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Introduction

This unit looks at the pedagogical issues involved in the creation and selection of self-study educational resources for a set of intended learning outcomes as exemplified here on OpenLearn. It is a unit about writing a unit. Although it considers the way that people at The Open University set about writing open-learning materials, it will not focus specifically on the University’s particular production system. Nor does it look deeply at the technical issues involved in producing certain types of media. It distinguishes between the different purposes of self-instruction and gives advice about techniques and strategies to help the learner when they are engaging with what we normally consider to be open-learning materials.

Learning Outcomes

After studying this unit you will:

be able to state your own motivation for producing self-study Open Educational Resources (OERs);

have investigated and analysed some of the research into online learning;

have evaluated some examples of educational resources for active open learning;

be able to plan a structured learning experience using a range of resources;

be able to construct an OpenLearn-style unit by remixing resources;

have considered how to evaluate your teaching resource.

1.1 Open educational resources

1 What is open learning and why OERs?

1.1 Open educational resources

Names quickly become loaded: distance learning, supported self study, computer-based training/computer-aided instruction, home study and flexistudy, to name but a few, have all been used to describe self instruction or self study and many of these terms are thought wanting. The UK Open University is sometimes described as a ‘distance-learning institution’ yet the support that students receive from their tutor through telephone, email and face-to-face tutorials and through correspondence tuition by commenting extensively on assignments is often greater than a student receives at a ‘conventional’ bricks-and-mortar university. The Open University prefers to use the term Supported Open Learning, and you can find out more about its approach at http://www.open.ac.uk/about/ou/p5.shtml. Furthermore the use of the word ‘instruction’ rather than study or learning implies training over education and a narrower focus.

Similarly, Open Educational Resources (OERs) as a term is often used interchangeably with but can be distinguished from ‘Open Content’ and OpenCourseWare.

Briefly, according to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions,

‘An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organised as courses.’

(see http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php)

In 2001 MIT was the first university to work on putting many of the teacher-defined support materials from its undergraduate and graduate courses online.

(see http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm)

The term Open Educational Resources was coined by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2002 (Caswell et al, 2008) and it embraces OpenCourseWare but would also include any educational materials, technologies and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. OpenLearn is an example of a collection OERs. The term ‘open content’ was first used by David Wiley, an academic now working at Utah State University and a key figure in OERs (read his Open Content blog at http://opencontent.org/blog/), and the term tends to refer to all types of materials (music, video, text and so on) which are available for use under an open, ‘some rights reserved’ copyright licence that enables people to use, adapt and share the materials. So open content may not necessarily have an educational purpose. There are a number of different types of open license and so the content may be ‘open’ but not necessarily free to use as one would like. A good review of open licences can be found on the Commonwealth of Learning website – see http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/4765 – and this is discussed in more detail later.

Rather than spend more time looking at differences in terminology, we will now look at some examples of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to investigate their purpose and structure. Specifically, we will consider some different examples from this OpenLearn site, which in the LearningSpace are usually extracts from a course. Even though a unit is not a whole course, these OERs use different elements such as text, pictures and audio-visual elements that are together known as ‘assets’.

Activity 1

You should allow 3 hour(s), 0 minute(s).

Have a detailed look at the following OpenLearn units. For each one, consider and write brief notes on paper or in your Learning Journal about:

the intended learning outcomes;
the activities that learners are asked to do;
the range of media that are employed;
the teaching sequence.

E500_10 Play, learning and the brain

MU120_1 Maths everywhere

AS208_1 Europe's awakening

Now read the discussion

Comment

As you look through these units you will have seen a range of activities that learners are asked to engage with. Some, such as E500_10 Play, learning and the brain, use Flash to animate diagrams and to set up quizzes. The MU120_1 Maths Everywhere unit uses video to exemplify mathematics being used in an everyday setting and has audio clips too to talk the learner through some pictures of ‘mathematical musings’. The History of Science unit (AS208_1 Europe's awakening) uses a guided reading approach. It is clear that assumptions have been made about the intended learner. For example, E500_10 was written for a teacher or helper working in something like a nursery or similar education setting, so it has a professional focus. MU120_1 is from a very introductory course for those adults who may feel have felt in the past that mathematics is not for them. AS208_1 is targeted at a learner who might typically be in the second year of a university course, and assumptions are made about their academic skills and reading level.

1.2 Copyright and OER

1 What is open learning and why OERs?

1.2 Copyright and OER

I assume that you are reading this unit because you would like to create a unit similar to the materials that you can find on the OpenLearn website. You therefore have a teaching purpose and are particularly interested in the use of online tuition. Hopefully you are also keen to share your teaching materials with others in the LabSpace. But why bother creating a new Open Educational Resource? Surely there is so much material already available for free on the web anyway!

I would answer this in a number of ways. First: quality. You want to know that the materials that you are using yourself, or obtaining for use for others, are of high integrity; accurate and well constructed. Second: copyright. The copyright rules for many countries are rather similar. You may be exposing yourself or your institution to legal challenge if you use copyright material. If you use Youtube for audio or video elements or Flickr to store, say, a collage of pictures in a ‘Sgt. Pepper style’ line-up, they will remove the material from their websites if they receive a complaint. So a unit that uses copyright material may be removed from such a site. However, most counties allow ‘fair use’ of copyright material in educational settings. Although each country is different in its copyright laws, ‘fair use’ usually includes factors such as:

the material is not used for commercial purposes, such as the sale of the copyrighted resources;
the amount you use from one source is not excessive. A short 20-second clip from a film would probably be considered fair dealing, but not a 20-minute clip;
what it is – a song or poem is more likely to be considered a whole unit under copyright than, say, a useful description of symptoms of an illness or health-and-safety procedures.

The material here on OpenLearn has been cleared for use using the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 2.0 for England and Wales.

This in short means you are free:

to copy, distribute, display and perform the work
to make derivative works

as long as you follow these conditions:

Attribution: you must give the original author credit.
Non-Commercial: you may not use this work for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike: if you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

If you want to look at the whole legal code you can do so here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/legalcode.

However all third-party materials in OpenLearn are made available for use in accordance with permissions granted by rights owners and are not subject to Creative Commons licence. All users are required to read terms and conditions and any restrictions which are placed with acknowledgements. So therefore it is possible to combine Creative Commons Licence terms for your own materials and other terms for third-party materials to ensure your users derive educational benefit from a variety of sources.

You can find the Plain English version of this licence by clicking on the log at the bottom of this page, but if you want to look at the whole legal code you can do so here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/legalcode.

My final point about why you might want to construct your learning as an OER is that in serving the needs of your own learners you will be serving the needs of other learners. It is possible to use copyright material for online use if you point users to where it can be freely accessed but not copied or altered or if you password protect it so that, in effect, you are using it just for the few learners in your class. Many institutions currently do this using Blackboard or WebCT (now owned by Blackboard and being phased out) – but what a missed opportunity! If you have put in the work to create some online learning why not let as many learners as possible share the experience?

To summarise, the following advantages and disadvantages need to be considered before one embarks on creating OERs.

Advantages to OER

Freedom of access; both for yourself and others
Freedom from proprietary systems and corporations
Encourages pedagogical innovation
Lowers costs to students
Potential publicity
Contribution to a community
Method of collaboration
Helpful to future educators
Potentially beneficial to developing nations
Avoids ‘vendor lock-in’ or a situation in which you have to use one company's products.

Disadvantages to OER

Varying degrees of time commitment
Teachers sometimes not rewarded by the system for their efforts
Starting large projects can be difficult
Some projects require startup resources
Quality varies
May not meet accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities
Need to check accuracy before use
May need a high degree of customisation (called localisation in the OER community)
Technical requirements vary and some require you to use a particular software
Requires varying degrees of continual financial support
Licensing and obtaining copyright clearance can be difficult
Some institutions may be concerned about ‘giving it away’.

(From http://www.wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator/advantages_and_disadvantages accessed 17 April 2008)

Constructing online learning can indeed seem rather daunting. How should we go about it? Let us look at some research.

2 Online learning – What does the research tell us?

Marion Coomey and John Stephenson review a range of research to try to set out what designers of online learning should learn from experience.

Activity 2

You should allow 1 hour(s), 0 minute(s).

Read the article by Marion Coomey and John Stephenson, linked below.

Click below 16 pages, 0.2 MB

View document

Consider the online paradigm grid they discuss. In what quadrant(s) would you place the units that you considered in Activity 1?

Now read the discussion

Comment

The authors look at what they call DISC to analyse the four elements of

Dialogue
Involvement
Support
Control

It seems to me that the examples illustrated in Activity 1 fit into the ‘NW’ quadrant – ‘teacher determined, task specific’. This is true for Involvement – there is little or no scope for the learner to influence content and the activity is defined and related to pre-set tasks. The teacher is in the role of instructor – as I guess I am here – and the learner control is confined to responding to tasks. However, assumptions have been made about the NW quadrant that don't correspond to the units on OpenLearn. The Dialogue can be between other learners, the teacher has no involvement, and support can come from peers, too.

You might wish to construct a quite different type of OER to the sort that is offered here on OpenLearn, such as is described by DISC in the other quadrants.

3.1 Introduction

3 Planning your OER unit

3.1 Introduction

In planning your unit you need to keep four questions in mind.

What are you trying to achieve with this teaching unit - what are your aims?
What activities do you wish the learners to engage with in order to demonstrate or achieve those aims - what are the learning objectives or outcomes and how are they to be assessed?
How will you evaluate the effectiveness of what you have produced?
In the light of the evaluation, how will you change 1 and 2 above?

When you meet your learners face-to-face, it is relatively straight forward to answer question 3. Even before an assignment is marked or any informal question is answered the learner's body language gives plenty of feedback as to the success of your activities. In producing OERs you don't have such quick feedback, although some research into the OERs on OpenLearn has taken place (see http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3).

3.2 What are aims and objectives/outcomes?

3 Planning your OER unit

3.2 What are aims and objectives/outcomes?

It is best to start to settle on the aims and objectives/outcomes (these terms are variously used around the world but are largely interchangeable) of your study unit as soon as possible. You looked at the intended learning outcomes of some units in Activity 1. The difference between aims and objectives is that the aim is the general statement of what you hope the unit will achieve, usually expressed in terms of what you will be presenting in the unit. The objectives are what you intend the learner to be able to know, understand and do once they have studied the unit. For example:

Aim: To explain the concept of energy and the need to conserve heat in houses.

Objectives: On completing the unit the learner should be able to:

list different forms of energy;
describe how energy may be transformed from one for to another;
be able to describe different forms of heat flow;
distinguish between energy and power;
etc.

Writing learning objectives can be quite demanding as they have to be set at the right levels of difficulty and detail for the expected learners and be reasonably assessable. Derek Rowntree (1986, p. 45) suggests the following when writing objectives:

Avoid words like:	Use words like
Know…	State…
Understand…	Describe…
Really know…	Explain…
Really understand..	List…
Be familiar with…	Evaluate…
Become acquainted with…	Identify…
Have a good grasp of…	Distinguish between…
Appreciate…	Analyse…
Be interested in	Outline…
Acquire a feeling for…	Summarize…
Be aware of…	Represent graphically…
Believe…	Compare…
Have information about…	Apply…
Realize the significance of…	Assess…
Learn the basics of…	Give examples of…
Obtain working knowledge of…	Suggest reasons why…

The list on the left shows unobservable states of mind, very difficult to assess, whereas the list on the right is more focused on what the learner is able to demonstrate to others.

It is quite unlikely that in creating your OER you will start with a blank sheet of paper as some of the original authors did on OpenLearn.

For you, the model is likely to be that described by David Wiley. He believes that OER development follows a lifecycle like this:

Get: Searching and finding OERs. Getting OERs may include using search engines, repositories and finding individual websites.
Create: Generate the OER, preferably using open source tools.
Localise: Essentially localising means making a resource more useful to a particular situation. For example, translating instruction from one language to another.
Remix: Remixing is the act of taking two OER materials and merging them to form a new OER. Remixing is probably one of the most enjoyable parts of OER production.
License: License the work using an open content licenses such as Creative Commons and GFDL (“GFDL” stands for GNU Free Documentation License).
Use: This covers the actual use of OER for your context.
Redistribute: Publishing an OER once it is finished and making it available for the open education community to begin the lifecycle again.

(Wiley, D., 2008)

However, before finding and remixing OERs to create just what you want for your learners, you need to be certain you know what it is you want the learners to have learnt. After setting out aims and objectives, one way to help you do this is to draw a diagram.

Activity 3

You should allow 2 hour(s), 0 minute(s).

Look at the linked ‘spider diagram’ – sometimes called a spray diagram – which I drew on paper to bring to mind the different science activities that I had engaged in as a student of science from my primary school to higher education. It was part of a Masters course on Contemporary Issues in Science Education SEH806 (part of which is now available as OpenLearn unit SEH806_1 Changes in science education). As well as exemplifying what I wanted the students to do, it helped me collect my thoughts about different phases of science education that I wished to consider.

Click below 1 page, 0.1MB

View document

You might want to draw a similar diagram to set out your ideas for your OER. (If you are unused to using diagrams, try studying either of these OpenLearn Units: GSG_2 Working with diagrams or T552_1 Systems diagramming).

For this you could create a Knowledge Map using Compendium. You can also access a short tutorial on how to use it by clicking here.

Now read the discussion

Comment

The Compendium tool could be used to create an online learning scheme that is more in the control of the learner – a ‘north-east quadrant’ OER perhaps – where the conduct of tasks is up to the learner who can follow the route through the materials that interest them. Another use is to create south-west quadrant ‘teacher determined open-ended strategic learning activities’. Here the learner has control and the learners can work in groups. An example of that would be the ‘Compendium for e-learning’.

4.1 Sources of material

4 Creating your OER

4.1 Sources of material

You will probably be making an OER in an area in which you have some expertise so you are likely to already have lesson plans and resources that you use in your face-to-face work that will be invaluable to others.

As well as your own materials, you might like to look at a range of other OER repositories in addition to OpenLearn.

Activity 4: What is available already for me to use?

You should allow 1 hour(s), 0 minute(s).

Look at the following OER repositories where there are often not whole units but rather useful ‘bits and pieces’ that could be mixed (but also be careful to look at the licence used in each case). This activity should take about an hour to scan what is available – and then become a very useful reference list.

OER Commons

This site has a range of open resources

http://www.oercommons.org/

Science

http://www.wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator/Science_repositories

Humanities

http://www.wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator/humanities_repositories

As well as the units in the LearningSpace, OpenLearn has a large selection of older Open University materials in the LabSpace which could help in the construction of your OER. Here you could also try out uploading material from OpenLearn that you have translated or localised.

Let us now explore the different types of content resources.

4.2 Content

4 Creating your OER

4.2 Content

The content on OpenLearn comprises both the unit (structured self-study resources) as well as the individual assets which make up a unit.

The assets of a unit are the materials such as text, images, animations, audio clips, etc., which are likely to be in different digital formats. In some cases a unit will consist of just one asset, but most contain a variety.

As the amount of material in both the LearningSpace and the LabSpace grows, so does the variety of the units available. However, the main types of unit that you will encounter are:

Segments of current OU courses or support materials.

These comprise an XML-based front page providing a short description of the unit, its learning outcomes, hyperlinks to the sections of the unit and the unit's assets (text, MP3, images, etc.). In these units the majority of the original third-party material has been cleared and retained.

Teaching texts from a discontinued OU course.

Such units contain an XML-based front page providing details of the original course and a hyperlinked list of PDF versions of the majority of the texts. Third-party material has been removed.

Audiovisual material from discontinued courses.

These units comprise an XML-based front page providing both a description and hyperlinked list of the audio or video files.

Specially written guides.

These guides provide details on using the tools and technologies on OpenLearn.

Knowledge maps.

These link together various different resources in a visual structure.

Public FlashMeetings.

FlashMeetings created by fellow users of the site.

Flash Vlogs.

Video blogs created by fellow users of the site.

In addition there are OERs that others have already created or changed, as well as collaborative units where groups of people and organisations can develop aspects of their project which will result in new open educational resources.

4.3 Formats

4 Creating your OER

4.3 Formats

OpenLearn units can be downloaded or taken away in several formats:

Print Format
Unit Content XML
Unit Content RSS
OU XML Package
IMS Content Package
IMS Common Cartridge
Plain Zip
Moodle Backup

At the asset level the major formats you will find are:

text in XML or PDF
animations in Flash
images as GIF or JPEG
audio files as MP3 and video files as MP4.

To help you to rework OpenLearn material, the OUXML structured authoring schema is provided as part of the downloaded unit, although you do need to know about authoring in XML.

Activity 5: Investigating formats and tools

You should allow 1 hour(s), 0 minute(s).

Log on to the LabSpace and find the text assets in XML or PDF, animations in Flash, and audio and video files.

Analyse each format in terms of:

How easy it is to re-work the asset – what additional programmes are required?
What assumptions are made about the technical competence of the user?

The OpenLearn website and Athabasca University in Canada both use the management learning system known as Moodle (see http://moodle.org/)

What are the advantages of using an open source learning management system?

Now read the discussion

Comment

My view is that although PDF and Flash files are well known and easy to read, they are not easy to re-mix. To edit Flash for example is very difficult without Adobe's Flash program, and similarly PDF is easy to read but, unlike Word, difficult to manipulate. This means that localising the material is not easy.

A learning management system such as Moodle has the advantages of being free and relatively robust because of all the efforts of the community who have helped develop it.

5.1 Introduction

5 The pedagogy of open learning

5.1 Introduction

One of the key differences between Open Learning, where the ‘student’ is remote from the teacher, and a learner just reading a text book or looking up information for themselves on the internet, is the need to encourage active learning. Whether the material is text, online quizzes or audio-visual elements, the learner should not be a passive absorber of information but actively interacting with the resources. This is grounded in views of how people learn. But I have made some assumptions here and maybe you disagree with me.

5.2 How do people learn?

5 The pedagogy of open learning

5.2 How do people learn?

That seems a straightforward question, but you will already know from your work in producing teaching materials elsewhere that an answer is far from obvious.

Activity 6: Take about two coffee breaks

If you work in a teaching context, ask a few colleagues the question: How do you think people learn? What should we do as teachers to help that happen?

If you are not working in such a professional environment, you could ask the same questions of friends and especially parents of young children that you might know.

Now read the discussion

Comment

Asking these questions in such a blunt way is likely to have elicited either a flippant response or maybe a cautious one along the lines of ‘Everyone learns in different ways. It depends who they are. I teach depending on the needs of the student.’ And so on. It is almost certain that your straightforward question did not get a straightforward answer!

All teachers, and parents for that matter, have a ‘theory’ of learning. It may link to formal ideas but is more often not something grand or grounded in careful research, but rather is a collection of day-by-day assumptions about what we, as teachers, should do to help those we are teaching to learn. New ideas about learning are developing and we need to test them against our knowledge of learner behaviour and the views we currently hold.

As you will probably know from your questioning of colleagues, the following are some views which people hold about how people learn:

(a) Knowledge and skills can be broken down into component parts and it is the teacher's job to do this for the learner. The teacher then teaches each element and gives the student sufficient repetition until the learner can give a ‘positive response’. The student will generally receive the same instruction as everyone in the class, but if assessment shows that the student requires further help, then an additional programme with smaller steps over a longer time scale will be provided

(b) A learner constructs meanings by getting to grips with the particular problems in hand. Private problem solving is very important and a teacher should provide the necessary stimulus material and opportunities for the individual student to learn something new. A student will not progress without plenty of practice in the activities that have already been mastered. In particular a child will only be able to ‘get’ an idea when she has reached a certain stage of maturity and the teacher's job is to be aware of that and to decide when the learner is ‘ready’ to move on. Some learners are never able to ‘get’ certain ideas.

(c) All learners are educable and are helped in their learning by discussion and other social interaction, including with a more experienced learner or teacher. There is no fundamental difference between the learning of children and that of adults. Rather than waiting for a student to be ‘ready’ to learn, a teacher is finding out what the learner thinks in order to guide and support what the learner is trying to do next. By talking with the teacher, and obtaining other support, a learner is able to grasp ideas and new understandings that they could never arrive at on their own.

These very brief summaries relate to the three main traditions of learning theory: behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism.

5.3 Behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism

5 The pedagogy of open learning

5.3 Behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism

How do the well-known ideas of behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism relate to what you actually do as a teacher in a face-to-face context? Are you able to ‘sign up’ to any one of the theories wholeheartedly? As you read the descriptions you may have felt that each of them separately described some aspects of your ideas about learning and those of your colleagues, yet none was wholly satisfactory in its own right. For example, in teaching certain practical skills, a regime of practice and reinforcement in the ‘behaviorist’ tradition may be appropriate. An individual project will provide problem-solving opportunities and will be successful if the learner is working largely within his or her capabilities; a Piagetian standpoint. That teaching methods should be selected in terms of ‘fitness for purpose’, rather than adherence to a particular dogma of ‘good practice’, is clear. Teachers tend to have their preferred way of working, which reflects a personal ‘theory’, but nevertheless are not hidebound by particular ideologies and will adopt a different teaching strategy if they think it will be helpful. Sometimes it is called a ‘folk theory’ of learning.

Some people think that good teaching means the same thing as good explaining – keep it clear and simple and all will understand. In fact some teachers get very upset when, despite their greatest efforts, the learners just don't grasp what they have explained. When students just don't ‘get it’ they take it as a personal failure, or maybe blame the learners themselves.

It is certainly true that a key teaching skill is the ability to explain and describe things clearly. But a belief that transmitting information clearly is all that is required for a ‘good’ teacher is insufficient. However, such a ‘folk’ theory of how minds work is very common, and also explains the position some parents take to learning and teaching. These common beliefs were investigated by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1996), who characterised a folk theory of mind as follows:

knowledge is ‘stuff’

mind is a container

learning involves putting stuff in the container

This tends to be reinforced by national curricula and examination syllabuses which emphasise content knowledge. Bereiter and Scardamalia suggest that the corollaries of such a view of the mind is:

pedagogy: a craft for stocking minds
educational testing: a process for inventorying mental contents.

Desforges (2001) indicates that the corresponding ‘folk pedagogy’ to such a view of learning has had some remarkable success in teaching through ‘show and tell’.

But where the ‘stuff’ metaphor breaks down – as it does with wisdom, creativity, knowledge creation, appreciation, a ‘feel’ for a subject, we are left floundering.

(Desforges, 2001, p. 25)

Folk theories are indeed robust, yet the alternative ideas about teaching and learning outlined above have been considered for a least the last 50 years and, in more recent times, linked to a growing understanding about the biology of the brain.

Taking a social constructivist view of learning, the experiences that we should construct is not a ‘lecture’ but rather a one-to-one ‘tutorial’. How would you behave in those different contexts?

Activity 7

You should allow 0 hour(s), 20 minute(s).

Imagine you have just one learner and you were going to work with them for about three hours to help them learn a key idea in your subject area.

You are planning what to do and it is just you and the learner.

In broad terms – What would you plan to do? How would you characterise the activities and the way you would work?

Now read the discussion

Comment

To begin with I expect that you would not be planning to talk at length as, maybe, you would do if it was a big group that were expecting a ‘lecture’. You would make sure that the learner was with you, stopping and asking for feedback or for their own ideas. You might ask for examples from the learner from their experience or you might ask them to use your idea in a new situation or practice what they have learnt in a new situation. You might ask the learner to evaluate an idea or compare one idea with another. In short, you would ask them to be Active.

Even when you are writing educational text, write it as though you are writing an interactive tutorial. Build in activities for the learner to do that will help them to learn. Activities such as questions, tasks and exercises are a very important feature of self-instructional material as they challenge the learner to do something they can assess and appreciate for themselves. If we take the view that we construct knowledge, then using the ideas that we are learning is vital. Remember the proverb often ascribed to the Chinese:

I hear, and I forget;

I see, and I remember;

I do, and I understand.

In addition to activities, however, is the style of writing. The one-to-one tutorial will be intimate and conversational and that is the style of writing that engages the learner. You should be able to ‘hear’ the writer talking to you. Of course, ideally it will not only be the writer contributing to the learner's engagement with the materials. As I described earlier, learning can be enhanced if we recognise that it is a social activity, too, involving interactions with other people, family, friends and work colleagues as well as fellow learners.

6 Communicating and OpenLearn

A variety of software tools are available from OpenLearn to help you communicate with others to rework content and to enable your learners to work with each other. As well as Compendium, the mind mapping tool described in Activity 3, FlashMeeting enables video-conferencing through a web browser, and the unit forums allow asynchronous discussions. These tools can variously be used in situ or taken away as a client download or source code.

Activity 8

You should allow 2 hour(s), minute(s).

Log on to the Flashmeeting (FM) quick start guide and read about this video-conferencing tool.

Read the page there that describes FM and book a meeting with a friend or colleague to try out this communication tool.

It is very simple to book a meeting. After clicking the link ‘book a meeting’, you are given directions at the booking page, where you can add the details of the meeting: the date and time, the duration, the number of attendees, the booking title (e.g. ‘meeting with John’), a description of the meeting including the type of meeting, attendees, etc. (e.g. ‘Interview with John Wilson, Professor of New Media’) and keywords (e.g. ‘collaborative media’). You also have the option of making your live meeting ‘public’ so it can be attended or later reviewed by others who find it useful or interesting. You can then click on the submit button and a URL is created in the booking page, as well as sent to your email address. The URL can be passed on to the other participants, who simply click on the link to join the meeting at the arranged time.

Log on to the main FM website for a demonstration.

Now read the discussion

Comment

Tools such as FM move open learning away from ‘text on screen’ to a more integrated experience of what some call ‘blended learning’. The Open University has never been a ‘correspondence college’. From its inception the model was to use a range of media such as radio, television and printed texts supported by a local tutor to provide assessment, feedback and support in a system known as ‘Supported Open Learning’, as noted earlier. The local tutorials also gave students the opportunity to meet and support each other. The Open University has moved on from this ‘classic’ model to provide much more online support, and OpenLearn has been able to build on these changes to some extent. Here the text and audio-visual elements are integrated, but there is no tutor to mark assignments and provide feedback. However, FM and the discussion forums do provide you as an author of OERs the ability to link up your students. We know that FM has been a very successful tool for many learners – both those studying OpenLearn and for general peer support.

Some advantages and key features of FM are:

it enables audio broadcast over a network or internet;
there is no download and installation – it works in a web browser with the Adobe Flash™ player;
it is easy to use – click the Broadcast button to start – click again to stop!
you can indicate your intention to speak with a simple queuing system;
there is a public Text chat – chat to others while watching the broadcast;
you can share a URL when chatting so as to open a web page on all remote machines;
there is the ability to vote and use ‘Emoticon’ options – share your opinions and feelings!
anyone can upload slides, draw and annotate on the Flashboard;
there is a countdown timer showing remaining time;
you can view participants either as a list of images or names;
there is a simple booking procedure to manage your meetings;
it has low-data requirements (one stream at a time);
it is possible to record the meeting for easy web replay – very useful if the meeting has a ‘guest speaker’.

7 Evaluating open learning

I mentioned the term ‘Open University Classic’ to describe the original print-based materials with audio-visual elements and face-to-face support that has been the University's principal method of teaching since 1969 and is still used on many courses. Another feature of the way that Open University materials have traditionally been produced is by a ‘course team’, typically of four to six academics who would work on the production of a course for perhaps two years before presenting it to Open University students. OpenLearn study units are only an extract from such courses but they would have been through such a process before being transferred to the website. This system has been called a ‘Fordist’ approach to course production as such a lot of work has to go into the design and production of a course as – just with the production of a car – it is very expensive if the final course is not as popular as envisaged or if it needs a lot of post-production amendments. The model is one of very high initial costs but relatively small on-going or ‘marginal’ costs.

To ensure the material is as correct as possible, a course goes through a number of drafts.

Click here to view the draft process (1 page,0.05MB)

View document

Not only are the drafts considered internally by colleagues, they are sent for comment to experts outside the University and also shown to volunteer students who help by ‘developmental testing’ the emerging materials. Finally they are edited by someone who is both a professional editor and familiar with the subject area.

This study unit went through a similar process. It was seen by my colleagues and I amended it in the light of their comments. However, OpenLearn and other online environments enable us to move away from this ‘classic’ model to find a better compromise between speed of production, responsiveness to changes in the external environment, and ensuring a study unit is as of good quality in terms of accuracy and production values.

Online production, and making the materials open to everyone, has some considerable benefits over the former ‘Fordist’ production process.

It is not too expensive to change the study unit after it has been published in the light of comments received. Although the comments of colleagues are valuable, the need for external validation is reduced as both learners and other teachers can give feedback to aid improvement.
When open to everyone, experts from around the world can comment and offer new insights which can contribute to subsequent versions. This has already happened on some of our units.
If a unit topic is subject to rapid change – for example one about new technologies or influenced by changing government requirements (as is often the case with study units for teachers) – the unit can be easily updated and keep pace with change at a reasonable cost.

Activity 9

You should allow 0 hour(s), 30 minute(s).

Join a study unit that you are particularly interested in or which you have already studied.

Investigate the rating and reviewing systems provided. Look at the questions about quality, interest and difficulty.
Look at any ‘constructive comments’ in the unit forum.

What other questions would you wish to ask to obtain feedback on your OER?

Look at the unit forum discussion for this study unit on OERs.

Now read the discussion

Comment

I would want to obtain specific feedback in addition to the general comments under the rating and reviewing systems and, for this study unit, I have set these out as a first posting on the ‘unit review’ discussion forum. I am interested in how people have engaged with Compendium and FM, and how easy (or rather how difficult!) people find the different ways that study units can be downloaded.

8 Conclusion

This study unit has tried to emphasise the issues to consider when constructing self-study Open Educational Resources for your intended learners. My objectives or learning outcomes were that, after studying this unit, you should:

be able to state your own motivation for producing Open Educational Resources (OERs);
have analysed some of the research into online learning;
have evaluated some examples of resources for active open-learning;
be able to plan a structured learning experience using a range of resources;
be able to construct a unit by remixing resources;
have considered how to evaluate your teaching resource.

I hope that having completed this unit you now do two things:

Let me know the extent to which you think the above objectives have been met and how the unit could be improved by posting some ‘constructive comments’ in the forum.
Log onto the OER Handbook for Educators and contribute to the developments there.

Do this

Now you have completed this unit, you might like to:

Post a message to the unit forum.
Review or add to your Learning Journal.
Rate this unit.

Try this

References

Bereiter, C. and Scardamalia, M. (1996) ‘Re-thinking learning’ in D.R. Olson and N. Torrance (eds) The handbook of education and human development: new models of learning, teaching and schooling, New York, Blackwells.

Caswell, T, Henson, S, Jensen, M. and Wiley, D (2008) ‘Open Educational Resources: Enabling universal education’, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 9, No. 1, 11 pp. Available from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl (Accessed 17 April 2008).

Desforges, C. (2001) ‘Familiar challenges and new approaches: necessary advances in theory and methods in research on teaching and learning’, Nuttall/Carfax memorial Lecture, Cardiff 2000, Southwell, British Educational Research Association.

Rowntree, R. (1986) Teaching Through Self-Instruction, London, Kogan Page.

Wiley, D. (2008) http://www.wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator/OER_Lifecycle (Accessed 17 April 2008).

Acknowledgements

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions.

Grateful acknowledgement is made the following sources for permission:

Marion Coomey and John Stephenson: ‘Online learning: it is all about dialogue, involvement, support and control – according to research’, chapter 4 in TTeaching & Learning Online Pedagogies for New Technologies, edited by John Stephenson, first published in 2001 by Kogan Page Limited. © Marion Coomey and John Stephenson.

Related educational resources

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:21:26 GMT

This is a list of all the Related educational resources for the unit OER_1 - Creating open educational resources

RSS Feed for the unit Creating open educational resources

Introduction

Introduction

Learning Outcomes

1.1 Open educational resources

1 What is open learning and why OERs?

1.1 Open educational resources

Activity 1

Comment

1.2 Copyright and OER

1 What is open learning and why OERs?

1.2 Copyright and OER

2 Online learning – What does the research tell us?

2 Online learning – What does the research tell us?

Activity 2

Comment

3.1 Introduction

3 Planning your OER unit

3.1 Introduction

3.2 What are aims and objectives/outcomes?

3 Planning your OER unit

3.2 What are aims and objectives/outcomes?

Activity 3

Comment

4.1 Sources of material

4 Creating your OER

4.1 Sources of material

Activity 4: What is available already for me to use?

Music

Multi-media resources across a range of topics

Images

A wiki of general repositories hosted by UNESCO

Jorum – a sharing site for Higher Education in the UK

OER Commons

Science

Humanities

4.2 Content

4 Creating your OER

4.2 Content

4.3 Formats

4 Creating your OER

4.3 Formats

Activity 5: Investigating formats and tools

Comment

5.1 Introduction

5 The pedagogy of open learning

5.1 Introduction

5.2 How do people learn?

5 The pedagogy of open learning

5.2 How do people learn?

Activity 6: Take about two coffee breaks

Comment

5.3 Behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism

5 The pedagogy of open learning

5.3 Behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism

Activity 7

Comment

6 Communicating and OpenLearn

6 Communicating and OpenLearn

Activity 8

Comment

7 Evaluating open learning

7 Evaluating open learning

Activity 9

Comment

8 Conclusion

8 Conclusion

Do this

Try this

References

References

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Related educational resources