Learning with OER INTRO MUSIC HOST Welcome to our podcast exploring the impact of K-12 OER on learners. We will look at the ways open educational resources can be used to create new learning opportunities, support differentiated learning and encourage the student voice. Sarah Weston, Director of OER and Technology at Mountain Heights Academy in Utah, explains how the flexibility of open educational resources can often create better opportunities for learners than licensed content. SARAH WESTON There are other reasons I think that OER that has stood the test of time over the last few years. The first one is that it’s flexible. There’s a term that gets thrown around a lot in K-12 : it’s RTI, it stands for Response to Intervention. It applies to Special Education, but more broadly it refers to how teachers are adapting their curriculum to fit the needs of their students and then measuring and documenting the students’ response, and hopefully their gains. 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 in all these digital resources; it’s ironic. It has led to the development of some of the most engaging and thoughtful and beautifully defined lessons, but they’re static. So we have static curriculum out there that’s been developed in this surge of 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 Weston goes on to describe the response parents and students have had to the use of OER in their classrooms. SARAH WESTON We get very little, and that is positive because sometimes, again, the impression of OER out there for people who aren’t familiar with it; they think free and they think lower quality. And that’s starting to change but that’s starting to change among people in education, that’s not starting to change among people who are using education: parents and students. So, if they know about OER they may not be comfortable with it. And so, if they’re not coming and telling us they’re having problems, then that means they’re getting the level of education and the quality of content that they’re expecting to see from our schools. And whether that’s from OER or not OER, the fact that they’re not noticing is actually good. That means we are providing education and content at the level that is not causing them any alarm. And that’s the whole idea. OER should either be the same quality or higher quality than what is out there. Wherever it comes from, that doesn’t matter so much. But parents care about the quality of the education. They don’t care its origin. And so if we’re not getting a lot of comments back on OER, it means we’re probably doing our job right, because they’re getting the education they want. HOST Michael Canuel, CEO of LEARN describes how creating OER has helped to individualize content for learners and allow access to content and resources when they are needed, not just during set courses. MICHAEL CANUEL One of the most interesting things that we’ve done over the years is we’ve created resources that are not only for teachers, but also for students. These open educational resources really came up as a result of teachers who have classes where students are many many different levels, and they were becoming very frustrated because frequently they would have to go back over material and cover things that they assumed the students had done in previous years or other subject domains. And so we called these a “How to.” And they really touch on a variety of skills and competencies that the students should have developed at earlier stages in the learning curve. And so these How Tos include everything from how to write a research paper to write a letter, how to work in a team. All kind of different skills and competencies. And what the teachers then do is they direct their students to these resources where they’re able to pretty much follow them at their own pace, refer to them as they need. The feedback that we’ve had from teachers has really been phenomenal. They feel that as they’ve tried to deal with the students at different levels within their own class and they’re trying to provide differentiated strategies, this is a tool that’s been invaluable to them. And it sounds quite, so simple but for the teachers it’s been a tremendous resource, and a time-saver for them. And it also helps to individualize the teaching that they’re able to provide the students. The result is that the teachers are able to address individual needs without sacrificing the work that they want to accomplish with their class. Focusing on Open Pedagogy and Participatory Culture is really for us something critical for our entire community. However, we have eighty of our schools are also community learning centres, and I’ll just use them as an illustration. These are schools where the community is asked to participate and get involved in pretty much every aspect of the school: school life, student life. And we have parents, very often, who are looking for resources. And so we’ve over the years, provided courses and support to parents through our Community Learning Centers and all primarily online. They’re able to take courses on how to deal with children who have ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) or if they’re parents who have children who are somewhere along the autism spectrum; they’re able to find out strategies on how to deal with their children at home or in preparation for school. So we have these courses online and they’re available to all of our community. And we always deliver them pretty much in a synchronous real-time format where we encourage participation and exchange and questions from the parents and it’s been tremendously successful. We subsequently, of course, record the sessions and the parents are able to refer to them as they need and now as a result of that the demand for them is growing tremendously. We just find, especially within the area of special needs, parents and educators need to know and want to know more. So we continue to give these courses and we’ve had great feedback and great interest in our providing more. HOST Bea de los Arcos, Research Associate of the OER Research Hub Project at the Open University of the UK, researched some of the potential benefits of OER for K-12 learners. She shares her findings. BEA DE LOS ARCOS The Open Educational Resources Research Hub Project is a project funded by the Hewlett Foundation in the U.S. and what we’ve been doing for the past couple of years is research in the impact of using open educational resources on teaching and learning practices. And the way we’ve gone about it, we have, at the starting point we had 11 hypotheses and tested these hypotheses working with projects and collaborations across four different sectors. So we looked at higher education. We looked at colleges. We looked at informal learning and also K-12. So these 11 hypothesis that we were testing. Not all of the hypotheses were tested with all sectors. We had 2 main hypotheses that kind of worked as an umbrella for all the collaborations we had. So the first one was, to what extent OER improves student performance and satisfaction, and the second general hypothesis is to do with the fact that people use open educational resources differently from other online materials. And then, the two main hypotheses that the project covered in general with all the collaborations, we did find that, yes, the OER (open educational resources) improve student performance and improve satisfaction. But performance not necessarily understood in terms of grades. We didn’t find evidence that because you’re using open educational resources as opposed to other online materials you’re going to get a better score in your exams. That evidence is not there particularly. But we weren’t really particularly interested in looking at performance from the point of view of looking at grades and assessment. It’s more performance understood in different ways. So in that sense we found evidence that OER basically helped student performance and maybe not directly but indirectly through increasing confidence or through increasing enthusiasm for the subject. Increasing the independence of the students. Increasing the collaboration. So that’s with regard to the first hypothesis; the hypothesis to do with increasing satisfaction and performance. For the second hypothesis, this idea that people use open educational resources in a different way from other online materials. What we found is that rather than adopting open educational resources, what you have is the idea of adapting open educational resources. So teachers, not only teachers but also learners, you hardly ever use something as they found it exactly on the internet. You’re always going to customize, you’re always going to change, always going to adapt what you find in order to fit your needs. And that basically happens in a continuum from just, you know, it develops from just finding an idea to actually changing, repurposing something, creating something completely new. If you think about it, with open data students have access to the same raw material that scientists have, that policy makers have, that researchers have. And so, in a way that enables students to engage with real programs. Whether it is at local level, whether it is at global, wider global context, and so what educators can do with open data then is they can encourage the students to think as researchers or to think as scientists, to think as journalists. And in a way what they’re doing, that open data is providing a meaningful context for say gaining experience in what is the research process. What is doing research, for instance. Or what is good practice when it comes to data management. So educators can use open data to teach data analysis skills, to teach data curation skills, to teach information management skills. It’s very much about developing critical thinking skills, and about making that learning experience real, rather than something that you do within the four walls of your classroom. It doesn’t really apply to the outside world . So if you think of performance or if performance is understood as directly improving scores in exams then the evidence may not be there. We cannot say nowadays that if you use OER you’re gonna get better scores in your exams than if you use materials that are not open. But at the same time we have found that if you study with OER that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be doing worse on your exams than if you use traditional materials. But again, the improvements that OER can make in a student’s performance are kind of indirectly related to other aspects like: open educational resources are going to help your students build up confidence, your students are better engaged in the classroom, they’re more enthusiastic about what they’re doing. Not only about what they’re doing now, but what they can do in the future. So just continuing their study. THere is gains when it comes to actually gaining confidence and feeling better prepared, feeling kind of more independent and more self-reliant. So you’re not always waiting for your teacher to tell you what it is that you have to do but you can actually go out there and take a bit more control over your own learning. So the students are creating, the students are participating in this idea of openness. And you have also this idea of the teacher not - working alongside the students in a way at the same level. It’s not the “Sage on the Stage” but the idea of the “Guide on the Side.” HOST Bill Fitzgerald, Director of the Privacy Evaluation Initiative at Common Sense Media, goes further to explain how OER helps create opportunities for the student voice to be heard. BILL FITZGERALD I mean if a student is doing work they should be the one that has the say; that has the final say, the authoritative say over how that work gets used. Because it’s theirs. And, you know, school doesn’t exist so people can get datasets out of it, school exists so students can learn and in the States we have compulsory Public education and it’s really.. It’s epicly shaky ground to both legally require somebody to be there and then not give them a say in how their work is used. That’s not the kind of autonomy that we actually want to, you know, we want people to have autonomy. We want people to have control. So if we set up a system that inherently denies that we’re doing something wrong. I think the choice of what should be released openly and what shouldn’t be, I mean, that’s a personal choice. I think that if we try and place unnecessary limits on that we are getting into ethically shaky ground. But even, like, the phrase “sensitive user data” you know, really what we mean when we say “sensitive user data” is actually somebody’s personal story about how they learn. And when we talk about data, when we talk about openness and when we talk about releasing things freely we run the risk of kind of de-personalizing something that is really intensely personal. So I’m a huge advocate of openness, but I’m also a huge advocate of having a student-centred learning system. So I think if we’re going to err in one direction or another I think we need to err on the side of learner autonomy and learner control. HOST Bea de los Arcos explains her thoughts on the future of OER on an international scale. BEA DE LOS ARCOS Internationally if you talk about pressures as in what might push people to explore open educational resources, cost is an issue. In a sense that reusing materials is always going to be much cheaper than producing or buying something that, you know, within no time at all is going to be out of date and is not going to be relevant for your class, but I think the pressure to explore open educational resources is going to come from students Because again, it’s about being exposed to so much more than what you can give them as teachers. But for me in a way, it is unavoidable. Open is happening and maybe we don’t realize that it is. That it’s happening and we don’t realize that what we’re doing as practitioners, as teachers is open practice. But it is there, so it only needs a click and somebody needs to say to you, “Yes, what you’re doing is actually Open Practice. What you’re using is an open educational resource” for you to actually flourish in a way. HOST Finally, Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, leaves us with this message. RORY McGREAL We need to recognize that teachers want to innovate and share their resources and that open educational resources are important for promoting sharing and doing so in an atmosphere that is free and puts sharing at the forefront. And this means sharing not just among teachers and the content, but also with student-created content, and the use of students constructing their own material and sharing it with other students. HOST OER offers students the opportunity to learn in a flexible way - promoting critical thinking, sharing, connections to the content, and overall student engagement. Special thanks to our guests, 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, and Bea de los Arcos with the OER Research HUB. 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 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