Benefits of OER for K-12 Learning INTRO MUSIC HOST Welcome to our podcast looking at the benefits of open educational resources and what they can contribute to our work as professionals and to the learning of our students. When we are first introduced to the non-commercial, freely-shared ethos of open educational resources, it’s natural to assume the primary benefit of OER must be cost. Surely, in an educational system where there never seems to be adequate finances to accomplish all we would like, free must be a powerful draw. Not only would free resources save local districts from one of the major expenses of education, but it would promise an unprecedented opportunity to reduce educational inequality around the world. Yet Sarah Weston, Director of OER and Technology at Mountain Heights Academy in Utah, suggests there may be more to the story of open educational resources than cost-savings alone. SARAH WESTON When I first started talking about OER and people asked me the benefits, the first thing I always said was cost. It seemed like a no-brainer to me that something that was free or nearly free was going to be the biggest selling point to OER. And I would talk about that up until last year. I’d have my list of my four things why OER is you know amazing and you should use it, and I always led with cost. And I think cost is a factor when we’re talking about colleges and universities because the idea, you know, of providing, you know, a five dollar textbook as opposed to a hundred-and-forty dollar textbook, when it’s coming out of the student’s pockets, their pocketbooks, it makes a huge difference. But here’s the thing with K-12. Cost has not been a factor. And I’ve been feeling this way for a while and I finally found a study that backed it up. Back in this last December the K-12 OER Collaborative, they released their study or their main paper’s conclusion and they had in there something that finally backed up what I’d been seeing. They’re finding that price is not a significant factor in district decision-making, with the possible exception of when there’s no money available. But in that case, adoptions are generally suspended anyway. So when there was lots of money for a district, the price made no difference in OER. But when there wasn’t any money, they weren’t making any movements in curriculum anyway. And so this idea of cost which I used to tout as the main, maybe the biggest reason for going with OER is not really having an impact in K-12. That was fascinating for me to learn, and yet I’m glad I found some facts to back it up because I’ve been kind of feeling that way. So I never really, well I lead with that one now when people ask me only to tell them that’s not the reason why. HOST Royce Kimmons, an Assistant Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, also accepts that cost-savings are certainly worth mentioning but he believes that the true meaning of open educational resources may lie in the potential to differentiate learning for individual student needs. ROYCE KIMMONS There are definite economic potentials for openness, but there are also pedagogical potentials and professional potentials. So, in relation to pedagogy, teachers can use open educational resources and adopt other practices of openness to help increase their ability to differentiate for individual student needs. So this is a huge issue right now in education, and trying to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of each of our diverse students. Because that’s something that everyone has been talking about for several years now, and that schools and districts are simply requiring their teachers to do, to make individualized education plans, to make sure that they are adapting their instruction for individual learners but at the same time, teachers are not given the resources, resources that are adaptable. They’re not given instruction and guidance on, often on how to go about doing that, and so openness can be seen as a solution to the problem of differentiation. And so I think that, at least the teachers that we worked with, that was probably the biggest motivator for them is that they knew they should be differentiating for their students but they didn’t necessarily know how. And once they started to realize that openly-licensed content is so adaptable that they can, do things with it they could not do with their previous, previous copyright-restricted content, then all of a sudden light bulbs went off and they realized this can help solve my problems, this can help me do this thing that I’ve been expected to do for a long time. HOST Rory McGreal, the UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University further describes how we can use the open structure of these resources to accomplish the move towards differentiated, individualized education RORY McGREAL The benefit of using other people’s resources is not just a cost benefit. It is also, the fact that it gives you the ability to change, modify, mix, remix, mash, and do what you want with that resource. And so sharing is also sharing the ability to improve and augment, localize and do many different things with the open educational resource. To be sure, you cannot do this with restricted, copyright-restricted content, but with an open license, teachers and students can do what they want with the resources. HOST It is not just about modifying and remixing the same resources to teach different concepts; we can use the open structure of OER to teach the same content in multiple ways. RORY McGREAL With open educational resources, we can use many different resources to teach the same concept. We can have a range of different lessons that teach the same concept, so students with different learning styles and different ways of understanding can have an individualized, more personalized instruction. HOST When looking at the benefits of open educational resources we find ourselves returning to David Wiley’s Five R Framework of open educational resources - retaining, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing. Bea de los Arcos, a Research Associate of the OER Research Hub Project at the Open University of the UK, describes what the freedom inherent in open educational resources can mean to the practicing teacher. BEA DE LOS ARCOS So in terms of openness, the fact that you have a resource, and that this resource is open, um, what you have immediately is the freedom to adapt it, the freedom to customize the content. And that is huge when you think about it. If you think about it nowadays, eh, if you’re in front of a class, especially we’re talking about K-12, you’re in front of your class, you have 30 or 40 kids in class and we know very well these days that this idea of one size fits all doesn’t work anymore. So what you are you going to do? What you have to do is, what you’re trying to do is, is em, respond in a way to the diverse needs of all your learners in class. You want your kids to learn as as best as as they can, so you’re going to make it, One of the things that the openness in an open educational resource is giving you the freedom to actually customize that content so that you can, so that you can actually, accommodate the needs, the diverse needs of your kids in the classroom. What OER gives you is this freedom to go, to go slightly mad about adapting and changing and revising and experimenting and uh so again, it’s this freedom actually to do whatever it is that you want to do in class to help your students your students learn better. HOST While the benefits of flexibility and financing is clear, many still ask how the quality of open educational resources could possibly compare to carefully-constructed, copyrighted materials. Sarah Weston acknowledges the high quality of licensed digital materials, but argues that the flexibility of open educational resources for teaching is fundamental. SARAH WESTON So there have been some amazing advances in ed tech and delivery over the last seven years, and we’ve been able to witness them, it’s been awesome. But this movement and this growth and all these digital resources, it’s ironic. It has led to the development of some of the most engaging and thoughtful and beautifully-designed lessons, but they’re static. So we have static curriculum out there that’s been developed in this surge in ed tech and learning objects. But this is where OER comes in. One of the plusses of OER it now can give you the freedom to take that content, and you can edit and revise it to meet the needs of your students, which is a basic tenet of teaching. This is what we do. And we have digital content that’s not OER, it’s copyrighted; you can’t do with it what you want to do as a teacher, but OER allows you to do with the curriculum what you are always doing. And that flexibility is one of its biggest strengths. HOST Royce Kimmons feels that a shift in attention from the technical, polished learning object towards the openness and flexibility of open educational resources also brings professional benefits for the teacher. ROYCE KIMMONS Professionally, I think that OER and openness provide a lot of other opportunities as well. I think that what openness does is it requires us to rethink the role of the teacher in the classroom and to reinstate them in many ways as the content experts in the classroom. So if I have a high school science teacher who uses an open textbook, what I can do is allow that teacher to take control of that textbook, to adapt it to their students’ needs, to stay abreast of what is happening in the scientific community and adapt their curriculum and adapt the content they use in their classrooms to always reflect what is most up to date and what is most important for the students to learn. And so by using open educational resources, teachers can become the content connoisseurs in their classroom and they can become the content experts and update their curriculum. They can adapt it and make sure that they are teaching their students the content that they need to learn. HOST The potential of open educational resources to enhance the role of the teacher as a professional is not just limited to the individual. Sarah Weston describes how the sharing and adaptation of open educational resources can foster a professional continuity between teachers, as a sort of evolution of teaching practice. SARAH WESTON The other thing that I believe is one of the biggest strengths of OER is the idea of evolution. The evolution that comes with it, it actually stops that waste of teachers. There was a, my third grade teacher, she had a big long butcher paper sign over her blackboard that said, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” a quote that went around tons in the early 80s. And I always tell people when talking about OER that a teacher is a terrible thing to waste. And when we use OER, teachers are able to take their content, edit it, revise it, add to it, improve it and then hand it off to another teacher who can then edit and revise and add and improve. And with OER we now have an evolution of best practices that are going on, and not teachers who are walking out of the classroom and taking all of their content and experience with them when they do so. HOST With these notions of evolution and adaptation we find the real benefit of open educational resources is an opportunity for learners to flourish and succeed. Bea de los Arcos explains: BEA DE LOS ARCOS This idea that you’re not locked into one way of teaching. So it could be the case that what you have in your class, do you know, some students, and we know that some students actually don’t fit in the classroom as we understand it as a traditional classroom, so, you know, it might be the case that a kid is not responding well to one particular way of teaching so, for this reason, they might be regarded as a low achiever or they might, and then that increases the likelihood of them dropping out of school, of school. What OER gives you in this case is again, this idea that you can expose the kids in the class to other ways of teaching, to other ways of learning and show them a different way so that they can all, in a way they can all flourish. It’s the same idea. You’re not locked up into one way of teaching and so the same way the kids are not locked up into just one way of learning. So they can try what’s best for them, and that’s going to help them being being successful and getting where they they want to get with with their education. HOST We have clearly moved far from the idea of open educational resources as simply a means to save costs. As Royce Kimmons sums up: ROYCE KIMMONS The potential benefits of OER are really kind of mind-boggling once you start to consider openness as a technical term, because it can fundamentally reshape many of the structures that we’ve come to accept as commonplace in education. HOST From cost savings to the ability to continually update, localize, and improve content, to flexible individualized instruction and the enhancement of the teacher’s role as content expert and professional, open educational resources hold the promise of transforming education and creating a relationship between content, teacher, and learner that can help each student flourish and achieve success. These are the true benefits offered by open educational resources. Special thanks to our guests, Sarah Weston, of Mountain Heights Academy, Royce Kimmons, of Brigham Young University, Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, and Bea de los Arcos,of the OER Research Hub Project. 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