Open Educational Resources have taken off over the last two years or so. Open courses – especially MOOCs – are becoming ever more popular. And there is a growing focus on how we can develop more open forms of assessment.

These movements reflect a move away from expert driven development processes based largely on commercial interests towards more open processes based on practitioner and leaner input.

Yet their remains one big barrier to open education which is largely untouched – curricula. Curricula tend to remain the prerogative of experts – be they university working groups, assessment and accrediting bodies or governments.

In a time of rapid social economic and technological change, curricula can quickly go out of date. And expert driven curricula processes are usually extremely slow to respond to such change.

We have the technologies to collectively develop curricula. Wikis are powerful platforms for sharing ideas and co-production. We have the ideas based on the practice of teaching and training. We have the communities. Of course we have to look at the processes of developing open curricula. But above all the experts have to be prepared to give up power. And that is the hard bit. Until then, curricula will remain the last frontier in open education.

The WSIS Knowledge Communities platform, run by UNESCO, has announced the publication of a new resource. “Open Educational Resources: A guide for teachers” is a web, PDF, and print guide focused on OER for teachers at the basic education level. It was created to fill a gap in materials available to discuss OER in the Portuguese language, as well as local demand in Brazil. It is available with a Creative Commons license.

The announcement says: ‘We made a concrete effort to remix materials from existing resources (UNESCO, JISC, Curriki, WikiEducator), translating and adapting as necessary – but also developed new material. The guide is complemented by a wiki which contains a list of portals and sites which offer resources (OER and more restricted) in Portuguese. We hope the guide will be useful to our colleagues in Portuguese-speaking countries, and Portuguese-speaking communities around the world.

The guide is available here (wiki/PDF) and a brief (English) description of the process is available here.

What a difference the Creative Commons License makes.

According to the icould web site:  “icould gives you the inside story of how careers work. The icould storytellers relate, in their own words, their real life career journeys. There are over a thousand easy to search,varied and unique career videos as well as hundreds of written articles. From telecoms engineers to police officers, from landscape gardeners to web designers, from engine drivers to zookeepers; they talk about what they do, what it’s like, how they came to be where are and their hopes for the future.”

The service has just celebrated its second birthday. A email from Director, Dave Arnold says:

Happy birthday to icould! We launched icould two years ago this week and although we are still in our infancy, we are growing well and becoming better known. We’ve doubled the visitor numbers to icould.com in the past year and also now have icould content streamed on key sites such as Guardian Careers, Career Wales, Skills Development Scotland, TES and the Frog schools learning platform, extending icould’s reach to millions of young people across the UK.

We’ve continued to add to our career videos and written content, with recent additions featuring advice on student finances and more practical tips for getting a first job. We’ve also created a new ‘Focus On’ area, designed to demystify certain sectors and types of work, exploring all the jobs and career possibilities within that theme.  These Focus On areas consist of around eight to ten new video stories, new written content, competitions and specific guidance on training opportunities and company information.

Focus On Music was the first new area on icould.com sponsored by BlackBerry.  Launched over the Summer, it looks at careers of people behind the stars in the music industry. Focus On Music profiles the unseen heroes behind a music star, for example Jesse J’s choreographer and music video director and Tinnie Tempah’s publicist and photographer. We wanted to show that you don’t have to be behind the microphone to have a successful career in the music industry and hopefully we give young people an insight into the breadth of careers within the industry. This area was launched in July and has attracted considerable media attention as well as several successful partnerships, one with the iconic NME which has resulted in an icould user being offered a work taster experience with the Editor. We have also created some new free teaching resources to complement this new initiative.

……..

We’ve recently launched the next area, a Focus On Finance sponsored by Standard Life, which looks at the range of careers and skills needed in the Financial sector, proving that you don’t have to be an expert with numbers to work in finance!  We have a number of other areas in the pipeline, including a Focus on Media, which will launch in the New Year.

We continue to listen and respond to your feedback and are currently undertaking further research on the usage of icould.com to inform future developments.  We really appreciate your input, so please keep your comments and suggestions coming in.”

Obviously icould is on a roll. But lets use the Wayback machine to take us back to spring, 2009. I don’ t know, but I suspect that at that time iCould was struggling to make much impact. And here is one of the major reasons why. The Terms and Conditions of use at that time stated:

“Use of the icould website

Unless otherwise stated, icould owns the intellectual property rights in the website and material on the website. All these intellectual property rights are reserved.

Unless otherwise stated, you are entitled to use the icould website for personal use in any way, providing you do not reproduce any of the information as your own and/or seek to profit from it. Personal use constitutes viewing the icould website online and printing pages and/or documents for review offline.

If you wish to reproduce any materials accessible on the icould website including information, graphics, images and other design elements in printed or electronic form, you must obtain written permission first. Please use the contact details at the bottom of this page if you need to obtain permission.

Linking to the icould website is permitted, although displaying our pages within a frame of another website is not as this constitutes reproducing our content as your own.”

Now let’s forward to the present day. Under Terms and Conditions we find the following statement:

“…..we give permission to use the contents of the Site on a creative commons licence which can be found at:

Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported

This licence gives you permission to broadcast icould.com pages over the school network or use them on a whiteboard in a classroom.  You can circulate articles, use the worksheets and so on. This applies in any education or training context.

In simple terms:

• You can copy, distribute, transmit the work and display the material with the exclusion of full length versions[i] of stories.
• You may create derivative works with the exclusion of full length versions of stories.

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution: You must give icould credit and make clear the resources come from icould.com.
• Non-commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes or make any charge for the work.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to the Creative Commons licence.

This means you could, for instance, create electronic worksheets or create electronic careers posters or include them in an e-portfolio or personal learning environment.”

Not only that, but icould provides an API key to make it easy for developers to incorporate icould materials in their own sites.

There is a lesson here for developers and content providers and indeed for many education and learning projects. Few of us have the clout to make it on our own. But through allowing use of our materials and projects we can build impact on a vastly greater scale. And whilst going creative commons closes off some business models it opens up others.

Congratulations to icould for opening up their content. And happy birthday. Lets hope they continue building on the success they are presently enjoying.

As Geoff Cain says, “I was at the Open Education 2011 conference this week and David Wiley had the good sense to invite Jim Groom in to rattle cages and shake the chains. I have been reading his stuff for sometime. You can follow him on twitter here and his blog is always worth reading, but it is really a whole other experience to meet him in person. As a distance education director, I almost never say that. He is the favorite exuberant uncle who occasionally breaks the furniture. His mind is clear but his soul is mad. and here he is at his Dionysian best.”

The sound quality is sometimes a bit ropey but don’t let that put you off. Watch it all!

The latest in our occasional series of blogs about data.

Although in education much of the emphasis has been on viualising data as an aid to teaching and learning, or to explore network effects, the use of data can be a useful research tool. This simple visualisation below, posted by Mike Herrity on twitpic, shows the depth and length of the present economic recession and also, I suggest, the total failure of political and economic policies to deal with the recession.

Th second visualisation also deals with politics and economics. It comes from research by the Guardian Data Blog, following the demands of the #OccupytheCity movement in London for the democratisation of the City of London. The City of London is run as a state within a state at the moment, with its own police force and governance, and with companies allowed multiple votes in elections, dependent of the number of employees. Unsurprisingly the finances of the City of London are less than transparent. however, the Guardian did mange to obtain some details about expenditure and produced the following visualisation using the free IBM ManyEyes tools.

Mike Herrity shared his picture without comment. The Guardian appealed for readers help in further investigating the city of London finances. essentially both visualisations can form part of a distributed and loosely coupled research effort, with materials openly published being able to be reused and repurposed in education and in research.

(via a Jisc press release) Open Access Week 2011 is full of inspiration on the benefits of free immediate access to the results of scholarly research.  Now more than 30 compelling stories have been collected together from across Europe showcasing the transformative effects of open access.

The stories have been commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, a Europe-wide initiative that supports the use and development of the technology infrastructure for higher education and research, of which JISC is a member.

They come from over 11 countries and are told by a wide variety of stakeholders, from individual researchers and journal editors to publishers and companies, and cover a multitude of disciplines.

The stories, which include the First Monday journal and Pedocs, a German educational science archive can be accessed at http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/ .

In a blog post circluated widely on twitter yesterday Gerge Siemens reports: “At the EDUCAUSE 2011 conference today, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Hal Abelson – founding director of Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons. He presented on the state of openness in education. While on the surface openness is gaining traction through scholarship and publication, content providers and journal publishers are starting to push back”

Goerge posted the slide (reproduced left) from Hal’s presentation used to argue that journal publishers have a monopoly. George goes on to say: “The surface progress of openness belies a deeper, more dramatic period of conflict around openness that is only now beginning.”

The slide is taken from a discussion document (pdf) containing “pertinent information, arguments, and data about the current debate over open access (OA)” for the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009. The document contains a second and perhaps more shocking diagramme comparing the profits made by academic publishers to other industries.

I suspect, though, that such inflated profits are confined to the large global academic publishers. Whilst in New York, I talked to Michael who works for a relatively small publisher in the city. He gave me the impression they were certainly not raking in so much money! His main current work was focused on providing e-book versions of older manuscripts and publications which are now out of press. He felt there was much valuable knowledge which was presently lost to the system because of the nonavailability of older print based publications and saw the possibilities of cheaper e-book publishing as opening great possibilities to bring this knowledge back to life.

He was not concerned about the possibilities of e-publications being pirated, arguing instead that if every 100 pirate editions brought one sale, then that was good for the publishers and of course good for learning and knowledge sharing.

In this regard I wonder if there is the basis for some kind of alliance between the Open Access movement and the smaller academic publishers.

The European Conference on Educational Research 2011 will take place at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany from 13 – 16 September. The theme of this year’s conference is Urban education and as the conference website notes “Not only are cities burning glasses of societal change and its educational consequences; they also provide remarkable resources to put societal and educational change on the political agenda in order to shape them proactively.”

As in previous years Pontydysgu are providing multi media and ‘amplifying’ support to the conference and if you are not able to attend the conference in person you can follow the event through our streaming of the keynote sessions and internet radio programmes.

Keynotes

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University She will focus on “The City: Its Return as a Lens into Larger Economic and Technological Histories”
Wed. 14.09., 13:30 – 14:30 Central European Summer Time

read more

Watch this spot for full details of where to go to watch the stream.

Internet Radio

Wednesday 14 September 1430 – 1545 (Central European Summer Time)

Daniel Fischer, Leuphana Univeristy, Luneberg, Germany, Best paper winner 2010,  (Emerging Researchers Conference Award) will talk about consumer education

Harm Kuper from the Free University, Berlin is a member of the local organising committee for ECER 2011

Lejf Moos from the University of Tilburg in Denmark is President of the European Educational Research Association (EERA)

Marit Hoveid from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is EERA Secretary General Elect

Venka Simovska, also from the University of Tilburg is Convener of a new network: Research on Health Education

Hongmei Ma, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong is an ECER Bursary winner and will give his impressions of the first ECER conference he has attended

Thursday 15 September 1000 – 1030 (Central European Summer Time)

Tjeerd Plomp from the Univerity of Twente was present at the first ever ECER conference. he will talk about how the conference has evolved and grown over the years.

Kathleen Armour from the University of Birmingham in the UK is Convener of a New network: Sports Pedagogy

Melanie Völker is from Waxman publishers who are sponsoring the conference poster prize. She will be talking with us along with the poster prize winners

More guests to be announced

Friday 16 September 1430 – 1500 (Central European Summer Time)

Guests to be announced.

Watch this slot for the address for the radio stream.

We will also update this post as more guests confirm. In the meantime if you are going to the ECER conference and would like to come on the radio programme please email us. And finally if you are at ECER and just want to watch and listen to the  broadcast, we will be situated near the registration desk. Come and meet us.

Badges seem to be the coming thing on the tech developers horizon. Soon we will have badges for everything. Cynical as I might be I am very interested in this Mozilla project to develop badges to recognise learning. It is really a very simple idea. The Open Badges framework, say the project developers, is designed to allow any learner to collect badges from multiple sites, tied to a single identity, and then share them out across various sites — from their personal blog or web site to social networking profiles. The infrastructure needs to be open to allow anyone to issue badges, and for each learner to carry the badges with them across the web and other contexts.

I think the project is interesti9ng in that it recognises the increasing diversirty of learning pathways and contexts. It also recognises that in the future it is on line web presence which will for4m the primary iddentioty for a job seeker, ratehr than teh now old fashioned CV.

But rthere are still potential issues. The credibility fo the badges swil depend on the credibity of the organisationw hich issues them. And attempting to classify differents orts of badges holds many perils. I don’t agree with teh distinction between badges for ‘skills’ and ‘community /peer’ badges.

but i would love to see this project rolled out – possibly linked to Open Education Resources – anyone ideas for a trial around it?

I participated in a workshop on Open Educational Resources at the EDEN2011 conference in Dublin last week. OER was high on the agenda at the conference, referred to by a number of the keynote speakers and also the subject of several papers and workshops.

the workshop I attended was organised by the OPAL project. OPAL – the Open Education Quality Initiative – funded by the EU and supported by UNESCO – is attempting to develop a guide and benchmarks on open educational practices. It is focused on institutional change and the guideline is designed as a maturity model which allows organisations to position themselves according to the degree of maturity for each of a number o individual dimensions of open educational practices identified by the project.

The discussion at the workshop was lively and interesting. One focus was the language of the guide with participants feeling that more still needed to be done to explain what OERs and open educational practices were.

Grainne Conole in her introduction to the workshop had posed a series of questions including why there appears to be so limited reuse of resources and secondly how we can guarantee quality.

I am not so convinced by the assumptions here. the idea that there is limited reuse of resources is based on the lack of posting of amended resources to OER repositories. But that doesn’t mean they are not being used. I suspect many, many teachers do use OERs and naturally edit and change them to suit their own practice (although the prevalent PDF file format does not make that easy). However it is not part of their culture to repost the changed version to a repository. Does this matter? On the one hand not if OERs are being created and used – although obviously institutions, authors and funders would like to know what impact their work is having. One the other hand one of the ideas behind OERs was to create an ecology of learning materials with use, reuse and sharing playing a key role,. But I suspect benchmarks will not help us in this. The main issue is the culture of sharing. Even here I don’t think there are major obstacles. However we need workflows and spaces which make the sharing as easy and natural as sharing music.

And here is the rub. Whilst I guess most people share music it is often illegal. And one participant in the workshop raised the issue we never dare talk about. The problem, he said, is that teachers constantly download, change and reuse educational resources. they rarely check the license conditions. If it is on the web it is fair gain. And in telling people they should only use resources licensed for free use, we are in danger of being seen as the internet cops – telling people what they cannot do rather than helping them use resources for learning.

That is a big question. I like the approach of OPAL to open educational practices. But I am not so sure about benchmarking and maturity models (what senior manager is going to admit that their organisation lags behind?). Instead I think we need to continue very basic work on making it easier for teachers to produce OERs and share them. It will take time, but even over the last five years there has been massive progress.

And I wonder if we need to open a wider political debate on the efficacy or educational resources which are not open and who benefits form such practices.