Wayne Mackintosh

Hi Joyce,

That's a brilliant idea -- why don't you propose the development of an OERu course (hopefully credit bearing) on how to develop a portfolio based on OERs as ESC's course contribution to the network.

I would imagine there would be strong interest from other OERu partners who have advanced / progressive PLAR operations including for instance, Athabasca University, Thomposon Rivers University, Otago Polytechnic, University of South Wales, others?  If there is interest among the partners we can definitely include this in the agenda during one of the meetings.  We will have a few of the PLAR / RPL gurus from our partner institutions attending the OERu 2013 meetings. So a good opportunity to develop a proposal for action.

I would strongly recommend that a development like this should be technology neutral (i.e. it should prescribe or be dependant on a given e-portfolio technology) because that would seriously impeded reuse accross the network for institutions who do not use Mahara.  Adopting a generic design would enable partners to choose their own e-portfolio platforms. 

A few comments and clarification in follow up to Joyce's post referencing Stephes contribution:

To me, the central (and existential) question always facing OERu (and WikiEducator) is: who does OERu and WE serve? Who is intended to be the ultimate beneficiary of these initiatives? When a person contrubutes content to WE, who are they trying to help?

As the emphasis of WE has shifted over time from open learning to founding partners, the answer to this question has become murkier.

WikiEducator serves all educators who want to engage in collaborative OER development or perhaps just to learn wiki skills which is an important service the OER Foundation offers to educators worldwide. As the site rankings of WikiEducator have increased over the years, we have seen an increased number of new accounts created for the purposes of spamming links to external sites (about 200 - 300) new accounts each month. Spam posts are deleted and these users accounts are banned. 

There are hundreds, if not thousands of projects in WikiEducator ranging from small personal "pet projects" to national collaborations which are not in anyway related to the OERu.

The OERu is but one of these projects in the WikiEducator community.  

The OERu project is serving learners who are interested in more affordable opportunities to formal academic credit using courses based on OERs and openly accessible materials on the Internet. 

This is what WikiEducator users say when joining the community based on our survey of 2200 community members (I don't think spammers bother filling out the survey ;-)):

• +34% of users are working in the school sector
• +48% of users are working in the higher education sector.

Over time the school sector has steadily being increasing in relation to tertiary.

Here is the breakdown of reasons educators cite for joining the community. The majority of WikiEducator users (70.3%) join to learn wiki skills. 67% join Wikieducator to research new ideas and trends and 62% join to develop OERs. 56% of respondents indicate that they join to connect with the WIkiEducator community. 

About 60% of new account holders in WikiEducator have never created a wiki account before. In this regard WikiEducator plays an important role in providing educators the opporunitiy to gain wiki editing skills.

In answer to the question, I think when I person contributes to WikiEducator they are serving their own open education needs within their own context.  The OERu is one sub-community focusing on their particular needs for the communities they are aiming to serve, i.e learners seeking formal academic credit from OER courses. 

Paul and Joyce,

Absolutely! We have found the strategy of engaging learners as co-creators of OER to be effective as a pedagogical approach in the WikiEducator community. 

The WikiEducator family has been using pedagogical approaches which engage learners as co-creators of OER development since the inception of our open courses in 2007. The pedagogical design of the Learning4Content initiative which to date has offered free learning opportunities to +6000 educators worldwide is based on the idea of sharing their knowledge by developing one lesson of free content and releasing this as OER back to the community. Its a learn-by-doing model and pretty active in the sense that students are developing OER in an authentic open community. Uptake from learners is not as high as we hoped it would be with only 25% to 30% of the learners actually engaging in the process. 

Other examples I think of:

• In the most recent Open Content Licensing for Educators workshops we invited learners to develop MCQs for testing knowledge on copyright based on the idea that if you want to learn something, teach it! Learners were given the choice of applying open licenses for their creations and these MCQs will be used as inputs for future offerings of the course as well as developing the question database for future summative assessment for formal academic credit using a credit by exam model. There was also an activity where learners were tasked with developing case studies on copyright and Creative Commons licenses which will be integrated back into the course materials in the future.

• We are developing a mOOC on the design of OERs as an elective in the Open Education Practice course (which will be credit bearing.) This will involved the design and development of 5 notional hours of learning to be released as OER. 

Maria wrote:

Talk to the students. Ask them what they need. Where are the students in these forums?

Yes, the OERu should be more proactive in talking to students and that's an area for improvement potential.

Just two points:

• We do talk to students through the course evaluations we administer after each micro course and this has been invaluable in refining and improving our delvery approach over the last 6 years trialing the open course delivery model in the WikiEducator community.
• We run numerous open community lists, of which this forum is one. Many participants in our community lists are learners from our courses who stay on and help shape the future of the community.
• In jest, when is comes to open education, most faculty are learners in this space ;-)

Hi Maria,

I think you right, most learners don't care if the OERu processes are open or not. However, our partner institutions do care about open processes and this is particulary important because prospective partners can see what we are doing and it contributes to trust in the project.

I think learners do care about the price of text books and proprietary resources the are required to purchase in traditional closed models. So that is a point of difference - -more affordable education.

You make an excellent point of blending local and global and this was a significant benefit of the Scenario Planning protype we ran in conjunction with full-fee students at the University of Canterbury was able to offer an international learning experience with participants from +32 countries which would be difficult to replicate using the traditional campus model. The local community of post graduate students generated the "critical mass" of interactions for a meaninful networked learning exprience.