Author Archives: gillryan

Open for Access

It’s approaching the end of the month and my curation of the Open Scotland account. There’s so much I planned to write but find myself running out of time. Before I go, let’s return to the Scottish Open Education Declaration. The declaration recognised the potential of open education to “expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens”. This is where I see my own open practice situated so let me tell you a little about how I use OER in widening access.

The Open University has an open admissions policy, which means students don’t need to have prior educational qualifications to study for a degree with us. This was pretty radical in 1969 and I’d argue still a powerful counter to prevailing neoliberal narratives about ‘standards’. Our university is explicit about its social justice mission to make education accessible to all. To help fulfil this, we make a percentage of all our content available for free on OpenLearn. OpenLearn allows us to engage with learners who may be very distant from higher education. It means we can begin where they are at, with the subject that interests them, at the level they are ready to learn and at their own pace. But OpenLearn is a beast – after 14 years and thousands of OER, from one minute videos to 100 hour courses, the choices can be overwhelming. Where to begin?

Over the years the OU in Scotland has developed a model called open learning champions. We have worked collaboratively with community and third sector organisations to develop a network of ‘champions’ who can support potential learners to access online learning, develop confidence and build digital skills. How they do that depends on their role and the relationship they have with learners. Some will get learners started and leave them to explore for themselves, others will provide 1:1 support to undertake a course, some champions have taken an OER and run it offline with a group of learners or used a blended approach with some online learning and some group work. We have also worked with third sector organisations to co-create OER with learners, using our OpenLearn Create platform.

“Most of my learners don’t have a computer or a laptop at home, so they use a tablet or a public library. That digital divide means they need support to get started, but once they get to a certain level OpenLearn is something fun and engaging that helps increase their digital skills but not in a boring IT class. Doing a wee thing in a subject that interests you makes you more comfortable in the digital space.” community engagement worker / open learning champion

The model has evolved as champions tell us how they use OER and then we incorporate the case studies into our workshops for new champions. We currently have just over 300 champions working with learners who are disabled, care experienced, refugees or asylum seekers, carers, adult returners… groups that may not otherwise have engaged with us but have existing relationships with our champions.

“As we go through the course, we identify what people are interested in and explore resources on OpenLearn, making sure it’s at the right level and length for the learner. Delivering the course this way encourages peer support and fosters relationships. The group gives them confidence, builds resilience and provides a supportive environment.” carer development worker / open learning champion

To support people on their learning journey, we’ve developed Open Pathways, a guide for navigating OpenLearn, OpenLearn Create and FutureLearn platforms that enables learners to plan their online learning and into formal study if that’s where it takes them. Our open entry policy makes the OU an attractive option for people who left school early or have been out of education for a while. The flip side of this is retention, which is a bigger issue for us than other universities, so a core aim of our access work is to set people up for success. Open Pathways enables them to practice self-directed learning with lower stakes, building their study skills and confidence so they are ready to succeed in higher education.

This isn’t all about the OU. We know that other institutions in Scotland are using OER to support their access and participation activity, and I had hoped to chat to colleagues in the sector to share some of their innovative practice but just haven’t managed it this month. I’m aware that Fife College uses OER to ‘keep students warm’ between their enthusiasm at registration and their course start date. The University of Edinburgh uses OER as part of their community outreach. If you or your institution are using OER for access and outreach, I’d love to here about it. Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter.

@Gill_ie

Gill Ryan

Access, Participation and Success

Open University in Scotland

gill.ryan@open.ac.uk

 

Open for Scots

It’s not often that OER make the news but in December the Open University in Scotland’s new Scots language and culture course made a bit of a splash. I spoke to the OU’s Sylvia Warnecke, who led production of the OER, about interview requests, open archives, and creating a new pedagogy for a non-standard language.

Scots Language and Culture sits on OpenLearn Create – the OU’s most open platform, which makes course building tools available for free to anyone interested in creating, reusing or remixing content. We also use it for co-producing resources with partner organisations, which is what Sylvia did, rather than placing the course on OpenLearn, which houses only OU-generated OER.

“We had to develop a whole new pedagogy for learning Scots as it is not a codified language. There are no agreed standards for written Scots and the language has many regional variations in addition to 10 main dialect areas. We approached teaching Scots in the way a child learns a language, through immersion, mainly by listening. To do this, we had to have a new feature added to OpenLearn Create to enable people to listen to authentic Scots, then record themselves speaking and play it back so they can hear if their pronunciation sounds right.”

The project originated in 2016 following the Scottish Government’s launch of the Scots Language Policy, but it has been a long time evolving into its current form. It was produced in partnership with Education Scotland and was very much a community effort. Many Scots linguists, speakers and authors gave their time to the project, writing content and providing audio material. It also drew on content from archives and other online resources that have been made available with an open licence, such as the Dictionary of the Scots Language and the Scots Syntax Atlas.

Since Part 1 was launched in December (Part 2 was released this week) the course has been accessed by more than 8000 learners, making it one of the most successful on OpenLearn Create to date. Was Sylvia expecting the course to be so popular?

“We knew there was an interest but we’ve been taken aback by the overwhelming response from the public and the media. It was strange to be fielding requests for interviews with newspapers and radio. One of the questions I got asked was “why did it take a German lassie to make this happen?” I think it’s because I had no preconceptions about Scots, I just approached it as a linguist and could compare it to Swiss German, another non-standard language which is fully recognised in Switzerland. So many people have fed back to us what it means to them to have the validation that the way they speak is a real language and not ‘bad English’ like they were told at school. They are proud to be recognised as bilingual.”

Sylvia reckons social media has helped change attitudes to using Scots, reaching younger audiences and people with Scottish roots around the world. The Duo Lingo app’s recently launched Gaidhlig course has also been hugely popular and far exceeded expected numbers. The Scots OER is being used by a wide range of people and institutions, in schools, in prison learning centres and by groups of retired people, some of whom were not allowed to speak Scots when they were in school. 40% of people accessing the course are based outwith the UK (that’s right autocorrect, I said ‘outwith’!) from Canada to Australia.

Scots speakers may enjoy learning about the role of the language in Scottish history and culture and explore reasons for its ‘lack of prestige’. If you’re new to Scots you’ll learn to understand spoken and written Scots in different dialects and can begin to build your vocabulary. Each part of the course covers 20 study hours and you can earn a digital badge on completion of both Parts 1 and 2.

Gie it a shot!

@Gill_ie

25 Years of Ed Tech

When I signed up to curate the Open Scotland blog, I hadn’t thought of the possible perks but getting a sneaky peek of Martin Weller’s forthcoming book 25 Years of Ed Tech has definitely made it all worthwhile. It’s a look back over a quarter century of educational technology and is also very much in keeping with this month’s reflective theme.

While Martin and I both work for the OU, it is a very big university and we don’t actually work together. I managed to blag it the old fashioned way – by asking nicely on Twitter. You won’t have to wait very long for your own copy as it is due out in February, published by Athabasca University Press, and will be made available with a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence (of course).

Weller, M (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca University Press. Alberta

TLDR: 25 Years of Ed Tech is a must read for educators and prospective open practitioners. I found myself wishing I’d had it as a source during my MA in Online and Distance Education studies so I can see it becoming a core (open) textbook. It will also help prepare us for a more critical relationship with educational technology.

Any summary of 25 years is bound to be subjective and you may find yourself quibbling with some of the dates he has assigned to each technology or trend. Weller has chosen the years based on when they became significant for him or when they reached a tipping point of adoption within higher education. The 25 years cover 1994 – 2018 and some of the later entries may sound familiar from his EdTechie blog posts. Aiming for one technology per year (though some years have many sub-headings!) this is a wonderfully succinct yet wide-ranging back story to the canon of Ed Tech – a counter to the sector’s tendency towards ‘historical amnesia’. There is a focus on higher education but even if you work in a different educational context, or have not embraced online education, you will find this an accessible and interesting read.

It begins with the nascent forums of online bulletin boards, moving on to the uptake of the internet and how its design as an open system enabled all that subsequently evolved. In that sense, much of the history of ed tech intersects with that of open education. It’s not surprising that the OU was an early adopter of the possibilities for ‘e-learning’ and Weller was part of the team that created the very first fully online undergraduate module (in 1999). Early predictions were that this way of teaching would spell the end of teachers but the larger scale of the course meant that more tutors and facilitators were needed. What changed was the pedagogical approach, from a ‘sage on the stage’ to a ‘guide on the side’ (King 1993).

In some cases, the technology has matured and been mainstreamed while others have come and gone – either morphing into a different technology or failing because the world wasn’t ready for it yet. What’s interesting is the interconnectedness of many technological innovations and the discussions within the EdTech community which led to their evolution. Learning objects (2000) required content but not context which made it difficult for educators to share and reuse them. The discussions on LOs led to the development of open educational resources (2004) – with their own rules for sharing and platforms to enable that – but there was a lag before the technology caught up. The ideas behind constructivist (1997) and later connectivist (2010) learning needed Web 2.0’s social networks (2006). In the meantime, the sector was building a shared vocabulary and standards for ‘open’.

For all its relative successes – the OU’s open platform OpenLearn had 8.9 million visitors last year – Weller argues that OER still haven’t gone mainstream, with levels of awareness among educators in the UK sitting at 10-20%. While it may not have been transformative in the way it was predicted in 2004, OER can be seen as a gentle shift in the tectonics of education that has moved gradually but consistently so that the old arguments that kept knowledge behind the gates of the academy and publishers’ paywalls no longer hold. This is particularly evident in the US, where the Open Textbooks movement (2013) is a direct challenge to the end-stage capitalism hegemony that encourages students to donate their blood in order to pay for textbooks in the hundreds of dollars.

In 2012, the so-called ‘Year of the MOOC’, it was predicted that MOOCs would disrupt higher education in the way Napster did the music industry. [As an aside, music artists whose songs are downloaded from sites like Napster and iTunes get less than 10% of the cost, with record companies receiving more than 50% and Apple the remainder. Plus ça change.] MOOCs are free and accessible with the potential to democratise education, but they remain plagued by low completion rates (<10%), are accessed predominantly by learners with high prior educational attainment, and have been accused of replicating old-school ‘sage on the stage’ pedagogies to achieve scale. It can be argued that they are in the post-hype maturity stage and the model is still evolving. If you’ve never done a MOOC, or are interested in one that explores online and open education, Weller is behind The Online Educator course which is running on FutureLearn in February.

Along the way, Weller acknowledges when he has called it wrong (announcing “the VLE is dead” in 1997 was premature) but he was an enthusiastic adopter of blogging (2003) which he suggests has developed in a way no other technology has. It is now an almost obligatory open practice, allowing academics and practitioners to share ideas, connect with a wider audience and evolve the concept of a learning community. Twitter and social media (2009) have amplified this but not without exposing us to the uglier side of our connected world. Weller recalls a brief, utopian time before the online environment became so toxic and acknowledges the risks of harassment, misogyny and racism. As these risks fall disproportionately on women, people from minority communities and indeed the majority world (aka the Global South), I feel he could have cited some of the voices with lived experience of this. I’m put in mind of sava saheli singh’s Fallacy of Open.

Digital badges make an appearance in 2015. I’ll be blogging about these later in the month so don’t want to say too much but suffice to say they are another example of an idea that promised much but has yet to be widely adopted in the UK. They’re also another example of how ed tech evolves “when other technologies make the environment favourable for their implementation”.

The book rounds off with a “dystopian turn” and Weller sounds a note of caution against the dark side of edtech – uncritical adoption of technology that puts our students’ data and privacy at risk – and reminds us of our duty of care. He also offers educators some rules for engaging with technology. I’m not going to tell you what they are – you’ll just have to download the book! While you’re waiting, Weller acknowledges some of the non-male voices that often get missed in ed tech creation stories so take the time to explore some of them: Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Robin de Rosa, Audrey Watters and Open Scotland’s own Sheila McNeill. I’d also recommend Donna Lanclos’ work on strategic refusal of ed tech.

Gill Ryan

@Gill_ie

Seven years of open

Happy New Year! This is traditionally a time for reflection so as I take the reins of the Open Scotland blog for January I will take the opportunity to look back on seven years of the Scottish Open Education Declaration (2013).

Full disclosure – I am a relative newbie to the open education community. In 2013, I was working in community education and had no clue about the massive potential of OER for my learners. I first heard the term in 2015 when I became involved in a partnership project to remix an OER for carers with Lindsay Hewitt of the OU in Scotland. I was smitten and when she offered me a (short-term) contract, I jumped (from my existing short-term contract). Precarity was my norm then. I had the opportunity to work closely with the then Open Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project and learned so much in a short time, attending every forum and conference that was going and meeting many of the fine people who had been involved in the Declaration along the way. I attended my first ALT OER conference in Edinburgh in 2016 (co-chaired by Lorna Campbell). OpenLearn, the Open University’s OER platform, was already 10 years old.

Before I was completely down with the terminology (we do have a knack for jargon and acronym) what I remember from those meetings was recurring mention of repositories. It is indicative of how the conversations have moved on that this is no longer the case. I’ve witnessed the direction move from OER to open educational practices (OEP) and pedagogy. There has also been a centring of ‘open’ within higher and further education. Unsurprising perhaps, as so many of the members and theorists within the growing and increasingly international community are located in HE institutions.

Which brings me, eventually, back to the Scottish Open Education Declaration. What’s interesting to me is that the Declaration wasn’t overly focused on HE. It was addressed to the Scottish Government, the Scottish Funding Council, education agencies, schools, colleges, universities, the third sector, and all organisations and individuals engaged in teaching and learning including galleries, libraries, archives and museums. It identifies the potential of open education in expanding access, widening participation, teaching and learning, digital citizenship, social inclusion, inter-institutional collaboration, publicly-funded research, accreditation (open badges), and lifelong learning (formal and non-formal).

Over the course of this month, I hope to explore activity in Scotland related to some of these lesser-blogged-about areas of open practice. Given my own role in widening access with the Open University in Scotland, you can expect to hear about projects I’ve been involved with. I am very much hoping that these can be the start of a conversation and would love to hear about – and boost – some of the exciting things you’ve been doing since the Declaration.

Tweet me @Gill_ie