M'S' Vijay Kumar, MIT

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Opening Up Education
M.S. Vijay Kumar, MIT Toru Iiyoshi, Knowledge
Media Lab, Carnegie Foundation
Educause Webcast Oct 17, 2008
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A Collaborative Publication Project

• How can we advance teaching and learning by
  taking full advantage of open education?
• A hardcover book free online distribution with
  Creative Commons
• 30 chapters by 38 prominent leaders and
  visionaries (Foreword by John Seely Brown)
• Lessons learned and visions of the future from
  OKI, IMS, CNI, Sakai, Moodle, ETUDES, iCampus,
  VUE, Mellon Foundation, OCW, Connexions, OLI,
  MERLOT, OpenLearn, SOFIA, Creative Commons, LAMS,
  Hewlett Foundation, CASTL, VKP, ISSOTL, Open
  University, Carnegie Foundation, and more

The Carnegie Foundations Book on Open Education
(Winter 2008, MIT Press)
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Opening Up Education Key Dimensions

• The educational value proposition and
  implications of open education initiatives
• The micro and macro factors that would accelerate
  these initiatives towards having a larger impact
  on education
• The means and mechanism for iteratively and
  continuously improving the quality of teaching
  and learning through effective development and
  sharing of educational innovations and
  pedagogical knowledge

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Understanding and Promoting the Impact of Open
Education Big Questions

• How can we enable and encourage learners and
  educators to productively participate in open
  education?
• What does open education mean as an agency for
  change both in formal and informal education?
• How can niche learning communities take advantage
  of open educational tools, resources, and
  knowledge of practice?
• What support needs to be provided?

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Opening Up Education A Framework
Section Editor Flora McMartin Richard
Baraniuk Tom Carey Catherine Casserly Gerard
Hanley Diane Harley Andy Lane Anne
Margulies Shigeru Miyagawa Marshall Smith Candace
Thille David Wiley
Section Editor Owen McGrath Trent Batson David
Kahle M. S. Vijay Kumar Stuart Lee Steve
Lerman Phil Long Clifford Lynch Christopher
Mackie Neeru Paharia Edward Walker
Section Editor Cheryl Richardson Randy Bass Dan
Bernstein Barbara Cambridge James
Dalziel Bernadine Chuck Fong Richard Gale Mary
Huber Pat Hutchings Toru Iiyoshi Diana
Laurillard Marilyn Lombardi Diana Oblinger
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The iLab Vision

• Order of magnitude more lab experiences
• More lab time to users/researchers
• More sophisticated labs available
• Communities of scholars created around iLabs
  sharing educational research content

Campus network
Internet
Client
Service Broker
Lab Server
University Databases
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Accelerating Global Movement
Higher Education
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Making a Difference Educator Use
Professor Richard Hall LaTrobe University in
Melbourne, Australia, now teaching information
systems, beginning microprocessors, and advanced
computer-aided software engineering. OCW saved
him an enormous amount of time and stress. I
was delighted by the way the material is so
coherently presented. It is truly inspiring to
see this level of excellence.
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Making a Difference Student Use
Kunle Adejumo, Engineering student at Ahmadu
Bello Universityin Zaria, Nigeria Last
semester, I had a course in metallurgical
engineering. I didnt have notes, so I went to
OCW. I downloaded a course outline on this, and
also some review questions, and these helped me
gain a deeper understanding of the material.
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OER Value Proposition

• Open high quality digitized educational content,
  tools and communities
• Available anytime, anywhere for free
• Localizable and re-mixable
• Allows for collective improvement and feedback
• Alternate way to learn Accelerate/deepen
  learning
• Scaling excellence

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Opportunities and Challengesin Open Knowledge
Sharing

• Ability of learning technologies to be integrated
  together into an educational infrastructure.
• Easier sharing of applications and content among
  institutions that can be a catalyst for
  cooperative and commercial development.
• Lower long term cost of software ownership, as
  well as increased stability and reliability for
  example through replacement/upgrading of single
  components, rather than entire systems,.
• Making tacit and local knowledge of effective
  teaching and learning visible and useful to
  others (both globally and locally) .
• The commons must serve both as a repository and a
  seedbed. Open knowledge is not simply about
  making new pedagogical work available. It is
  about creating the conditions in which ever
  better ideas and models can come forward.

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Recommendation 1
Investigate the Transformative Potential and
Ecological Transitions

• Does open education shed new light on the
  persistent, hard problems of education with
  respect to access and quality, and perhaps offer
  new solutions?
• Does it provide a fresh new look at the practice
  of education, necessitated by that flatness and
  fortunes expected of the new global dynamics of
  mobility and emerging economies?
• What new pathways does open education offer to
  improve education as a whole?

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Change Educations Culture and Policy
Recommendation 2

• What fresh perspective on resources and
  relationships does open education demand?
• What would be a good model(s) for building
  receptivity to open educational resources at many
  levels through effective professional and
  leadership development?
• How can we help educational institutions allocate
  resources towards building support necessary
  capacity for faculty and students in fully
  utilizing open educational resources?

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Is Education Ready for Opening Up Education?

• Inertial Frames
• Scarcity vs. Abundance
• Pundit-Pupil vs. Peer-Peer
• Outdated premises (Historical Evolution)
• Enabling Structures
• Sense Making
• Ordering the digital disorder
• Teacher education
• Facilitative infrastructure (Technical
  Organizational Financial)
• Accountability and Accreditation

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Make Open Education Solutions Sustainable
Recommendation 3

• Programmatic and technical integration
• How can we tightly integrate open education
  efforts with educational program priorities?
• Synthesis and synergy
• How can we look beyond institutional and other
  boundaries and connect efforts among many
  settings, and seek complementarities and
  productive combinations?
• Governance
• How can open education initiatives take advantage
  of both widely distributed nature and
  collectivity in leading their efforts?

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Influences

• Collectivity
• Participatory, Collaborative practices for
  developing and sharing educational materials
• Social Software, networks..
• Virtual Environments Second Life.
• Remix
• Design
• Agency
• Sustainability
• Enablers
• Open Community Source Creative Commons
• Open Architecture Interoperability (OKI
  eFrameworks.)

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Make Practice and Knowledge Visible and Shareable
Recommendation 4

• How can we facilitate community inquiry and
  discourse, making diverse pedagogical know-how
  visible and transferable in intellectually
  engaging and rewarding ways?
• How can we help educators and educational
  institutions build their intellectual and
  technical capacity to create and share quality
  educational knowledge, and transform tacit
  knowledge into commonly usable knowledge?

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All of these are freely available to the public!
http//commons.carnegiefoundation.org
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A Circle of Knowledge Building and
SharingPromoting the Scholarship of Teaching
Learning
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Build the Commons through the Collectivity Culture
Recommendation 5

• What kind of mechanisms do we need to devise to
  harvest, accumulate, and distribute locally
  created educational assets, pedagogical
  innovations, and wisdom of practice in a way that
  can be reused effectively in different local
  contexts? (e.g., Education Concierge)
• To foster the spawning and sharing of new ideas
  and models for innovative learning and teaching,
  what conditions need to be created through the
  collectivity culture?
• How can we create a vast network of educational
  knowledge-bases that inspires and helps to inform
  future efforts?

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Three Dramatic Improvements in Education
By openly sharing educational tools, resources,
and knowledge, we could

• increase quality of tools and resources
• promote more effective use and
• advance individual and collective (and local and
  global) knowledge of teaching and learning.

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Open Education Vision Elements

• Blended Learning
• Intelligently combine the physical and the
  virtual
• Integrate conventional pedagogy with net-learning
  to deliver quality
• (relevant) educational opportunities
• Boundary-less Education
• Beyond geo-political
• Across Disciplines
• Thematic Education
• Research-Education/Learning

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Related Online Resources
MIT Press http//mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/de
fault.asp?ttype2tid11309 Book Release
WebEvent http//commons.carnegiefoundation.org/op
eningupeducation/ Opening Up Education
Discussion Forum http//commons.carnegiefoundatio
n.org/openingupeducation