Teaching with OER INTRO MUSIC HOST Welcome to our podcast looking at the potential for open educational resources in K-12 teaching. This podcast will consider the changes to teaching and learning that an open teaching practice creates and the ongoing need for OER professional development for educators. Recent research by Bea de los Arcos, Research Associate of the OER Research Hub Project at the Open University of the UK suggests that more teachers should consider using OER as primary resources in their learning environments. De los Arcos found that many teachers are still unaware of OER fundamentals including the 5R’s of OER and Creative Commons licensing. BEA DE LOS ARCOS A lot of what we found in a way we expected to find. On a personal basis I think what surprised me the most was the disparity between saying “I, yes! I adapt materials. So I hardly ever use in class what I find as-is. I’m going to adapt it, I’m going to change it to fit my needs in the classroom.” SO the disparity between being very certain that that’s what I do in my class. I adapt resources that were created by other people. So the disparity between that and then not being necessarily aware of Creative Commons licenses. On the one hand, you’re telling me, “Yes! I adapt materials,” but on the other hand you’re telling me that, “When I look for materials, whether this resource has a creative commons license or not is not a priority.” In terms of how teachers go about finding open educational resources, you will see how a great majority of teachers we’ve surveyed in the project will actually visit a site like Youtube or a site like Tedtalks or Kahn Academy and other repositories. The curious thing is that there are repositories out there that are specifically target K-12 teachers. And funny enough, these repositories are not widely used. So, yes teachers go online to find resources but they’re not so keen on actually putting their resources back online. So they’re not so keen on sharing the resources themselves for others to use. They share in person at teaching meetings or staff development meetings, they share if somebody asks but they rarely put things publically online for anyone to see, for anyone to use. So what needs to happen and one of the challenges that we found for K-12 teachers: what they say is that they find it very difficult to actually find open educational resources. And so what we need to do is encourage sharing as much as we can. HOST Sarah Weston, Director of Technology and OER at ‎Mountain Heights Academy in Utah, tells us about her own OER creation and how she helps other teachers learn how to make and use open educational resources. SARAH WESTON Since 2009 I’ve had the opportunity to develop many different courses from OER , probably over 20 at this point, most of them are early math classes, writing back in 2009 through 2011. They are still available for people to use - however What I am teaching teachers how to create with OER now, I sometimes use some of those things I did as the non-examples, the bad examples. I had to learn because there was no one there to teach me. There was no one there to point me to where to go and so the opportunity we have now again is to give the teachers a path on how to create with OER so they’re not having to bungle through with no directions like we were doing back in 2009, 2010. I used to have a list of like 5 or 6 places I told teachers to go to start and I’ve narrowed it down really to one now. I kind of learned what works best for them. The first thing I do before I send them anywhere, however, is I tell them to take a look at their state standards. I guess if it’s international whatever standards are there for their country or region. Almost every teacher is going to have an outline of what needs to be taught in their class. Not just for core classes but for everything. Those standards are the outline that you can use to start curating your own and pulling your own OER. And that feels very natural for teachers. They’re like, “Oh! I’ve got an outline.” That’s good. That makes them feel comfortable, and when you’re teaching teachers to build with OER, you’ve got to make sure that you’re teaching them the way that they’re comfortable with; and they’re comfortable with outlines. So, I have them pull their standards, and they have them out in front of them, and then I take them now to the one place I told you about: I take them to OER Commons. There’s a few reasons that I do this: it’s a place they can pull from and it’s also a place that they can build in. If they’re a teacher not associated with a specific school, if they’re just doing OER all on their own, they need a place to build as well as to find. And when they’re able to build inside of the authoring tool, in OER Commons, they are both using OER and producing and sharing OER all in the same step. And so it kind of completes that magic circle of OER when they stay inside that system. In OER Commons, they’ve done a lot of the heavy curating for you, and if you want to get even more detailed they have the OER Commons hubs where different institutions or schools or agencies have gone through and take these OER resources, narrowed them down, filtered them to a specific population. Maybe it’s STEM. Maybe it’s common core. Perhaps its K-12. And so you could even narrow it down even more. So I used to send teachers to multiple spots and now I say, “Just go to OER Commons.” When you’re new to OER you kind of just need a one-stop shop. And once you’re familiar and you can use that really well then before I send them anywhere else I make them go learn about copyright. Because copyright is something that many people, they say they know, but they don’t. And they need to learn not just about Creative Commons copyright which is, you know, one of the underpinnings (that and Public Domain of OER), they need to understand other types of copyright. Like Fair Use, and you know, things that are actually copyrighted: how they are able to use them or if they are able to use them. And they need to understand everything about that before I start sending them elsewhere. So I send them OER commons first, and then if they’re wanting to do a little bit more, then we take a look at copyright, and then I give them some other sites where they can go and start finding their own OER. What I found is: in this process, they start self-creating at the same time. So they need a place to publish. Which is why I mentioned the authoring tool in OER Commons called Open Author. They have their Open Author but they also have sort of the K-12 specific tool and a post-secondary specific tool where they put feature sets in there that can apply a little bit more to each type of teacher. And then the teachers can author in there. I give them a few other authoring places. I always try to think of places that will let them license easily. You can now set up your own Moodle site in Moodle cloud. I direct them towards that just because if you’re building a Moodle, it’s open source software, so philosophically it fits OER, so it’s a good place to go. But I give them a few places to build. So the order I go in: I have them pull standards, then go to OER Commons, then I teach them about copyright, and then someplace that they can expand beyond that. One of the tough things about OER is: you created it and you put it out there, and people use it, but you never know what they do. So it’s good practice when you use OER - you’re attributing, you’re digitally attributing, but I think it would encourage people to share and use OER more if there was more of an actual attribution. Where you call those people up or email them and say, “This is what I’ve done with your content.” When you’re talking about K-12 that is the biggest reason then. It doesn’t or feel like what you’re used to. And we’ll slowly overcome that as the next generation of teachers come in who are used to curating digital resources on their own. They grew up bookmarking and pulling things from the internet and so it doesn’t feel so unfamiliar to them. So that change is going to happen on its own, but right now we’re still struggling against districts and you’re talking about people in their, you know, 50s or 60s making the decision. They’re looking for things that look how they always saw it. And OER doesn’t look that way yet. So either we’re going to start making changes in how we present content or we’re just going to let time run it’s course and in a decade or two it won’t matter so much. HOST Bill Fitzgerald, Director of the Privacy Evaluation Initiative at Common Sense Media describes how OER can provide professional development opportunities for teachers by encouraging teachers to remix and reshape content to best meet the needs of their students. BILL FITZGERALD Interacting on a regular basis with OER and communities that create and reuse OER is some of the best teacher professional development out there. Because you are working with content and people who have content area expertise in a way that invites you in and it’s a different type of teaching. It’s a different type of learning when you get to interact directly with the text that you are then going to use to teach. If a teacher even goes a step further and has a project that includes student co-creation of text where students are both learners and authors, and teachers are learners and authors; that’s a pedagogical shift. In addition to a shift in how we ordinarily think about how texts are used and consumed in the K12 level that, you know, has the potential to improve learning outcomes but also has the potential to reshape the way we think about teacher professional development. When a teacher has the ability and has the freedom to modify their curriculum and then share out those modifications it creates higher level of engagement with the course material. And one of the reasons why I emphasize the “and share out” element of working with a text. is that teachers do the core work of creating OER all of the time. And if a teacher is using a proprietary text or if a teacher is using an open text they are augmenting that text, they are not covering sections, they are replacing one chapter with a different source. I mean, teachers are perpetually engaged in what could be considered content remixing. The difference is when they use a proprietary text they can’t actually release that out, or the means for them to actually package that up and reuse their own intellectual work is diminished because they can’t restructure the text on their own.Often they would be violating copyright in some cases if they did that. Whereas with an open text they actually can create their ideal text once, use it, figure out what’s wrong with it, fix it for the next time, and then repeat every time they actually deliver the course or hand it off to a colleague who’s going to take over the course. Or break it in half when they want to actually , you know, do a different course or use a different structure. And, there is a level of flexibility they have with open content relative to proprietary content that allows for really just more precise tailoring of material and approaches to students within a course. HOST Royce Kimmons, an Assistant Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, recently completed research on why and how teachers are using OER in K-12 Learning environments. The research revealed that teachers often adapt OER to create relevant resources that they were unable to “find” anywhere else. ROYCE KIMMONS 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 a huge issue right now, in education, in trying to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of each of our diverse students and by using resources that don’t rely on traditional copyright restrictions it allows us to take our resources, adapt them as needed. A simple example of this would be if I have a textbook written for my grade level but I’m teaching a class of students that are not performing at grade level in terms of writing or, and in terms of the reading, then I can adapt the reading level of that grade book using an automated system. There are websites like Simplish or Rewordify where I could copy an entire chapter of a textbook and paste it in there and ask the program to take any difficult words and reword it to make it simpler for my students. So students with learning disabilities, I can rewrite basically the textbook to meet them where they are at. Within a traditional copyright restricted paradigm you can’t do that. A similar example would be being culturally responsive in the resources that I use. So if I have a textbook, for instance in the US, many of the textbooks are written for the big states. They’re written for Texas or California. And if you are talking about things like geography or geology or native American issues, when you are trying to teach students those kinds of things you need something that is more culturally responsive but also locally responsive that takes into account your local needs and your local learning outcomes that you should be addressing to help your students become full members of the society in which they live If I’m living in Utah, as I am now, and if we’re using a textbook written for Texas, that’s a problem because the cultural heritage and the issues facing Utah are very different from those facing Texas. So there a lot of things that are needed for me as a teacher to adapt to my teaching to be responsive to the local needs of my students. And if I am working again under a traditional copyright restricted paradigm, I am just stuck with whatever the Texas textbook says. Whereas if I’m using an open textbook, I’m free to maybe remove chapters that are not appropriate or to add chapters as necessary, to edit chapters, to bring in additional resources and so forth. So it allows teachers to be much more adaptive to the needs of their students; both the individual needs and also the local needs of the community. So, I think pedagogically OER allows us to be very flexible and adaptive to our students in ways that copyright restricted paradigms have not allowed. Professionally I think that OER and openness provide a lot of other opportunities as well. HOST Randy LaBonte CEO of the Canadian e-Learning Network also notes the changing role of the teacher in terms of finding and using digital resources. Digital technologies have changed the expectations for teachers and they need to consider open practices. RANDY LABONTE OER in K to 12 is being searched for, so there is a desire and actually an affinity to use it. And there is a recent study that found that K -12 teachers are much more value and believe the quality is better of OER than they do of published resources. But a lot of research shows that right now, in online, probably at best 5%, more likely 1% of teachers actually share openly. They’re more looking to grab things that they can use themselves. So at that time we also operated within silos. When we moved online and digitally, we rationalized all of these resources into closed environments. They were called learning management systems. And despite the fact that Moodle is open source and the code is shared it actually is a closed environment. So for me to be able to connect or get anything from Moodle I have to have a login to that resource. So those are part of the restrictions why right now we’ve started to talk much more about open, open practices, open education. HOST Michael Canuel, the CEO of LEARN in Quebec, agrees that teachers need to experience the benefits of sharing in order to consider integrating and building OER. MICHAEL CANUEL Practice changes very slowly. Rarely does it change overnight. We don’t have epiphanies in our classrooms. Most of time teachers need to see what others are doing and they say, “Well I like that” and they can see the value of it. And it has to be modelled for them and then they need to live that experience. They need to have gone through it themselves. They see a teacher using resources in an innovative fashion, drawing from a variety of resources from different places and doing it in an effective way, I think they’re going to want to do the same thing. Modelling is core to everything. The problem with modelling is that it’s expensive. It’s not the easy way to do professional development or to do professional learning. It requires time. It requires patience. And very often, the powers think that a quick workshop or information session is going to do it. It rarely does. Modelling to me is absolutely core to everything we want to do if we want to change practice in the classroom. HOST Bea de los Arcos, explains how she believes OER can create more equitable and inclusive learning. BEA DE LOS ARCOS One of the ways in which OER can contribute to a more equitable and inclusive education is very much through reducing cost. So we have, for instance that, every year there are millions and millions and millions of pounds and dollars spent in buying textbooks, and these are textbooks that, you know, a year down the road they’re no longer current, they might apply to one state but they don’t apply in the other states because they’re not, they can’t be localized. So it makes perfect sense to create, for example, open textbooks that, you know, that can be printed by a handful of dollars. So it’s going to be much cheaper to print and it’s a book that you can keep forever, so you don’t have to give it back. So it helps in the sense that: if it reduces the cost of education, then hopefully it’s going to help so that everybody knows that it doesn’t matter what your background is or the socioeconomic circumstance of your parents. You’re going to have a chance to actually have an education Being able to adapt the resources that you find is of huge importance. Because it is very seldom as a teacher, if say, you go online and find this resource that you think “Yes! This is what I need” It’s very seldom that you’re going to use it exactly as is. You’re always going to customize it to your own needs. So it’s this idea that you adapt the resource to fit your needs, to fit the needs of your learners in the class. HOST She goes one to describe how OER allows teachers to create personal learning opportunities for each student and to share the content that they have developed for the benefit of even more students. BEA DE LOS ARCOS Personalized learning for K-12: is tailoring learning to student’s strengths and to student’s needs, to student’s interests and their experiences. One size fits all no longer applies. It’s about helping the students, in a way, to set their own goals instead of forcing them to actually follow a particular path. And how it changes teacher practice is that, you know, in order to do that you have to be able to tailor content to the students. The challenges of personalized learning for teachers, I think, it’s not easy as in it requires a lot of work. If you’re using one textbook and teaching one way and treating everybody the same, in a way that requires less effort than if you actually want to try and reach all of your students as individuals and helping them and guide them through the learning and setting of their own goals. So it is more difficult. For the students, it’s interesting because a lot of kids go to school and they know what’s the game. They know what they do. So there’s likely to be a certain resistance on the part of the students because it’s slightly less comfortable to them, especially at the beginning, because they’re going to have to take control of their learning to some extent. And is there resistance going to be there for parents as well? I don’t know but it’s something that, because it’s not the way we used to do things years ago, it’s not what we would consider “traditional teaching” that it’s something that we would, you know, that needs to be explained to students, but also needs to be explained to their parents I reckon. HOST T.J Bliss, a Program Officer in the Education Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, describes a future where teachers are included in the development of online and digital resources and students reap the rewards. TJ BLISS In the next five years what I would like to see, and what the Hewlett Foundation is working to promote is for a majority of districts choosing to adopt open educational resources. Not just because it saves them money but because by saving that money then they can invest in more teacher professional development and it can involve their teachers in the ongoing improvement of that content. I would like to see a day where districts do not need to go out and adopt new content. Particularly for areas like Math and ELA that don’t necessarily change that much, that quickly. I would like to see school districts move from what are typically 5-7 year adoption cycles that provide students with textbooks that they can’t take home or write in or use very well because they have to be maintained for 7 years until there’s enough money, you know the cycle comes up again, they can buy new books. I would like to see that go away completely, and I would like to see school districts start to realize that they actually own the content. Once they’ve adopted it, it’s theirs and they have a responsibility and an opportunity to keep that content fresh and up to date. And that they have a teacher force that is expected to do that and that is compensated for doing that. So, that’s where I see OER playing a role in the future, is actually toward increased teacher professional development and improvement and that leads to potentially greater learning gains and better a better educational experience for students. HOST By using OER in their classrooms, teachers can provide differentiated, culturally relevant and timely content for their students. And by moving to open teaching practices, it will further ensure that every student has the opportunity to learn in the way that best suits their needs. Special thanks to our guests, T.J. Bliss with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Randy Labonte of the Canadian eLearning Network, Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, Michael Canuel of LEARN, Bea de los Arcos with the OER Research HUB, Sarah Weston of Mountain Heights Academy, and Royce Kimmons, of Brigham Young University 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