’re adapting resources, you’re making sure your resources are continually up to date and you are opening yourself up to scrutiny because you’re sharing the things that you create with other people so that they can be reviewed, make sure that they’re accurate, making sure that they are actually doing what you want them to do. So I think openness can really help in many ways to change professional practice of our teachers by changing the expectations that we place upon teachers. We are making them or we are reinstating them as the  pedagogical and content experts in the classroom.   


HOST
Increasing the widespread understanding and use of OER will mean conquering economic resistance, changing educator mindset and perceptions,  and involving more people in the  making, creating and sharing of OER. As with all things working together in collaboration will be a major step in finding solutions. 
Special thanks to our guests, Randy Labonte of the CANeLearn Network, Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, Sarah Weston of Mountain Heights Academy, Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media,  Michael Canuel of LEARN,  David Porter of eCampus Ontario, Royce Kimmons of Brigham Young University and TJ Bliss of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
We hope you have enjoyed listening to this podcast and will take some time to explore the other podcasts in this series taking a closer look at Open Educational Resources.
This resource was funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources (ABOER) initiative, which is made possible through an investment from the Alberta government.
In keeping with principals of Open Education, this podcast is available under an open license, CC-by-SA.
The music "AM-Trans" and "Cash Rules" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-alike 4.0 International license.


CLOSING MUSIC