BioQuest June 2008 transcript
From OER Commons
OER for Teaching and Learning
Transcript of Presentation at the BIOQuest Conference
June 2008
This audio and transcript are based on a workshop given on June 16, 2008 for a BIOQuest conference in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Portions of the morning workshop were given to hands-on demonstration of features of OER Commons and several OER example sites. This transcript only covers the slide portion of the workshop, not the hands-on segments. What you are missing by reading or listening to this transcript will be specific instruction on how to use various features of OER Commons. There is good news, however. First, OER Commons is very easy to use. Second, over the coming months, ISKME will be developing some separate how-to materials about these topics.
Slide 1.
Good morning. I am Mark Basnage. I am here this morning representing ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.
ISKME is an independent, nonprofit research institute that helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create human-centered, knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success. ISKME does this in three ways: • Research: Conducts social science research and evaluation to better understand and improve educational processes and systems. • Innovation: Develops and shares innovation through research-based services, resources, and implementations. • Field Building: Facilitates broad and measured activities for professional development, knowledge sharing, and field building in education.
Slide 2.
For the next ninety minutes, we'll be taking a big-picture, multidimensional view of OER, taking time to look at a lot of different examples, and most importantly, giving you time to use the tools. We hope this presentation will be a conversation-- we want to know more about what your experience is in the field.
As you can see, we'll be covering a lot of ground in the agenda. First, we'll think about what OER is, and why it's important that educational resources be open. Then we'll look at a model for the process of engaging with OER, and get you right in to engaging by introducing you to the OER Commons tool. Fourth, we'll talk a bit about the licensing ISKME 2008 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 and sharing models that underlie OER. Finally, we'll wrap up with a discussion on "collaboratories" that bring together open educational resources with scientific people and resources.
Slide 3.
So, what is OER? And why should you care?
Slide 4.
Let me start with a few scenarios. Let's imagine that you are teaching an environmental studies class, and you want to find a really good lab activity that will engage your students with the material you've been covering in lectures. So you go to an online repository of educational materials, and you find a simulation lab on rainfall. You check the terms of use, and sure enough, you see that there are no copyright restrictions on your copying it for class use. You also note that you can make changes to it. So you download it, make some notes and changes, and you come away with something tailored exactly to what you want your students to experience.
How many of you have had this experience? -- Let's take these bullets one by one. How many of you have been in the middle of a semester, covering some material, and wished you could quickly find a good, adaptable lab exercise? Other kind of educational or pedagogical resource? How many of you have ever browsed such an online repository of educational resources? When you have found something, how many of you routinely check the terms of use? How many of you have adapted a resource developed elsewhere (open or not) for use in your own class?
Slide 5.
Here are a few more scenarios. Maybe you have a good lab already, but want to illustrate the textbook points with some good video clips or animations about the processes the students have been reading about. Or your students are putting together presentations on their own group research projects, and need some photographs of the plants whose proteins they have been researching. Does this sound familiar?
Slide 6.
Or perhaps you are gathering rich data and images with your students about seal populations off the coast of Central California, and wish you could exchange data and materials with scientists and science classes in Japan, where conservation efforts have been similar. Such an exchange may help build a fuller picture of the issue.
===Slide 7===. How does OER come into this picture? Let's define OER. OER, or Open Educational Resources, are "teaching learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques to support access to knowledge." (source: A Review of the Open ISKME 2008 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Educational Resources Movement, a Report to the Hewlett Foundation; Atkins, Brown and Hammond in 2007)
I want to stress that OER is not just an object, or a new universe of little learning objects. OER is also a process of engaging with the materials. This process involves sharing materials that you have created, either individually or in groups with other teachers and/or learners; using and adapting others’ materials for your own use; and sharing back modifications to or comments about others’ materials so that future users can benefit. Keep in mind that when I use the term OER, I am talking about the process of engaging with the materials. This, however, requires a paradigm shift from isolated experiences of content use, from teachers as purveyors of knowledge, to collaborators around knowledge, possibly with their students and with other teachers as well, so it becomes a very collaborative, networked picture.
What then, given this paradigm shift, what can OER offer?
Slide 8.
OER offer a number of advantages over the older ways of doing things. We'll run through a list of some of the advantages now, and then take a look at how they work in specific cases.
First, it radically increases the number of sources of learning and teaching content. No longer is it a handful of textbook and supplemental publishers. In essence, everyone can become a content provider-- different people and organizations will contribute different amounts, and will contribute resources of various shapes and sizes.
Second, there can be a huge financial advantage. We'll hear shortly about the example of the Free High School Science Texts, which among other accomplishments, has reduced the costs of printed science textbooks in South Africa to a fraction what they had been, by using volunteer contributors as primary authors and editors. Of course, they also maintain a website where you can download the texts for free. Not all OER efforts are about textbooks of course-- many OER efforts are providing new ways of collaborating and engaging that go beyond traditional textbook models.
Flexibility is another key concept in OER. OER materials are inherently adaptable. In the case of the free science texts, they exploit this quality to ensure that the materials are continuously improved. In other cases, adaptability may mean updating, or modifying for a kind of classroom arrangement, or different kinds of learners, or new contexts.
Slide 9.
OER also looks much more like the way science, and scientists, work. Compared to the model of "the best" knowledge being distilled and ensconced in a revered text, OER enables and acknowledges collaboration. It is also dynamic, recognizing that there will usually not be a definitive version, but a series of provisional, increasingly helpful iterations. And it is changeable-- responding to new data, new resources. ISKME 2008 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Slide 10.
So, who is doing OER? The answer is that lots and lots of people and organizations have become involved in a wide variety of OER efforts, many of which in the last seven years. MIT [1] helped to kick off an effort in 2001 among colleges and universities to put course materials online. With the help of several foundations, it made a big push to put virtually all course materials online (the current count is over 1800 courses) -- not only syllabi, but lecture notes, slides, and more. We'll take a look at John's Hopkins health-related courseware in a moment.
A proliferation of non-profit organizations such as the Science Environmental Resource Center (SERC) [2] and ItrainOnline [3] have put training and educational materials online.
Slide 11.
The Public Library of Science (or PLoS) [4] is a peer reviewed journal, which makes all of its articles available without charge. THe Encyclopedia of Life [5], has the audacious goal of gathering reliable scientific information on every species, and making it available to everyone for free. We will take a brief look at each of these.
Other OER efforts go beyond the repository model to offer tools for authoring or marking up materials. Examples include the Connexions project, out of Rice University [6], and LeMill [7], which is European. Of course, this is a brief list, and there are many others -- including federations and consortia. And the list keeps growing.
Slide 12.
Here's a quick look at the Johns Hopkins Open Courseware effort [8], from their Bloomberg School of Public Health. You can get to all of there course materials by browsing through the topic list here. You can also do things like subscribe to updates of biology courses through an RSS feed.
Slide 13.
One of my favorite features is this image library, which gathers images from all of the courses. Let's say you need an image of a bacterial cell wall-- well, that's easy. Here it is. An you can see that they already provide several adaptations-- the various sizes linked here. Notice the license here means that you can use it, and adapt it for anything academic you might want. So if I want to make this image the background of one of my slides...
Slide 14.
I can. All I have had to do is to cite the source-- i.e, to give attribution.
Slide 15.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [9] is thematically a bit outside our science theme today, but let me quickly highlight it as an OER effort. This is a volunteer effort of many domain experts-- now containing over 1000 entries of great depth. It is getting great readership - even two years ago it was getting 750,000 readers a week -- everyone from the general public to high school students to academics.
Slide 16.
We'll just mention that it is sustained financially by contributions from libraries-- this allows its control to be maintained by the academic community.
Slide 17.
And here is a quick shot of what it looks like. Very easy to use.
Slide 18.
The Public library of Science is now seven distinct journals, including specialized journals for genetics and neglected tropical diseases. Note the prominent note on the front page highlighting PLoS's openness. "Everything we publish is freely available online for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish."
Slide 19.
So how do do they do it? Anyone can submit to the journals, but you'll see that contributors have to know two things. One, you have to understand the licensing model. Two, you have to know that authors support the work. That is, you will send $1250 with your manuscript. This supports the peer review and editorial process, and provides for a sustainable publishing model. Why would you want to spend money to publish? For most people, it's for reputational reasons.
Slide 20.
Here's the Encyclopedia of Life, an "ambitious, even audatious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth." That's all 1.8 million known species. Lots of partners in this effort, including the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Slide 21.
Here's a species page, showing the kinds of information available and the external resources tied together. There are various ways to look at the species classification, and information like distribution maps. Notice the licensing information.
Slide 22.
Now here's the power of open. The Experience Design group at Adobe-- the team that works on the great interfaces to programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on-- took a look at the Encyclopedia of Life and realized that they could devise other ways to navigate this fabulous, if gigantic, collection of information. For instance, how about a treemap of species? Here are some images showing drilling down. Or perhaps there could be a visual treemap. Or 3-dimensional browsing. They key point here is that the openness has allowed new people to add value in new ways. [10]
Slide 23.
What about other sites? Are there OER sites that you know, or have used before?
Slide 24.
What have the impacts of OER been? We have time to mention a few highlights. One, is course improvement-- over time, with interaction from multiple participants; or by the addition of new kinds of educational materials. Another is course alignment. John Seely Brown showed that at MIT professors were now able to see in great detail what other professors were teaching, and this led to course alignment -- people removing overlap, and people in pre-req classes developing bridges to upper level courses.
Slide 25.
We mentioned the FHSST effort already, but I want to let you hear him explain one of the benefits. (For those of you listening to this lecture on the website, the video clip shows FHSST founder Mark Horner talking about the way that successive iterations of authorship have created very well written materials. He says "I think there's a lot of room for seeding the production of better material by getting the ball rolling. I wrote a lot of the original stuff in the FHSST textbook and what's there now is much better than what I wrote, and I haven't contributed to the book specifically in a very long time." [To see all of this interview, see http://wiki.oercommons.org/mediawiki/index.php/OER_Spotlight:_Free_High_School_S cience_Texts_%28FHSST%29]
Slide 26.
One final example. Here is a BioQuest problem page, which you'll see more of shortly. Not only do you get information about a project, but connections to authors, audiences, and lots of other resources.
Contrast what you find here-- and what it makes possible-- with the kind of material you find on MIT open courseware. One of my colleages calls the open courseware approach a "grab and go" model. Here we see a bridging of resources with the actual learning/designing learning experiences.
Slide 27.
Now let's take a look at the OER process. After all, as I have been saying, OER is as much a process as a specific resource.
Here's a schematic picture of what the OER process may look like, adapted from Collis and Strijker's (2004) article, from the learning object's point of view.
You might start by selecting a resource. Then you view and modify it. In doing so, you help to create content that others can use. You can also add some context to the resource, ISKME 2008 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 such as keyword metadata, and notes about what conditions the use of this resource -- is it a group activity? a lab for freshmen? best done after field work, or before? and so on. After creating content and adding this contextual information, you can offer the resource back to the community, by posting it in one of the repositories, or your own website.
Again, you can imagine that a person can come into this process at any point. You may start by posting something you already have developed. Or you can jump in by creating something new-- like the activities you are doing for BioQuest. And so on.
Now let's move away from this abstraction, and see how it all works in the context of OER Commons.
Slide 28.
OER Commons is a tool developed by ISKME precisely to facilitate the OER process that we just looked at. More than just telling you about it, we will be giving you a lot of time to use it.
Slide 29.
This is a quick peek at the interface of OER Commons. One of the things it does very well is give you quick search access to tons of OER content from many providers. OER Commons is not another repository-- instead, ISKME partners with many organizations and repositories, and links to their high-quality content.
Slide 30.
Here is a screenshot of one OER Commons resource. In the background, you see that OER Commons provides a lot of contextual information-- what kind of resource, what language, etc. In this case, we can see that it's a learning module -- a climate change emissions calculator from the US Environmental Protection Agency Climate Change site. There's an abstract we can read to get more information, and clicking on the View Item icon or link will take us to the resource itself.
===Slide 31===. Let me show you where to log on, at oercommons.org. If you have not registered yet, it will only take a few moments. Once you are logged in, we're going to jump in a play with it.
First, we'll let you browse the offerings by keyword, tag, or collection. Tags are user- generated notes and keywords attached to the resources by users. Search keywords are provided by the content authors when the items are entered into the collection.
Next, try a simple search in the search box. Look for bioquest items, for instance. Or look for something on the topic you might be exploring for your poster session, like "Chesapeake". How was that?
Now take some time to explore the advanced search, on the upper right. Notice what
kinds of filtering you can add. Not just boolean keyword searching, but also limits by subject, grade level, language, and so on. You can see it's really quite fine grained.
Slide 32.
Let's look at this list of context and metadata that OER Commons supports. Provider, type, description, level, language, media format-- these are added when the content is created. Tags, ratings, and reviews are added by users.
===Slide 33===. Why do we care about this context? What can metadata do? Among many things, it can inform users about relevance and quality, and suggest ways to use or implement the content.
Slide 34.
We'll take a quick look at how you add content. On the OERCommons home page, click on the OER Matters tab, then over on the sidebar link that says "submit your course materials." You could also choose to "submit your library or collection". Here you can see how easy it is to assign the initial metadata. Note that you will also have the option to declare how you will license users to use your work. We'll talk more about licensing in a moment.
Slide 35.
So far we have been talking about a static resource, and how contextual information or metadata gets attached. But one of the glories of OER is that content does not remain static, it can be changed in a million ways. How?
Slide 36.
There are all kinds of reasons why you as an educator might modify materials you find. Perhaps you want to adjust them for a particular learning style, or academic level. Or perhaps, like the flu materials, you want to bring something across an interdiciplinary threshold. Or you want to take a field experience and bring it in the lab.
Slide 37.
Or you want to change the details to address diversity, or some cultural preference in your local setting. Or maybe your department has some guidelines that curricula must follow. For all these reasons and many more, you may want to modify your lessons, which OER encourages.
Slide 38.
Sometimes we build specific cases with data and context rooted in a specific time and place, and with modifyable, open materials, we can separate the science learning from the specific features, and keep the power of the original while updating it to a more relevant context.
Slide 39.
Our next activity involves tags. Again, tags are different than indexed keywords. If you do a simple search on Biology, you'll get more than 1400 relevant search results. Tags are user-generated, meaning that when a user finds a piece of content, she might add tags to help people find it. So right now there are fewer items with the biology tag... but these will grow over time as people use resources and add tags. As an example of tags, look at this example of content on using cabbage juice as an acid/base indicator. People have added tags including acid, base, chemistry, "chemical and physical change", pH Indicators, and also some less obvious tags like "algebra."
For this tagging activity, we're going to ask you to find a resource by browsing or using search (not tags). Try to find something not in your field, and then figure out how it might be relevant. For instance, Ethel has talked about her experience finding materials on the 1918 flu epidemic in a social science collection, then using those resources in teaching a case study about biology. So try the back-end approach, the serendipity approach, and find a good resource. Take five minutes or so to find something promising and look it over. Then take another five minutes and add some tags to it that you feel are relevant. So that's tagging. Users can also rate and review materials they find. Take a moment to rate and review the content you found for tagging.
Slide 40.
We only have a few minutes to talk about licensing and sharing, which is a bit unfair. One could easily spend an entire workshop on licensing and copyright alone. But let's at least take a look at the importance of this issue.
Slide 41.
We care about licensing and copyright because we care about sharing. Why do we care about sharing? Don't the other teachers know how to make their own good materials? On the contrary, sharing is part of how good learning and teaching have always worked. Sharing certainly provides better options for others, but it also builds a much larger group of potential resources for everyone. Sharing also supports new ways of doing and learning, like network science. Instead of a series of isolated researchers and educators, we have a distributed network able to produce a much greater amount of high-quality educational resources.
Slide 42.
So let me ask: how, in your work as educators and instructors, does copyright affect you?
Slide 43.
If copyright means, in a nutshell, "all rights reserved," then licensing becomes a way of saying "some rights reserved." It opens up the materials in user-friendly but legally enforceable ways, so that more people can share. But it also reserves basic rights to authors.
Slide 44.
There are many different types of licenses. Most famously from CreativeCommons, which allows you to specify things like: someone can use this work, if attribution is given (see the little person icon). Or use it as long as you're not trying to profit from it (hence the crossed-out yen, dollar, and euro signs). The equals sign means you can use the work, but not alter it. This is the "no derivatives" rule. Finally, the recursive arrow means, go ahead, use it and make changes... as long as you are willing to "share alike," as long as you are willing to make your derivative work available just as freely.
Slide 45.
How do you find sharing your materials? What makes it hard or easy? What kinds of licensing issues come up?
Slide 46.
Finally, let's zoom back out to the big picture. I want us to think for a moment about the possibilities being created now as we bring together communities of educators, students and scientists-- often interconnected in new ways with technology; science discoveries and investigation; new kinds of e-science resources; and now OER -- lesson plans, assignments, and other educational bits. What connects these things? Let's think about the possibilities of forming new kinds of collaboratories. What new opportunities and challenges does that bring to our traditional jobs and institutions?
Slide 47.
How is using e-science resources and OER impacting your teaching and learning? How are these collaborative processes contributing to a new model for your teaching and learning? What areas need more support, whether from other practitioners, experts, or from technology and tools?
Slide 48.
Like I said at the beginning of this presentation, I hope this is the beginning of a conversation. We would welcome your additional thoughts and ideas through email, and through your contributions on OER Commons. Let us know what your successes and challenges are. Questions? Thank you.
