Supporting Students’ Learning in an Open World: Mapping Current Practice to Open Practice

Liz MastermanAPT 2014: Connected Learning in an Open World, 8th July 2014

CC B

Y Li

z M

aste

rman

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.Except where indicated, all images are in the public domain.

Raising the level of research

“Open education is not just about disseminating resources … but also about an opportunity toward broadening and deepening our collective understanding of teaching and learning.” (Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2008: p. 439)

Areas of focus

• The fundamental principles of openness• Characteristics of open pedagogic models• The necessity (or otherwise) of new open

pedagogic models

Fundamental principles of openness

1. The world’s knowledge is a public good and all people should have free access to it.(after Geser, 2012)

2. Open sharing of knowledge is at the heart of the academic process.(Lerman, Miyagawa & Margulies, 2008)

The necessity of new pedagogic models in an open world (one view)

“The pure usage of these open educational resources in a traditional closed and top-down, instructive, exam-focused learning environment is not open educational practice.” Open educational practices entail “social interaction, knowledge creation, peer-learning, and shared learning practices.”(Ehlers, 2011)

CC BY-NC-SA University of Oxford

Open pedagogic models – 1

a. The teacher’s role changes from source of knowledge to learning adviser.

b. The student takes responsibility for their learning, including what they learn.

CC BY-NC-SA University of Oxford

Open pedagogic models – 2

Knowledge is co-constructed through mutual interaction and reflection between teacher and students.

CC BY-NC-SA University of Oxford

Open pedagogic models – 3

The development of knowledge and skills required for tackling and solving problems has priority over subject-centred knowledge transfer.

Open pedagogic models – 4

Students learn primarily from each other, as a community.

CC B

Y-N

C-SA

Jenn

ifer K

onta

x vi

a Fl

ickr

Are new “open” pedagogies essential? Or… • …can we achieve the same pedagogic ends using “closed”

content? (cf. Beetham et al., 2012)

• …when designing for students’ learning, is it sufficient for teachers to recast/reimagine existing pedagogies? (cf. Weller, 2011)

• …can teachers simply “adopt those aspects of open practice that amplify their existing pedagogic practices most effectively”? (Beetham et al., 2012)

• …can researchers employ existing theories as “conceptual tools” for understanding learning in an open world? (cf. Panke & Seifert, 2013)

• …is the value of openness that teachers can “[rediscover] the specificity of their disciplinary pedagogy through a new lens … rather than discovering a new ‘open’ pedagogy”? (Beetham et al., 2012)

An antidote to Ehlers?

“…an almost inevitable feature of people doing research in almost any corner of any discipline, as soon as we think we’ve come across something new we think a) it’s completely new and b) it’s going to transform the world, and both of them are usually incorrect. Usually what you are doing with something like this is putting refinement on an existing idea or pushing an idea forward a little bit” (project interviewee).

CC B

Y Li

z M

aste

rman

* liz.masterman@it.ox.ac.uk

" www.it.ox.ac.uk/eet

@dotEliza@ltgoxford

With acknowledgements to Dr Chris Davies (PI)Jennifer Allen, Steve Albury, and Jessica Chan (research assistants)

ReferencesBeetham et al. (2012): Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L. and Littlejohn, A. Open Practices: Briefing Paper. JISC.

Ehlers, U.-D. (2011). Extending the territory: From open educational resources to open educational practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2): 1–10.

Geser, G. (2012). Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012. Salzburg: Salzburg Research/EduMedia Group.

Iiyoshi, T., & Kumar, M. S. V. (2008). Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lerman, S. R., Miyagawa, S. & Margulies, A. H. (2008). OpenCourseWare: Building a Culture of Sharing. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V. Kumar (eds.), Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (pp. 213–227). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Panke, S., & Seufert, T. (2013). What’s Educational about Open Educational Resources? Different Theoretical Lenses for Conceptualizing Learning with OER. E-Learning and Digital Media, 10(2), 116–134.

Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.