Until more traditional educational institutions decide to address the many issues related to open education, we must organize beyond our org charts and work outside of standard institutional infrastructures. Affinity groups organized around shared interests in open education can provide the structure to address pressing but daunting issues that our institutions may not.
In this presentation, we will focus on two such groups. Both groups are addressing needs that are not currently being addressed by traditional educational institutions.
The UW-Madison Open Meetup began when a few individuals noticed activities related to open access, open data, and open educational resources cropping up independently in across campus. Using widely-available resources, they convened a community to share information, interests and energy around openness and the academy. Among this group's successes has been the creation of a related community of practice -- a local users group of faculty and support staff who are all using Pressbooks, an openly licensed authoring and publishing tool.
The Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation is a collaboration intended to build a global, connected network of Open Textbook creators, develop an open textbook publishing process, and create software and tools to support that process. While this community has some dedicated staff support and institutional partners, it leverages the energy and experiences of members from around the world to work toward ambitious goals.
In addition to sharing our experiences with these communities, the presenters will discuss how these experiences can inform creation, development, and sustenance of similar groups.
While many efforts and funders in the open space continue to focus on the role that OER can play in expanding access and reducing cost, far too few practitioners are taking advantage of the unique potential of open resources and practice for fundamentally improving instruction and advancing our scientific understanding of human learning. However, open education – both in licensing of materials and in transparency of practice – has unique capabilities for promoting, identifying and advancing more effective approaches in supporting and educating learners. Learning science continues to identify a bewildering array of potential instructional choices that are unlikely to be usefully explored using traditional RCT studies. A/B testing and in vivo experimentation offer one path for investigating such instructional complexity, but the variations in materials and interventions necessary for these methods demand open resources. But an open practice is equally necessary: the transparency that is at the heart of open instruction and pedagogy is absolutely required for an authentic consideration of what materials and approaches are best demonstrating evidence of effectively supporting learners. This session posits a unique capability of open education to advance a science-based investigation of effective instructional materials, approaches and pedagogies. The session will facilitate a larger discussion of our capabilities and responsibilities as open educators in identifying, promoting and advancing a science-based agenda in serve of improved outcomes for all learners. Participants will co-develop models for combining open- and evidence-based approaches in service of discovery, and will be positioned to better enact science-based research and innovative instructional practice using open resources and practices. Science demands a transparency that only open is positioned to provide.
Executive Director Simon Initiative; Director, Open Learning Initiative, Carnegie Mellon University
Norman Bier has spent his career at the intersection of learning and technology, working to expand access to and improve the quality of education. He is currently the Executive Director of the Simon Initiative and the Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon... Read More →
Thursday October 12, 2017 9:00am - 9:25am PDT
Madrid
Open source software can be used to greatly enhance the learning experience of students in STEM courses. The challenge of its effective deployment and its course integration are substantial, however, even with an open textbook. Integrating a science textbook within a controlled open source software environment provides students and educators the advantage of access to a common set of mathematics, science, simulation, and multimedia software, as well as software development and teaching tools. Avenues for this integration range from the production of custom open source software distributions to the configuration of dedicated inexpensive computers to accompany textbooks. The former approach includes the production of a live free software distribution with the desired software, teaching resources and open textbooks already integrated to run on existing student and institutional hardware. The open source tools available to facilitate this creation along with the limitations of this approach are explored. An alternate approach, based on the advent of inexpensive system on a chip (SOC) computers having sufficient computational power at low cost puts distribution of an integrated open textbook/software educational platform within reach for students and institutions. This modality of textbook and software distribution presents its own advantages and challenges that are considered.
HR Management is very well suited to course redesign using open data and open resources. SHRM, ONET, salary websites such as salary.com, job search websites such as monster.com, online Department of Labor materials and some publishers can be combined to provide ample free and open material to permit teaching several HRM courses with the most up-to-date information and data. The session will share my experience creating no cost and low cost HRM courses in the areas Compensation, Staffing and Selection, Strategic HRM and Essentials of HRM at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the US, Asia, Europe and Africa.
HR Management is very well suited to course redesign using open data and open resources. SHRM, ONET, salary websites such as salary.com, job search websites such as monster.com, online Department of Labor materials and some publishers can be combined to provide ample free and open material to permit teaching several HRM courses with the most up-to-date information and data. The session will share my experience creating no cost and low cost HRM courses in the areas Compensation, Staffing and Selection, Strategic HRM and Essentials of HRM at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the US, Asia, Europe and Africa.
