Current Landscape of OER INTRO MUSIC HOST Welcome to our podcast describing the current landscape of Open Educational Resources for K-12. In this podcast, we will hear descriptions of K-12 OER initiatives from around the world. Teachers today are using OER in a wide variety of ways. Bea (Bay-a) de los Arcos, Research Associate of the OER Research Hub Project at the Open University of the UK describes how teachers are using OER based on her 2014 research involving 10 different countries. BEA DE LOS ARCOS We conducted a survey to find out about exactly this question was “what type of OER do school teachers use?’ And we found exactly that. There is a great variety of resources. In a way the type of resource that is more widely used - videos and images, but then we have lesson plans, we have quizzes, we have elements of a course, we have some teachers using open data. So there’s a great variety overall. And in terms of what do they use these resources for, we find that a lot of the teachers use the resources to prepare for their class, to prepare for for the teaching, to get new ideas and inspiration and also mainly to use as supplementary materials. So you wouldn’t find a lot of teachers using open educational resources as their primary material but as supplementary material, in a way like supplementing the existing coursework of students HOST TJ Bliss, Program Office in the Education Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation explains David Wiley’s 5 R’s framework and how they have helped distinguish between OER and free content. TJ BLISS So the Five R’s of OER are the qualities of an educational resource that make them open. So these are the qualities of OER in addition to being free, and they are : Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. The Five R’s are a framework that David Wiley, who is the person who coined the term ‘Open Content’ and really got the open educational resources movement started. This is how he defines OER, and it is the definition also that the Hewlett Foundation agrees with and supports as well. The Five R’s are really the most critical part of OER. Otherwise it’s no different from any other content that you can find anywhere else that’s freely available HOST TJ Bliss explains the 5 R’s further by sharing An example of how teachers in Utah came together to collaborate in the creation of new Science textbooks TJ BLISS The Utah Open Textbook project is an example of a state looking out and finding content. The work that they did is that they brought together twenty five of their best teachers from across the state and put them in a room for a week and said “Here’s a bunch of Open Content. By the end of the week we want to compile this content into a textbook that school districts across the state could adopt.” And because the content was available and open, and was free for reuse, revising, remixing, redistributing, and retaining they were able to do that. And within a week they had a textbook that was ready to go, and it was adopted, and it’s Utah’s textbook. They get to keep it. It’s theirs. HOST Utah educator,Sarah Weston, Director of O-E-R and Technology at Mountain Heights Academy, describes her first experiences with OER in K-12 learning environments: SARAH WESTON Our school Mountain Heights Academy kind of had its beginning back in 2007. So Dr. David Wiley who is very well known across the OER field was talking to one of his graduate students, and his graduate student actually set him. He said “ You talk a lot about this Open Educational stuff, maybe it’s time for you to shut up or put something on the table.” And so then David at that time met with some people and they decided to put together our school, which at the time was called Open High School of Utah and the school was going to be a charter school and it was going to be a fully online charter school. And they worked through the process of creating the charter and as part of that, the basis was that they were going to create a curriculum based solely off OER. And it was about a 2 year process I believe with them getting that through the state process, um and I didn’t come on the scene until about 2009 when they were doing hiring for this new school that was opening, and I had - it was - my background was as a local administrator and as mathematics teacher and I saw the job opening for a mathematics teacher for a new high school and I was intrigued. So the first time I heard about OER was when I read an article about David and him opening this school in the newspaper. And so I kind of pursued it from that angle. I had no idea what OER was - didn’t mean anything to me at the time other than just - I don’t know, kind of another gimmick behind a charter. Because every Charter has to have a mission, so a lot of times you find they, they try to stand out from the crowd and I figured that’s what this school was trying to do with this OER angle. And I started at the end of July. I got hired really close to the start of the beginning of the school year and they told me they had a class completely ready. It was a class written from these open educational resources and I got access to it, and I opened it up, and it was like 12 links to um to these modules in that that NROC had out there for Algebra 1. Now no assessments, no scaffolding, no framework, it was just these links and I about died. As a math teacher I thought “This is crazy. I can’t teach this. This isn’t a class, this is 12 web links.” And they were OER, ok? So I had an understanding about OER, but my first experience with OER was I hated it! This is what it is? This is what they’re going to give me to work with? Back in 2009, there were limited OERs for K-12. There was stuff happening in post-secondary, but in K-12 it was very very limited. Or it was people adapting the post-secondary uh materials to K-12. And even then, trying to write ninth grade level classes with that type of material it was, it was inappropriate, like that just not what you should be doing. So I spent that - I had about 4 panicked weeks of me staying up very late nights creating scaffolding materials, assessments, and taking from my history as a teacher. Given the idea of OER I’m like “Okay, the stuff that I created I can do that, I’ve been doing this for years.” And then I started making videos. I didn’t know that very much was out there. About a year later someone said “Hey, have you seen that stuff that like that Sal Khan guy is doing?” He was just couple years ahead of me, but I - I’m sure started the same way, in our homes at night making videos to give math students what they needed. I would spend hours. As soon as my house got quiet - it was about 10pm at night - and from about 10 until 1 I would make videos to be able to add to my class um. I realize now I didn’t know a lot what I was doing um. They are not videos that are very useful as OER now because they were very class specific. I know a little better now as we work with our teachers, when we’re creating something that is going to be released they create that content so that it’s a little more universal as opposed to specific. But I mean when you’re going at it the first time I mean it’s great, it can be student-specific because that’s what you’re allowed to do as a teacher. So I just spent hours making videos trying to create some sort of framework around the OER I was given. Not really knowing at the time I was creating OER. So it was, it was kinda cool. So I got exposed to OER in both a negative way - in that I thought it very limiting - and then also in a positive way in that I found ah my natural instinct as a teacher to be creative gelled very much with the philosophy of OER. And so I grew into it as a teacher kind of applying what I already knew, and found that OER kind of naturally was what I was doing as a teacher. That was my first exposure to OER and then we kind of grew from there. HOST While her first exposure to OER was overwhelming, Sarah Weston clearly considers OER a natural fit for teachers. Bill Fitzgerald, Director of the Privacy Evaluation Initiative at Common Sense Media, also sees OER as a natural fit for teachers as they create their own resources. Bill describes the importance of the OER creation process and how Hackathons are an example of supporting teachers in creating and using OER. BILL FITZGERALD OERs are often put out in formats that are not reusable. So 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. I mean honestly, the Hackathon, or the barn-raising model is, its its really just a fancy way of saying “Let’s do this work together. Let’s 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. If you do this as part of a group, you are already ensuring that the work you create is gonna get broad reuse across a few different contexts. In some ways, like, the whole notion of a barn-raising or a hackathon is - the focus is on what gets done in a day, but the real value is how it is reused and reused over time. So, my advice for people who are looking to do this work now, is to think, think beyond the point of creation and anticipate how you can support people reusing and adapting the work that gets done. You know, the easiest way to do that is just making sure that all of the, all the stuff that you release is available in a format that’s easy to reuse. For a lot of the stuff you put on the web that just makes sure you have an easily accessible text version with the images or any other media you use accessible, so people can swap in and, you know, they can edit text and swap in media as they need to. HOST Teachers in many English speaking countries have access to OER in abundance. And Canadians have often provided assistance in developing successful international projects for K- 12 schools. One such example comes from David Porter, CEO of eCampus Ontario, who describes the potential of OER in a recent project in Mongolia. DAVID PORTER In 2010 the Canadian Government through its International Development Research Center was working in Mongolia on Information Technology projects. At about the same time, the open movement was starting to become more prominent on a world scale, and the Canadian Government through IDRC believed that open educational resources might be a perfect fit in the Mongolian context to add value to the education system, to provide additional resources, from high achieving organizations worldwide, Universities and Colleges who are producing open resources and those might in fact be a benefit to a developing country like Mongolia. And so getting the idea for an open educational resource network established in Mongolia ended up being a four year project between 2010 and 2014 that ended with Creative Commons’ Mongolia affiliate being established and the ONE Mongolia Foundation beginning to promote an open educational resource future for the K-12 sector in Mongolia. One of the most imaginative groups I worked with there were preschool teachers who immediately saw the efficacy in using open resources. And we thought we would produce print-based open resources that they could use at regional centres and give to moms and kids and parents and stuff, but actually they wanted to do something way better than that. They wanted to take the sort of Youtube approach to building useful educational resources that were online and streamable to citizens who lived in the big centers and who had access to the internet and they thought that was the cool way to go. One of the real assets in Mongolia is that the sponsor for our project there was a Member of Parliament from the Green Party of Mongolia; he was the only member of the Green Party. And he was an internet entrepreneur, and so he had some really clear visions of how openness would contribute to the knowledge society in Mongolia. So he established a foundation call ONE Mongolia: Open Network for Education in Mongolia. So it has a URL: one.mn. And if you go there you’ll see, you can find the ONE Academy videos in Mongolian, you’ll see that they’re using Google Applications in Mongolian schools, and they’re very proactive in using all of the affordances of the web open source software to provide resources, information, and collaboration opportunities for Mongolian teachers and their students. And so they’ve really embraced openness in the K-12 sector in Mongolia, so much so that now government in Mongolia is now funding and putting money into the ONE Mongolia Foundation. The population is just about evenly split between urban dwellers in large cities and rural dwellers in a broad and vast hinterland. So coming up with a common set of educational resources that are freely available to students, that are easy to update by teachers and customized, seems like a real benefit in the Mongolian education system. They already do a lot of centralized development of their educational resources but now allowing those to be open and digitally accessible and giving the teachers an opportunity to add value to them; that’s really about the spirit of openness. And I think they really see the power in that opportunity. I think teachers are like teachers everywhere. A couple of things they always want to do:. they’re very into things that make their work more enjoyable, easier to do, and if it also has a significant benefit in the experience of their students they love it. So any groups of Mongolian teachers that I worked with, as soon as they understood the concept and the opportunity to look further afield on the web for Creative Commons licensed material, images, videos, text, graphics, that they could revise or re-engineer into something that worked for them - they really saw value in that. Despite it looking like a very rural and agrarian culture, Mongolian people are very well educated and they are also very keen to develop and do really well. They have a real spirit, and I think seeing an opportunity like this provided by open educational resources in the education sector, really gave them the sense that they could control a lot of things in the education system that happen at the classroom level really effectively. So I think that’s the benefit and I think it works for teachers worldwide. HOST Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, further explains how Canada can assist other countries in developing open educational resources, and what Canada can learn in return RORY McGREAL I make a point of not telling third world countries what to do. I do visit third world countries as part of my duties as a UNESCO chair, but what I do is I explain what we’re doing in Canada, what’s happening in other countries, and it’s up to the local people in their local communities - their their governments, their countries - to figure out what could work in their situation based on what’s happening elsewhere in the world. We could learn a lot from Africa; South Africa is moving uh very quickly to using OER uh in the K-12 area. The Siyavula project is a major one, and they’re spreading their resources around Africa. So we can learn a lot from what they’re doing. HOST Michael Canuel, the CEO of LEARN based in Quebec, describes how resources like the Learning Landscape online journal are using open research to support K-12 learning opportunities. MICHAEL CANUEL When I think of OERs as a process, I really harken back right away to what we’re doing with our online journal: Learning Landscapes. As we have uh academics who write for us, but we also have teachers and uh and even students who write in this peer-review journal. For us what’s important is not just the article but also the process. So as they are writing, they have an opportunity to work with reviewers, they have their work edited, and so whether their essay or their their article eventually gets published or not what happens is that they have had an opportunity to learn as they go along to research certain things, to learn how to write concisely, yet the article of course has to be good, and has and - that’s important but the process of arriving at that end product is really uh equally important. And the same thing is true with most of the resources that we have on our site. In Quebec we use what are called “Learning and Evaluation Situations” in the, in our classrooms, and these are a series of related projects around a common theme, paying attention to develop, or help develop a particular competency. So we have dozens and dozens of these on our oursite. But they are works in progress, they are constantly being adapted and adjusted, and not just by LEARN, and our uh subject matter experts, but also by members of our community. Our OER has become a theme for many of our online communities, of collaboration. So we, we’re very excited about seeing teachers, educators in general, get together, work on particular resources -A - to to just to have that opportunity to exchange, to share thoughts, to challenge one another. So the process becomes really really important. And we see this as an ongoing dynamic, organic process. It’s not something that’s done once it’s published because we come back and like uh Wikipedia work on some the updating and our materials. It’s part of the fun of it all but as I said, it also becomes a way for us to foster and maintain our online communities and collaboration. We have about a thousand teachers in I think about 20 different communities who participate on a fairly regular basis so to us it is important that we see, we see this as a process and not just a concern, as just a final result. HOST Support for equal access to digital resources and OER is increasing across Canada and Internationally.Randy LaBonte (la-BON-tay), CEO of the Canadian e-Learning Network identifies some of the OER advocates making significant contributions in Canada. RANDY LABONTE I think OER champions are quite well known across Canada. Canada, because of its geographic uh distributions has been a pioneer in a lot of online as well as open practices. Athabasca University has been a pioneer in that, and I think of the likes of Rory McGreal. I think of George Siemens in terms of the work that he did, uh the open practices around MOOCs, (massive open online courses) that were coined and initially struck by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, and Stephen Downes is well known in this open practices area and shares freely and openly, and I know a lot of people follow Stephen, they follow George, they follow Rory. There’s some great, great pioneers and leaders, and in the post-secondary or national perspective, in Alberta, I found that Alberta Distance Learning Centre with their initiative where they offer the first K to 12 open MOOC for students, they have worked very hard to open their practices as well as their resources and they share freely with others in Alberta. The grassroots group that is struck through Rocky View School Division, for example, was creating a Moodle site that they’re sharing courses and content that they’re creating, they call it the MoodleHub I think is another example of that leadership. In BC I’ve seen leadership come from what was an open sharing between just a few districts, school districts grow from what was called CoolSchool before, sharing courses to now the BC Learning Network which uh collectively pools resources from all the school districts to create courses and content that is freely shared, openly downloaded for folks within British Columbia. So I think there’s some leadership there. I know in Saskatchewan there’s been some leadership around sharing of distance ed, SC Cyber and the Horizon School effort. There’s been quite a few others. In Quebec, for example, the LEARN group out of Quebec. There’s the Anglophones supporting Anglophone learning in Quebec. They have done a lot to create resources and share resources openly within the province. We don’t have a national K-12 agenda or structure that transcends those borders provincially uh and we’re working on that, but I think there’s a lot of champions within our, our programs even Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Virtual School which is run by the Nova Scotia Department of Education. The materials that they produce, they’re sharing as openly as they possibly can as well. So I think we have, short of policy statements, I think we have now an open practice that is being embraced by a number of those early adopters, those early leaders, and they came from the distance education or online school programs, and now that practice is permeating well into the typical classroom in within the whole school or school district. HOST As we heard in this podcast the landscape of K-12 OER is evolving constantly. In Alberta, collaborations like the MoodleHUB provide an opportunity for all students to have access to quality digital resources, created with public funds. As the awareness and use of OER continues to evolve, its dynamic nature will continue to have effects on all those involved in K-12 education, locally, provincially, nationally and internationally. Special thanks to our guests, Bea De Los Arcos with the OER Research HUB, 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, Randy Labonte of the CANeLearn Network, 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