The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's presentation at the Open Educational Resources Grantees Meeting, OER 2011: The Impact of Open on Teaching and Learning
Presenters: Barbara Chow, Vic Vuchic, Kathy Nicholson
1. By chadh under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/chadh-flickr/395065840/ The Impact of Open on Teaching and Learning March 30, 2011 Cavallo Point
2. 3 COMPONENTS of the Educational Program CALIFORNIA POLICY DEEPER LEARNING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES OER
6. Community colleges have been the FOCUSof several major OER initiatives By velkr0 under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/25396215@N00/3472576304/ By stevecadman under a CC BY-SA license http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/3414783283/
7. We are seeing MOREinnovative OER start ups and business models than ever before
8. STATE AND FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS ARE SHOWING MORE INTEREST IN OER By stevendamron under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/sadsnaps/3820148709 By DannyBen under a CC BY-SA license http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannyben/1448396924/
10. ANNOUNCEMENT: The book “Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses” by Taylor Walsh was published.
11. While we are seeing huge growth, we need to figure out how to ensure that the impact of OER is GREATERthan the sum of its parts. By Horia Varlan under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4273168957/ By Horia Varlan under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4273913228/
12. Search and discovery remains a CHALLENGE By Dave Dugdale under a CC BY-SA license http://www.flickr.com/photos/davedugdale/5102302821
13. Sustainability models still need to be proven at By Paul J Everett under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_everett82/3136386146/ By DFID - UK Department for International Development under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/dfid/5352225004/ By euthman under a CC BY-SA license http://www.flickr.com/photos/euthman/2344952837
14. Research on FUNDAMENTAL questions in OER is still needed By nathanmac87 under a CC BY license http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathanmac87/5073480098/
15. Policy leadership in OER is concentrated into a FEW KEY POLICY MAKERS By eivindw under a CC BY-SA license http://www.flickr.com/photos/eivindw/4873333202/
16. WHAT IS QUALITY? Quality (Qual´i`ty) n.1 The condition of being of such and such a sort as distinguished from others; nature or character relatively considered, as of goods; character; sort; rank. 2 Special or temporary character; profession; occupation; assumed or asserted rank, part, or position.3 That which makes, or helps to make, anything such as it is; anything belonging to a subject, or predicable of it; distinguishing property, characteristic, or attribute. 4 An acquired trait; accomplishment; acquisition.
17. Hewlett has taken a FRESH LOOK at its OER grant making in light of new opportunities and remaining challenges CALIFORNIA POLICY DEEPER LEARNING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
18. In 2011 Hewlett will support the infrastructure of OER with the following 5 COMPONENTS: High quality supply Supportive Policies Implementable Standards Opportunistic Innovation Influential Research
19. Hewlett will also look for high leverage international partnerships to help OER SCALE GLOBALLY…
20. HEWLETT’S OER WHITE PAPER GOALS OUTCOMES LONG-TERM GOAL OER producers sustainability provide high-quality resources for the core academic subjects in K-12 and higher education Supportive policies remove restrictions on OER funding and implementation, and provide incentives to support OER The mainstream adoption of OER sustainability increases educational capacity Implementable standards that guide OER development and increase discoverability, interoperability, and accessibility are in place and used Equalize access to knowledge for teachers and students around the globe through OER Influential research spurs demand for and guides production of OER OER increases learning gains by delivering personalized education experiences and reducing costs Opportunistic innovation helps build an OER pipeline that continuously transforms teaching and learning
21. Hewlett announced its Deeper Learning Strategy last year, and has made SUBSTANTIAL PROGRESSsince then CALIFORNIA POLICY DEEPER LEARNING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
30. We have seen a year of great opportunity - the challenge going forward is how to operate as a coherent field, on a much LARGER SCALE than ever before
32. WHAT YOU CAN DO… Comment on our OER White Paper Give us feedback on what metrics we will use to define success Link to each other’s projects Send us evidence of impact supported by data
34. Some rights reserved. This presentation is licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The terms of this license can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. Please attribute to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Notas del editor
WelcomeWe will start with an overview of highlights and trends from the last year in OERWe will address the challenges most important to address in the coming yearWe will explain HF’s OER approach and current portfolioWe will give you an update on Deeper Learninghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/chadh-flickr/395065840/
Our Education program has 3 portfolios. Today we’ll focus on our OER Infrastructure component and the intersection of OER and Deeper Learning
Running a pilot project to establish a benchmark for OER web analytics. Have year on year data for quite a few of these sites, as a loose proxy for understanding growth of the OER field overall.In 2010, # site visits for 10 of these sites grew 25.5% from 30.7m visits(CMU, MITE, Hippocampus, PhET, OUUK, MIT OCW, Teachers Domain, WikiEducator, OER Africa, OOPS)Number of languages OER is available in increased from 130 to 150And, significantly, for these same 10 sites, the number of mobile visits increased from 95,000 to 300,000 (216%)These areimportant metrics that serve as a proxy for understanding growth of the field through increased access, but we still need to establish better measures to understand the impact of OER in the classroom and to understand whether OER is moving from the niche into the mainstream.
Last year we showed this diagram that illustratedour goal is to transform OER from a centralized simple ecosystem to a robust, self-sustaining adaptive networkMany hubs, many funding organizations, so that even if one piece falls out, the field is still growingNodes coming out of multiple hubs, and connected to each otherOver the past two years, we’ve been aiming to create this self-sustaining networkWhat do we mean by self-sustaining?There are multiple funders, and multiple sources of other types of support (policy, expertise, etc.)We see Hewlett transitioning to one of many hubs in a distributed network of leaders, funders, researchers, & practitionersOER becomes institutionalized, embraced by institutions. This is primarily happening in higher education but there’s still room to grow
This past year we have made continued significant progress on this goal highlighted by: More funders entering the field at bigger amounts Deeper institutionalization in policy and organizations OER included as a priority in many federal regulatory initiatives, UNESCO initiatives, OER Foundation Leadership is coming from more sources As mentioned earlier, web analytics is one way to measure growth of the field. Another metric is funding – by source and amount. Ideally we’d like to see a diversity of sources.The primary goal is transitioning OER from the niche to the mainstream through institutionalization
First, the Community College Access Project has been launched, which will provide fully open CC-BY community college textbooks for 20 core courses2. Next Generation Learning Challenge = Partnership with the Gates Foundation, investing $20 mil for innovation in Community Colleges. OER is a core part of this effort and supports fully open CC-BY licenses for products developed with grant funds.
P2PU/School of Webcraftgrew exponentially in its first yearThey just launched their 3rd class session with over 1000 learners in less than a year.They also have initial agreement with UC Irvine to offer non-degree credit for a P2Pu Psychology course. This is an important first step to blending innovations like this with formal institutions3. Irynsoft developed mobile app for OER/OCW for social learning on the go – their mobile app is integrated into Facebook4. Betterlesson.org is working on a new sustainability modelhas a public lesson sharing websiteSells the platform to charter schools (e.g., KIPP and Achievement First)who are encouraged to put their lesson plans under CC on the public site. The networks are doing this, and almost all under a CC-BY license, while Betterlesson is generating revenue on its platform and on its way to sustainability and profitability. 5. MITE is also experimenting with adding advertising from colleges to their Hippocampus site as a business model.5. Our grantees ran an OER business plan competition at the University of Pennsylvania. Look forward to results in June.
1. We’re seeing new OER friendly policies at the state level (WA, VA, TX)2. Core Project for California is working with Achieve to create a new vetting process for digital resources and OER creating a path to mainstream adoption3. U.S. government announced $2 billion community college training grant fund – potentially the biggest investment in OER to date
UNESCO is developing an innovative OER platform to offer selected UNESCO publications as openly licensed resources, allowing all stakeholders to copy, adapt, and share versions. The platform is expected to launch in 2011, along with a major global campaign promoting OER. In New Zealand, The New Zealand Ministry of Education has provided funding support to the OER Foundation to build a national OER commons for the secondary sector based on the Learning4Content and WikiEducator model. And, we’re excited to see the re-use of OER as a condition for grants in British Columbia, where the BC Campus program in British ColumbiaFocusing funding for credentials and credit-based coursesGiving preference to OER developed through multi-institutional partnershipsall grantees of BC’s Online Program Development Fund must choose a shareable open licenseFinally, as mentioned earlier, funded projects must build in the re-use of OER (incentivize re-use)
Congratulations to Taylor Walsh for publishing Unlocking the Gates, which achieved the #32 spot on Amazon in the distance learning categoryThis book documents the first stages of OER in the United States by looking at higher education efforts. It is targeted towards administrators and has already influenced a number of potential large scale efforts on OER in Texas, Maryland and New York state
Between the $2 billion grant program, Gates NGLC, and CCAP projects, over the next 3 years we will have more high quality OER developed than ever, which is great news. But challenges remain.The risk = silo’d resources on individual platforms, stuck in institutions where people can’t find them, and that we never gather the learning data to really demonstrate and make the case of how and why OER is so powerfulIt is critical that the field provide leadership here to take advantage of these opportunities, and demonstrate how we can provide coherence to these large scale efforts.
General claims are still made that OER is hard to find, and quality is hard to determine - but we don’t have metrics to tell us how we’re doingHewlett is working with Creative Commons and Lunametrics to establish a data framework so that we can understand where the challenges are and whether we are making progress or not.In addition, the National Governors Association has released a digital friendly version of the CommonCore standards that we hope people will use to align K12 materials. The more we use standardized formats, the easier it will be to find them.Finally, Steve Midgley at the Department of Education is developing a very innovative tool called the Learning Registry that is very lightweight, and allows us to begin to centralize and track basic learning data.
A great deal of progress has been made on finding sustainable business models for OER, but most of them are still early-stageWe need to figure out how best to help them grow achieve large scale success. Once we can demonstrate large scale sustainable models, we will have much broader institutional integration of OER.
Currently the research being done on OER is generally driven by personal interests of the researcher. We don’t know whether we are answering the biggest and most pressing questionsWe want to see research happening in a more organized way, so Hewlett is working with OLnet to map the field and find the 10 biggest questions about OER, the 10 biggest claims we can make about OER, the 10 biggest arguments against OER, etc.This will help us build a body of research and develop feedback loops between researchers and the community
Weneed to make sure OER is a priority for a broad group of policy makers, want OERto remain a consistent bi-partisan priority across administrations
Hewlett has a number existing ways that we are approaching this:Working with branded institutions for supplyWorking with large scale distribution channels such as iTunes and YouTube to see what gets usedDoing selective research on learning outcomes to demonstrate learning impactDevelop tools and signals (i.e. ratings, rubrics) across platforms as proxies for quality
We are seeing new funders/players in the field – OER is growing and becoming more popular– but in order to move more fully into the mainstream, the field must focus on reducing known barriersIt’s no longer about OER for the sake of OER – we are now focusing on improving learning experiences and outcomesWe have made it an explicit goal to help OER move into the mainstream
High quality supplyAligning to common core and other standards to ensure that formal systems can use themOnly supporting materials that are CC BY – Hewlett wants to promote interoperabilitySupportive Policies – Supportive policies remove restrictions on OER funding and implementation and provide incentives to support OER at the government, state, and institutional levels Implementable standards – To support technical coherence in the field; OER supply needs to be discoverable for those trying to find it, interoperable for those who would like to use it and integrate it in their own learning platforms, and accessible to allInfluential research –What we need is a continuous feedback loop to understand how people are using OER, what works and what doesn’t, so we have two components aimed at continuing to evolve and understand effective OER, which OER increase learning outcomes Basic research on core claimsResearch demonstrates effectiveness and personalization improvements delivered by OERThe impact and effect-sizes of “Open” are clearly defined and understoodOpportunistic innovationInnovative OER deliver new, more personalized approaches to teaching and learningNew tools and platforms increase OER adoption and improve productivity
Looking for more policy focused opportunities to leverageWill continue to support certain flagship projects and global networks
HF has recently drafted a white paper for the OER field - seeking feedback from the community on itWe are also looking for help in developing appropriate metrics to show impact on teaching and learning, and to show that OER is moving into the mainstream.
The ultimate aim of our strategy is to realign the nation’s education system to a higher bar for student achievement than we have today -- expecting “deeper learning” outcomes for all kids.By “deeper learning” we mean that all kids need to know and understand core academic content, as well as to develop key skills that research shows matter a great deal for success in college and careers (and that we believe will lead to better civic decision making as well). These skills include: critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and metacognition / being able to reflect on and regulate your own learning.
Core knowledge: reading/writing/arithmetic; understanding key academic contentCritical thinking and problem solving: which is reasoning based upon facts; analytic thinkingCommunication: speaking and writing clearlyCollaboration: the ability to work with others, Learning to Learn: the ability to direct and monitor one’s own learning
This slide shows how our OER and Deeper Learning goals overlap
We must come together to find coherence in the fieldWe must figure out how to scaleWe must measure the impact of open on teaching and learning
Dept of Labor - federal departments of Labor and Education recently announced the rollout of $2 billion in grants over the next four years, including the development of open courses for community colleges. Grant requirements stipulate that all materials must be released under a fully open Creative Commons Attribution Only license. Next Gen Learning Challenges - The $20 million grant program, cofunded with the Gates Foundation, seeks to increase deeper learning and raise college readiness and completion rates among low-income young adults. It will identify technological and OER solutions to the barriers these students face and encourage broad-scale adoption of those solutions. Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowships - for individuals with innovative ideas for social change. We are most interested in ideas with a strong component of openness, at the intersection between knowledge and learning, and technologyHP Catalyst Initiative - The HP Catalyst Initiative is a global network of thought-leading educators who are exploring innovations in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning and teaching. In 2011 HP seeks to fund 20 new organizations to join one of six international consortia - “sandboxes” of innovation that will use technology to create powerful learning experiences for students as they use their technical and creative ingenuity to address urgent social challenges in their communities and around the world. Selected organization will receive more than $150,000 (USD) in technology, cash, and professional services – and they become members of an exciting and unique professional network of innovative educators around the world.