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Thanks! Ken
Amee, Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and some real examples, on OER collaboration. “Doing OER” is a useful phrase for the wide range of creative and collaborate activities you describe.
It’s important that this message be shared more broadly and I’m glad to know that your institute, ISKME, is capturing case studies. As jsener noted in an earlier post, there is not enough out there on use and impact of OER.
Yet, I wonder how much of teacher, expert and practitioner collaboration is really due to OER. Like Ken asks, above, how important is it to have OER already out there to work from for “Doing OER.”? How much of the “Doing” is using existing materials, and how much is creating fresh? Also, what is it about OER that is expanding the scope and/or depth of collaboration? How much of what we’re seeing is due to having access to content versus having access to better tools for social collaboration?
Though I see it happening, it’s hard to put my finger on why.
- Chris
Thanks, Amee. I think that you highlight an important aspect of doing OER–that it requires a paradigm shift in some ways. So the question is, how do we best support teachers, students, and institutions overall in collaborating and stepping into new roles around OER and the potentially new ways of working it offers.
Christine, great questions and interesting point about where collaborating and OER might intersect.
Last week some of us heard John Seely Brown note in a talk at the Open Learning Interplay meeting at Carnegie Mellon that making MIT and other OCW materials public is having an ‘unintended’ effect of aligning previously unrelated courseware and faculty’s course objectives generally, just through the power of making all the materials public.
For those of us exploring the mechanisms around continuous improvement and sharing, this effect is very much an ‘intended’ enhancement, that is, access and use of open, adaptable materials is meant to impact teaching strategies. It’s hard to draw a line between “making fresh” and “building on existing”, but the participatory activities used in making materials is a form of learning that then might stimulate collaboration in the form of feedback, reviews, discussions, new examples. The access, the tools, the social factors are making new blends in and around the content and practices used in teaching it.
Amee
Hello,
The process that Amee is pointing to sounds very much like the “promise” of OER as a change agent or catalyst. From your experience (anybody), what are some of the qualities of OER that make it best suited for continuous improvement and sharing? That is, what do you think are some of the qualities or characteristics of open educational resources or courseware that makes some “better” and more likely to be easily used in the “Doing” process?
Cheers
Given the final thought in Amee’s posting:
Perhaps through considering examples of OER in action, we might have a chance to reflect on the “promise of OER” and ask if we getting any closer to it through the way that we are doing it.
I would like to get a sense for the answer…
Are we getting any closer to the “promise of OER” through the way that we are doing it?
and
How is “Doing OER” impacting education?
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