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Download the education page (pdf) from the iSummit '08 Annual
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This was the second year of the Open Education Track at the iSummit. At the 2007 Open Education Track, open education innovators and collaborators experienced an innovative open space facilitation methodology run by Allen Gunner and Mark Surman. As Philipp Schmidt says in his blog, the track acquired mythical status as those who participated in the track continued to work together over the next 12 months despite large geographical distances and impossible time zones.
Our aim in 2008 was to recreate a similar experience with the help of some of the Open Education Track Tribe (a term Andrew Rens from Shuttleworth has bestowed on Open Education Track participants past and present). Using and adding a few twists to the 2007 methodology, Ahrash Bissell and I co-facilitated a highly participative track at break-neck speed over the three days.
Participants
There were between 15 and 30 participants in each of the sessions of the track with a core group of 20 staying the whole course.
There was a great mix of people from well-established OER projects and new players and emerging leaders in OER. The old guard included veteran, David Wiley from COSL (US), recovering ex-lawyer Joel Theirstein from Connexions (US), still-a-lawyer, Andrew Rens from the Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa), OER warrior, Jaroslaw Lipszyc from Free Textbooks (Poland) and of course Philipp Schmidt (South Africa), champion of the Peer to Peer University.
Fresh participants came from Israel, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Brazil, India, Puerto Rico and Japan. We had government officials such as Grazyna Czetwertynska and Aleksander Tarkowski (Poland) publishers John Guatam (India) and high school student, Hung June Chung (Japan) who works at FTEXT creating Open Education Textbooks for mathematics and is now translating some of these textbooks into English to disseminate around the world.
The report back group of Cynthia Jimes, Andrew Rens, Jaroslay Lipszyc and Meital Duvdevani demonstrated the diversity of disciplines, culture and language present in the group which combined experienced and new OER contributors. By all accounts, this is an ever-growing tribe!
Methodology
This was a highly participatory track using all the tricks learned from the 2007 Open Education track. The approach requires a lot of energy and participation - 'like boot camp and drama school rolled into one'. To those new to open education and to this methodology it is initially a little overwhelming but by the third day people are seeing the results of discussion and collaboration and are very focused on real outcomes.
The track's mantra: 'Everyone here knows something, no one here knows everything!'
Breakout sessions were the main method of interaction and discussion. In the introductory session we asked everyone what two things they wished to get out of the track. Then we broke up into groups of five to workshop the top four priorities/issues that people wanted to discuss and then listed and mapped these on the whiteboard. Not surprisingly, common themes and issues were identified, including:
• How do projects get buy-in? What are incentives and disincentives for sharing?
• How can projects go global?
• Localisation, including natural language technologies: how many algebra textbooks do you really need?
• Quality and legitimacy of content - how do you rate the credibility of content?
• Technology - open architecture, mobile technologies, listing of e-learning tools to help people learn.
• Blueprint on how to set-up a successful open education project.
• Business models - how do you make money?
• Copyright and legal issues.
The Cape Town Declaration was a great resource to review and consider alongside the issues identified by the tribe.
Interestingly, although legal issues in particular copyright was identified as key issue early on, the tribe quickly recognised that there was a lot of work/projects in progress already and it would be more beneficial to focus on more practical issues.
Session Highlights
Feedback from participants:
• 'Loved the open space approach and the introductory hongi.'
• 'The Speed Pitch Session was inspirational to the presenters and the participants- exciting projects and possibilities and new relationships were built.'
• 'The Session did a great job promoting the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education and showcasing the uber-cool Cape Town T-Shirts. Only session with its own branding!!!!'
• 'Smart and inspirational people'
• 'Learning about new projects and discovering common issues and practical solutions'
• 'Finding new collaborators'
• 'Great to have new people welcomed into the tribe.'
Outcomes
It was extremely hard to come up with a 'Checklist on Openness' as there are varying grades of openness and this issue has still not really been generally agreed across the board. In the end the group identified the following core projects to work on in collaboration over the next year. Participation and providing incentives to educators, students, institutions and governments ended up being the key issues.
The following actions were identified as possible solutions/projects for the next 12 months:
• Development of OER Certification Mark/Logo.
• Consider whether there needs to be a certifying body to certifying OER resources or a self regulation checklist which assesses openness of OER resources.
• Refereed OER journal of OER resources. A peer-review system to evaluate course materials (similar to journal publication) and publish the outputs in an open journal, which would then be recognised for promotion.
• Develop a best practice guideline for a pipeline that educators can use to get credit for their open publications. The pipeline steps are: preparing materials, teaching the course, writing it up and publishing, and then using that publication to feed into the promotion process.
• Build upon existing OER/OCW guidebooks and reports to prepare a toolkit for policy makers. • Build list of contacts, urls and links to OER Projects showcased and referred to during the track.
• Identify and develop practical guides to CC licences and OER for educators, students and curriculum developers and disseminate.
• Consider making more Cape Town T-shirts on threadless or spreadless shirts and use them to promote them at OER events around the world.
• Identify opportunities to assist in the localisation of OER.
More Work to be done
Two key areas that require further research are:
- IP Law Reform - What changes to international and national laws need to be made to assist Open Education?
- Sustainability - Sustainable production of OER and the sustainable sharing of resources, improving OER values for various user communities.
• We still need to engage students in the track.
• Still more work to be done on localisation issues.
• We must continue to remember that a lot of world still needs textbooks and have no access to broadband, Internet or mobile technology. We really need to engage with developing countries and how to deal with their issues in OER movement. This was a very poignant comment made in the track's final round-up session.
Resources
- Coverage of the Open Education lab by the summit bloggers, available here.
- Blog entries by participants giving feedback on the event: Philipp Schmidt and Andrew Rens.
- Wiki notes recorded during each session available here.
- The detailed programme outlining the who, what, where, when and how of the lab, available here.
- Related keynote videos to watch: Jessica Powell and David Wiley.
Pictures: Scenes from the Open Education lab, by , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 and the iCommons '08 Annual Education page by Infiltrate Media, CC BY 3.0
