The Cape Town Open Education Declaration Teaching with Technology Seminar 13 March 2008 Eve Gray OpeningScholarship Project

What is Open Education?

Paradox … although learning resources are often considered as key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the Internet openly and for free, as Open Educational Resources (Hylén 2006:1). Why?

Technological affordance Major funders of OER, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation contend that: At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge

UNESCO’s view ‘To remain human and liveable, knowledge societies will have to be societies of shared knowledge.’ Koichiro Matsuuara Towards Knowledge Societies, UNESCO World Report Paris UNESCO 2005

So what is Open Education exactly? The concept of Open Educational Resources is based on the philosophical view of knowledge as a collective social product and the desirability of making it a social property (Prasad & Ambedkar cited in Downes 2007:1)‏

Definition of OER (2)‏ … the open provision of educational resources enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non- commercial purposes (Holotescu 2007).

The most famous Example - MIT In April 2001 MIT announced that it would be posting the content of about 2,000 classes on the Web as part of the program named OpenCourseWare and hoped that it would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods (Diamond 2003).MIT To date they have made 1700 courses available.

Open Education Meeting in SA

The Cape Town meeting Funded by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation A small but lively meeting of Open Education activists from around the world Entitled Open Sourcing Education, the original aim of this meeting was to accelerate the international effort to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education.

Declarations.... Budapest An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the Internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge (Soros Foundation 2002).Soros Foundation

The Vision.. a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go

Open, flexible learning It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.

Participation‏ Educators and learners Creating, using, adapting and improving.. Includes 'openly licensed course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning'. A 'participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need'.

Barriers‏ The OER debate has moved on from the early days in which, all too often, an easy assumption was made that the provision of quality content from the North would solve problems of access to knowledge in one easy move. There was some agreement among the workshop delegates, not only that there needed to be globally distributed OER development and collaborative partnerships for adaptation and translation, but that sustainability was perhaps to be found in partnerships with commercial entities in new business models for the production of learning materials.

Barriers Educators’ awareness Governments and institutions unaware or unconvinced Differences in licensing schemes Access to computers and connectivity

Strategies Active participation by educators- creating, using, adapting. Adopting collaborative and participatory educational practices Release resources openly, with licences that allow sharing and adapting Policy – institutions and governments make open education a high priority

Issues and debates Remixing? Must the integrity of content be protected? Commercial use? Licences – open? or 'libre' ?

What does this mean for us?

What would the advantages be for UCT? Cross-disciplinary developments Translations and shared resources for academic support. Sharing and building a bank of multimedia materials and simulations Readings and case studies And what else...?

Potential barriers Will Vula be able to support OERs? Lack of support for teaching and learning interventions. Does UCT have a culture of sharing? IPR issues? University policy?

OpeningScholarshipOpeningScholarship Project

Background information

Paradox … although learning resources are often considered as key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the Internet openly and for free, as Open Educational Resources (Hylén 2006:1). Why?

Alternative views Alternative ideological view which Atkins, Seely-Brown and Hammond refer to a culture of contribution (Atkins, Seely-Brown & Hammond, 2007:4)‏ Alternative business models best characterised by the Open Source Software movement and the Open Access movement

OER Examples: MIT In April 2001 MIT announced that it would be posting the content of about 2,000 classes on the Web as part of the program named OpenCourseWare and hoped that it would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods (Diamond 2003).MIT To date they have made 1700 courses available.

OER Examples: Rice University Connexions was created in 1999 by Rice University Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Richard Baraniuk and consists of modules that can be connected into courses by any educator or learner. The modules can be used, adapted and contributed back to the Content Commons. Connexions Richard Baraniuk

OER Examples: WikieducatorWikieducator

OER Examples: Open University, UK The Open Learn website gives free access to course materials from The Open University. Their LearningSpace (uses Moodle), allows any one to register and to add a “unit” to their list and participate in the associated activities and discussions or just browse the material.Open Learn

OER Examples in Africa: African Virtual University African Virtual University

OER in Africa: MERLOT Africa NetworkMERLOT Africa Network MAN – a research network of US and Sub-Saharan African (SSA) higher learning institutions and organizations to conduct multi- cultural educational research that can lead to best practices for integrating OER. goal of the MAN is to promote the formation of a cross-cultural network of scholarly and higher education faculty enhance the level of readiness and awareness of the member institutions that can promote the adoption and development OER as e-learning support and model. The network uses the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching International Conference (MIC - and E-learning Africa (eLA - as hubs and forums for discussing issues related to the project

OER Examples in Africa: FLOSS4EduFLOSS4Edu

OER: Examples in SA: FHSSTFHSST

OER Examples SA – Child Health CareChild Health Care

OER Research in SA Research being undertaken by the: – Meraka Institute – Kim Tucker – Libre Learning – South African Institution for Distance Education – Tessa Welsh – Rip-Mix-Learn Project (Shuttleworth-funded) at UWC – Philipp Schmidt – OpeningScholarship Project (Shuttleworth- funded) Centre for Educational Technology, UCT – Eve Gray and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

Current status of declaration A draft declaration has be drawn up by Mark Surman, working with three 'stewards', Ahrash Bissell of CC Learn, Delia Browne, an IP lawyer working for the Copyright Advisory Group of the Australian government and James Dalziel from the E Learning Centre of Excellence at Macquarie University. This has been circulated to the broader group for feedback. The term OER has been debated quite extensively and a summary of contributions tracked on the wiki.wiki The next step is that is will be circulated more widely before high profile supporters from academe and the educational world are sought as champions for the initiative.

Three key areas of research ICT in academic scholarship in HE ICT in teaching and learning in HE ICT and community engagement with HE International scans National scans Case studies at UCT

Advocacy OpeningScholarship website OpeningScholarship blog -