Open Education 2017

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, equity is defined as the freedom from bias or favoritism. Achieving the Dream believes that higher education institutions have an obligation to work toward equity for their students. The development and use of non-biased open resources have the power to create equitable learning experiences for all students. One question this panel will tackle is whether or not the use of OER in higher education environments automatically ensures that issues of diversity and equity are addressed.

The open education movement is heavily rooted in the belief that teachers and faculty have the freedom to develop content that meets the needs of their students. This raises a few questions. Can the implementation of OER exacerbate bias? To what degree is OER content culturally relevant? Does the majority of OER content have a white American male slant? Are we remixing content that unintentionally alienates a particular group of students?

During this session, panelists from community colleges and four year institutions will tackle the tough questions related to the intersection of equity and OER while addressing the ways in which OER can challenge bias.

Session panelists will discuss strategies for creating more diversity in the OER space and exploring success and challenges in developing culturally relevant and relatable OER content. They will also address ways in which colleges can consider issues of equity when designing OER courses and degree programs.

This presentation will briefly introduce the Word Generation program, describe its design features, and share teachers' and students' experiences, with a focus on those that give us hope by better preparing our nation's students as informed citizenry.

At a time in which rhetoric that challenges the norms for civility in public discourse has become commonplace, students in middle schools across the country ”from New York City to Salt Lake City to rural North Carolina ”are reaching for a higher standard. The Word Generation program developed by the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) offers freely available materials and web-based supports to bring evidence-based debate about important civic issues into the classroom, while at the same time promoting mastery of academic language.

Each Word Generation unit focuses on a challenging issue (e.g., What makes an American? Is the death penalty justified?) and culminates in a debate in which students use textual evidence to argue for their position. Design features such as discussion prompts and argument outlines guide students to develop and support positions and respond to each other's reasoning.

Engaging middle school students in civic debate is not an easy sell to time-strapped teachers. But the program is designed to develop academic vocabulary ”a high priority in middle grades. And teachers who initially doubt their students' capacity to discuss complex social issues at all ”let alone from multiple perspectives ”frequently express surprise at the depth of their students' thinking.

By using academic language as a vehicle, embedding supports for teachers and students, and offering the curriculum as an OER, students from disadvantaged backgrounds at the toughest schools are being given the opportunity to share and strengthen their voice, to respect and build on others' ideas, and to become expert in gathering and presenting evidence ”skills needed for the sustainability of a strong democracy.

Montgomery College's commitment to developing OER (z-degree) options is a desire to increase access, affordability, and success for Montgomery County's diverse population, particularly students who are marginalized or underrepresented. Montgomery College's mission and vision emphasize empowering students to change their lives and being an model of educational excellence, opportunity and success. Through a collegewide initiative MC Open, Montgomery College is providing students with the ability to save money on instructional materials while at the same time decreasing the time to degree completion. The first full semester of promoting z-courses through MC Open resulted in more than 3,400 enrollments in about 200 course sections. In concert with MC Open, Montgomery College is developing General Studies A. A. degree options with funding from Achieving the Dream. The initial General Studies OER degree options focus on two transfer paths with in the program, Psychology and English although students are not limited to those transfer options. The General Studies degree typically serves 9,000 students each semester, but courses within the z-degree impact over 25,000 students each semester because the majority of the selected courses meet General Education requirements for any student.The College hopes that the General Studies OER Degree project will help more students complete degrees by increasing access to affordable, quality material; by using open materials and instructional strategies which target a diverse range of learning styles and interests; by decreasing overall student costs, and by providing model paths for students to complete a General Studies A.A. degree.

Overview: In the US, there is desperate need to address inequity in our education system. High poverty-schools account for 25% of all public schools, and in every state, those students complete high school at a significantly lower rate than their peers. This trend continues straight into higher education, where economically disadvantaged students finish their degree programs at significantly lower rates than their peers.

OER has tremendous potential to bring equity to our schools and ensure that all students – regardless of their economic status, location, and background – have access to the same high quality learning materials. But as we push for greater OER adoption, are there ways that OER can exacerbate or entrench existing inequity?

This panel features two higher education experts and two K-12 experts, who will discuss this question and brainstorm how to best position OER as a solution to inequity in education moving forward.

 

At our suburban community college outside Seattle, a student population largely composed of refugee, immigrant, and international students forces equity issues to the surface. We believe OER offers hope for our students, making education more affordable and inclusive of their many cultures. We will discuss a set of small, practical strategies we use to enhance equity through OER, piggybacking on existing equity discussions happening at our college.

Since we don't have a single person coordinating OER on our campus and we lack a dedicated funding source for OER implementation, we will show what can be done using creative methods of evangelism and funding. Luckily, we have a strong collaboration between the library, instructional design, the bookstore, and the faculty at Highline College.

Because many of our students don't have reliable access to the internet when off campus, it's important that we also make inexpensive print versions of OER available to students. We will discuss a project in which we compared printing costs from various sources to identify the most affordable and adaptable method for our faculty and bookstore.

We will also discuss department projects, such as how the mathematics department uses a free textbook they provide to students to remove the cost, and how they use it to teach students to be effective and efficient learners. Students scribbling in the book inspired instructors to rethink the curriculum; in effect, blurring the line between OER and open education pedagogy.

OER projects on our campus encompass a wide variety of disciplines such as English, adult basic education, ESL, and philosophy, so all of our librarians are versed in OER and assist faculty with implementing OER. We'll talk about resources we've developed to help us with this de-centralized work.

Our goal is to provide session attendees with ideas they can implement on their own campuses, and we want to hear their ideas also.

The open education community is faithful to making resources easily reused, redistributed, and retained. However, the open education community stands to improve the ways in which it makes content available for revision or to be remixed. To remain true to the 5Rs put forth in the Open Content Definition, it is not enough to apply an open license to content. There are technical considerations that must be given careful attention to achieve maximum openness and be true to the open philosophy.



In this presentation, Cody Taylor, an Emerging Technologies Librarian at the University of Oklahoma Libraries, will discuss why only publishing open content in consumable formats, PDF for example, is an impediment to the aim of the open movement. Also introduced will be a tool developed at OU Libraries to ensure that open content created there is shared to its maximum potential. In its fourth year, the open educational resources team at OU Libraries has iterated several open publishing approaches. Experiences gleaned from those iterations will be shared as well as the motivations for our current trajectory.

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.

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.

During 2017, the Year of Open moved quickly from simply being an avenue to recognize significant milestones for open education to becoming a year-long event to bring awareness to all things open.

The Year of Open became a global focus on open processes, systems, and tools, created through collaborative approaches, that enhance our education, businesses, governments, and organizations. At its core, open is a mindset about the way we should meet collective needs and address challenges. It means taking a participative and engaging approach, whether to education, government, business or other areas of daily life. In its practical applications, open is about shared efforts and values to enhance people's opportunities, understanding and experiences.

During the Year of Open, we have captured and displayed efforts to increase participation and understanding of how open contributes to making things better for everyone. In this session, I will discuss the results and share what's next for the Year of Open.

Sharing is a key attribute of Open Education practice. Instructors who have chosen to adopt open textbooks for their college courses understand the value of sharing and sought a venue for offering the valuable resources they created to support their teaching.

To support this need and to further the creation of OER, Rice University's OpenStax and ISKME's OER Commons partnered to provide an online community hub where instructors can freely share and modify syllabuses, homework, study guides, and other open-copyright course materials that are made specifically for each of the free textbooks in OpenStax's growing catalog.

This community hub brings educators together in a new way, emphasizing their communities of practice though collaborative working groups. Educators are encouraged to share, discuss, and curate OER using this community hub, creating a dynamic environment for open education practice.

The OpenStax community hub on OER Commons launched in Fall 2016. Since that launch OpenStax and ISKME have partnered on several well attended webinars and continue to see the interest and engagement in the hub grow.

The world's nations have adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

This session will explore how and why the global open education community can and should work with their national governments to mainstream open educational resources (OER) and open education practices (OEP) in support of solving the SDGs, our collective global grand challenges.

Why connect OER and OEP to the SDGs? (1) OER can be the education resources to teach the public about and are continuously updated by working on SDGs. (2) It would connect education institutions, educators and students to solving SDGs; forming a new, positive connection between governments and their public education systems. (3) Global challenges / SDGs are constantly changing and OER and OEP can be updated in real time. (4) As learning spaces shift to OEP, students can contribute to improving the open curriculum, work on complex and authentic SDG challenges, and have their work be used in their fields. (5) As working on SDGs is meaningful and the stakes are high (e.g., climate action, zero hunger, gender equality, no poverty, etc.), students are motivated to work smarter, learn more deeply, have an opportunity to contribute to society – by producing, revising, and sharing OER about SDGs - while they earn their degree.

I recently explored the OER + SDG4 connection at UNESCO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvfC8A1oW30 and I look forward to working with Open Education Conference participants to explore these ideas and opportunities more deeply.

Open education in British Columbia, Canada is thriving. From open textbooks to virtual reality tours of Stanley Park, the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources (OER) have skyrocketed since the launch of the B.C. Open Textbook Project in 2012. In 2016, the BCcampus Open Education team, with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, distributed grants to B.C. public post-secondary institutions to create, adapt, or adopt OER. The successful recipients of these grants included: the creation of student-driven subject specific case studies; creation of 3D videos to enhance trades education; creation of instructional videos to supplement open textbooks; student co-created virtual reality tours of B.C. geographical landmarks; the creation and implementation of the first OER protege program, a faculty development program dedicated to the creation and adaptation of OER; and the student-led adaptation of OpenStax's Principles of Microeconomics open textbook.

This presentation will showcase what is next for OER and Open education in B.C., highlighting the collaboration that has taken place across the institutions, the student-driven open educational resource development, and the innovative practices that have led to successful creation of OER.

Using multiple metaphors, Mary will take participants through the development of strategies and activities that BCcampus has used in our Open Education work. As an entity that exists to provide support to BC post-secondary institutions, BCcampus is operating very much within a diverse system mired by the many challenges of the current post-secondary landscape. Our positioning as system supporters who are also responsible for advancing that same system's teaching and learning practices enables us to help our constituents advance while also ensuring their basic needs are met. This focus on both current and future needs has driven our strategy on Open Textbooks and ultimately Open Education. While we have worked towards advancing other elements of Open Education besides textbooks, we think it's vital not to get too far ahead of those we are trying to help. While working on Open Pedagogy and Policy, we are also looping back to pick up faculty who are completely new to Open Education and need very basic support and guidance. Meeting people where they are is the only way we will truly make the shift to openness as the default.

This will be a presentation followed by a hopefully robust discussion of how to support those just starting out in Open Education while helping those who are further along continue to advance and innovate. Should we stop talking about Open Textbooks? If we do, how will we reach the majority of faculty who have not yet heard of OER?

The best offense is a good defense. While overused, this saying still rings true for Open Educational Resources. As the movement continues to gain national and international attention, it is more important than ever to communicate in ways that counter misinformation about OER. One of the best ways to do so is with clear and concise messages that are crafted for your specific audiences.

Join this hands-on messaging and media training to learn the best language and techniques. From K-12 to high ed, we have developed a clear, concise, and universal description of OER that applies across the board, as well as created stratified messages, backed by research, and tailored to resonate with the many OER stakeholders--students, teachers, administrators, professors, and policymakers.

Learn the best practices for using these messages effectively in your daily work, through earned and social media, hone your elevator pitch, practice for interviews, and master your response to frequently asked questions.

Every few years, a K-12 OER project will come along that contributes significantly to the body of resources that teachers can access. EngageNY was one such project; Open Up Resources is another. However, as with many resources in the commons, there are problems around stewardship and maintenance. This presentation/panel explores the duty of care for both the educators who use K-12 OER and the organizations that develop new OER/on the basis of existing OER. How do we work together to build on what has been built before, without losing the best of what came before? How do we iterate without losing coherence and rigor? What are the most impactful and high leverage changes to the curricular content to meet the needs of students not ready for grade level work? This presentation/panel explores the research, tools, processes, and marketing/outreach necessary to build a coherent K-12 OER landscape that best serves the needs of educators while creating a path to sustainability for curriculum developers.

Over the last two decades, the movement of opening up education and through the innovative educational use of the Internet, such as OER, OCW, and MOOC, has been flourishing around the world. By making educational tools, resources, and knowledge freely and openly accessible to learners and teachers around the world, the movement is beginning to radically change the cultures, values, systems, ecology, and economics of education. As social and economic systems are being more cross-regional and globalized, it is becoming increasingly critical and urgent for us to create new education systems that are able to flexibly respond to the rapidly changing social needs.

In addition to the ongoing open innovation movement, the emergence of AI applications in education, especially our rapidly increasing ability to analyze and utilize big data, provides us with enormous possibilities to better support more personalized and collaborative lifelong learning building upon the abundance of openly shared educational resources. Furthermore, some evolving pedagogical approaches such as gamification and project-based learning are helping promote and accelerate the acquisition of critical skill and knowledge both for individual and social needs.

This presentation addresses and discusses some of the emerging possibilities of how we can embrace the openness and innovation in education to help us continuously build the foundation and infrastructure for supporting more personalized, flexible, and on-demand learning as well as improving learning and teaching. It also examines some pioneer and exemplary efforts in inventing the next-generation education and explores how we can create an ecosystem that enables us to build necessary capacity for lifelong educational support. Finally, this presentation explores some of the future possibilities that will help further advance individual and collective learning c and education systems, both locally and globally, in the 21st century society.

Students often lose hope as they head out of academia and into a career. Why? I believe that they need to see more specific career development resources. Students become overwhelmed – if they are cognizant that getting assistance in their job search is beneficial, they may not know where to look, whose information to trust and how to synthesize it with their education. What if we were to create an OER repository for students that's generated by faculty and career development professionals within any college that focuses on resumes and cover letters for specific disciplines, specific jobs or broader career paths or unique industries? What if these tangible artifacts (OER) also teach intangible skills – professional etiquette, capacity for leadership, motivation, communication efficacy and the like – that employers seek?

This presentation will explore the integration of college career development professionals and faculty to create an internal OER repository specifically for career development resources with the goal of offering students combined career development perspectives within a familiar circuit they can trust. I will explore ways in which this initiative could happen as well as the benefits.

This could be what's next for OER in higher education.

In a recent lit review of over 300 articles published between 2011-2017 focusing on identifying challenges and promises with OER, it was found that a majority of the current research centers on survey data and student and instructor perceptions. The key topics covered were around awareness and discovery, determining quality, utilization, cost and delivery.  This panel discussion will focus on these key topics and the realities of OER from 3 unique perspectives: a curated content and adaptive technology provider, an open education content provider, and an instructor who has realized the benefits and challenges of both.