at how OERs could be redesigned and used for collaborative learning purposes. It showed that practitioners found it difficult to understand the implicit design inherent in open educational resources and found making choices about how to repurpose the materials for their own context challenging. Would shifting away from a focus on the resources to the practices that surround their use help? That is, if we could better understand how teachers and learners are creating and using OERs perhaps we could get a better idea of what the associated barriers and issues might involve. We could then put in place mechanisms to address these. This is at the heart of the OPAL open educational quality initiative (http://oer-quality. org/). The overall aim of OPAL is to support open educational practice, defined as the: use of OER to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on institutional, professional and individual level.
A database or repository of open educational resources is not open educational practice. The use of these open educational resources in a traditional, closed and top-down, exam- focused learning environment is not open educational practice. Only if OERs are used to create resources which are more learner- centred than the ones existing before; if the role of learners in the creation of content is taken more seriously by teachers/facilitators; if teachers move away from content-centred teaching to ‘human resource’ based delivery; and if learning is considered a productive process where some of the outcomes of learning are ‘artefacts’ worth sharing and debating, improving and reusing, can we talk about open educational practices. The belief behind OPAL is that if we can better understand the practices around the creation, use and repurposing of OERs, we are likely to see better uptake and use. Further, the vision is that this will lead to improvement in the effectiveness of teaching and learning by enhancing the quantity and quality of open educational resources. Stakeholders of open educational practice
might include:
• national policymakers who are promoting the use of open educational resources;
• leaders of educational and training institutions who are initiating organisation- wide initiatives in which teachers are asked to create, find, adapt and share materials across the institution;
• teachers who are encouraging learners to produce, share and validate learning content; and
• learners who are using open, available content to study in ways that better fit their needs.
The OPAL initiative began by gathering more than 60 case studies of OER initiatives (
http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/ view/2085) and from these abstracted a set of dimensions of what we are terming ‘open educational practices’. On refinement, four OEP dimensions were identified: strategies and policies; barriers and success factors; tools and tool practices; and skills development and support. We used these as the basis to enable individuals and organisations to assess where they were in terms of level of OEP maturity (see Figure 1). OEP Maturity Model The OEP Cube Maturity Model has four levels of maturity: Initial (not yet started); Manae (little or no evidence of OER activity); Defined (evidence of OER activity) and Optimizing (embedded/advanced practice). To illustrate the use of the cube, here are a couple of examples. An organisation might be considered to be mature in terms of the dimension of strategy and policy if it has clear and effective strategies and policies in place about OERs. This might be evidenced by the existence of an innovative business model for generating open resources and making them widely available. Another organisation might be classed as mature in terms of tools and tool practices if there is evidence of it having an online Web 2.0 environment to enable teachers and learners to share and discuss the use of OERs. This practice might be considered innovative if the Web 2.0 tools were being used to improve the quality of teaching and learning through peer reflection. We see the cube as having a number of uses, principally for benchmarking purposes, and for guidance in terms of how to improve open educational practice and for reflection and comparison with others. As part of the OPAL project, we have validated the cube through a number of workshops and expert panels. Overview feedback on its value is positive and we hope to map existing OER case studies to it. From
44 ADULTS LEARNING SPRING 2012
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48