Brian Lamb

Hi all,

I feel lucky to be the facilitator for the second topic of this seminar, entitled "OERu operations and lessons we are learning". Lucky, because it addresses many of the challenges I face day to day at Thompson Rivers University, and I am confident that the people involved in this discussion will provide a lot of valuable and fresh insights that will likely be applicable in many contexts.

Some prompts to frame our discussion of lessons learned:

What are the institutional capacity development requirements for OERu operations? How do we address these?

To my mind, we might address these questions in a fairly general sense ("building institutional capacity"), and/or through a more focused OERu lens (our specific needs and challenges in meeting our OERu objectives).

In a broad sense, I'm spending a lot of time these days thinking about the question of "building capacity" around open at my institution. Personally, I see this as a set of tasks that all depend on each other, and to my mind need to be developed more or less concurrently: gathering or raising resources, identifying willing participants, attracting new participants, building use cases, having tools in place, supporting people where needed, sharing lessons learned and celebrating successes. How do you conceptualize the issue of "developing capacity"?

I'd also be interested in hearing some of the specific challenges being faced by OERu partners, and by community participants.

What are the lessons we are learning from prototyping?

Between the first OERu anchor partner meeting, and the second one we will be having in less than six weeks, many of us have taken our work to new places. I hope people will share some of the things they've picked up in the process. Have you or your organizations developed approaches or techniques we can all learn from?

David Bull has posted some very useful reflections from USQ here. -- http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=16816

What technologies will bring us closer to achieving our goals and how do we implement them?

MediaWiki is the technology I most closely associate with the OERu, and in a sense it is a community of "WikiEducators" in the literal sense as well as in its state of mind. But the number of other tools and platforms people are using to connect through this seminar speaks to the reality that OERu is not a technical monoculture. I am a huge fan of wiki-oriented education activities and the power of MediaWiki as a platform, but should we be thinking of incorporating other technologies?

What are the business models for scalable and sustainable operations?

The questions of fostering and managing growth while maintaining a stable footing never go away. Looking across the open education or "free culture" landscape, there are hopeful examples and creative ideas, yet I still struggle to identify and understand successful models that inspire confidence. Where are you seeing success stories whose examples we might emulate?

Please feel free to focus on whatever questions raised here seem most compelling to you, and if you feel thesy are not addressing the real issues of operations and lessons learned, by all means post questions of your own. The plan is to hash out these ideas today (it's the morning of Friday, September 20th here in western Canada as I post this), and Monday the 23rd, after which we will move on to the next topic. I am very much looking forward to seeing where this discussion goes. 

Thanks for getting us rolling, Wayne. It's exciting to see this discussion getting underway. TRU is very fortunate to be hosting the next gathering of OERu Anchor Partners, and it will be fascinating to watch this open process develop the agenda for that event.

This characteristically participatory process in itself speaks to the "OERu point of difference" that Wayne refers to.

I had something of a moment of clarity when I read the announcement for the "Open Education Alliance" last week. At the time, I was most struck by Audrey Watters' observations that this OEA made no mention of open source, open licensing... it seemed like a defining case of "openwashing".

But reading David Wiley's dumbfounded response the next day, my reaction to the OEA alliance grew even darker. What strikes me as most troubling is that this group of that this collection of major corporations (and a token university partner), with little history of supporting the long evolution of open education, had taken it as their right to declare themselves the "alliance" of open education with no consultation with or even acknowledgment of the community that has been working so hard on this stuff for so long.

So if I had to pinpoint the "OERu point of difference", I would say it lies in an identity as the inverse of the OEA. It is profoundly and demonstrably dedicated to transparent and participatory processes. Its members have been hard at work in all manner of open education work (not just open content, but the extension of access to higher education) for many years.

But obviously noble values are not in themselves enough. As noted by others in this thread the challenge we face is to build on our extensive expertise as educators to build out frameworks that will push open learning beyond inspiring ideas and impressive collections of learning resources. These days, I am thinking a lot about the dreary details of staffing, training and sustainably funding the new ways of working that open education requires. Can OERu allies help figure this stuff out?

I'd also add that what I think of as the "OERu mode of collaboration", highlighted by the public nature of this planning process, integrating 'Twitter, G+ and WikiEducator WENotes using the "#OERu" tag' in itself speaks to a potential strength of OERu -- an ability to tap into and feed back into a larger collection of networked educators beyond our formal alliance. I hope we will be able to take full advantage of that strength.

 

My method is fairly similar to Scott's...

I typically teach only one formal course per year, and when I give a talk it is usually more an instance of "updating" a talk on a theme I have already spoken on... So it is relatively uncommon for me to make an explicit search for OERs. More common for me is the attempt to stay on top of a particular subject on an ongoing basis. I read blogs by people or organizations (recently, I am also likely to follow them on Twitter) that I think can inform my interests, and flag items as I go along (either via Delicious or stars in Google Reader). Or, if significant annotation is necessary, or I think people will find it useful, I blog the resource myself. So when it comes time to update a resource of my own, I end up consulting those personal archives.

As far as "search engines" go, I do use Flickr's Advanced Search for images a lot (it allows me to search for CC licensed items), Google's Advanced Search (toggling the "usage rights" drop-down menu)... And I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to the excellent Free Learning engine... kudos to BCcampus and Scott for pulling it together:

http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/