potential for OERs to help address important educational needs in the United States.
The
Hewlett Foundation, which has funded several OER innovations over the past few
years, defines Open Educational Resources this way:
OER are teaching, learning, and
research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under
an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing
by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials,
modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,
materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
Internationally, the Commonwealth
of Learning and UNESCO have launched an initiative “to increase the
understanding of OERs by educational decision makers within governments and
institutions, and to encourage the incorporation of the concept of OERs into their
policies and strategies.”
In
the United States, there are a variety of OER initiatives. However, none have risen to the level
of national strategic priority. The opportunity is ripe to apply OERs in our public school
system and in the process, to create new creative partnerships between higher
education institutions and schools to help students meet critical learning
needs.
It
is not unlike the situation in the 1960s, when the baby boom generation was
straining the resources of our public schools at a time when there was a
growing demand for high school graduates to be able to move onto college. Then, a nascent public television
system—organized originally at the state and regional level—began to produce
and broadcast television programs specifically designed to be used by teachers
in the classroom. Today, online
media provide a new platform not only to deliver content, but to engage both
teachers and students in learning communities around critical skill needs.
The Need
Many
states have moved toward standards-based testing for students in key
curriculum areas. The one that
area that seems to be most in need of support is STEM—Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics.
Schools vary widely in their ability to support teachers as they adjust
their curricula to the new standards.
Given the importance of state standards in this environment, the OER
initiative would naturally be structured within individual states, with
colleges and universities developing materials for use by nearby school
districts. At the same time,
producers can easily network to share content (where the content meets state
standards and needs) and to coordinate delivery.
The Model
Here is how an OER initiative might
work:
The
project would begin by one or more higher education institutions in a State
collaborating with the Department of Education and with some selected school
districts to identify specific standards that have proven to be the most
problematic for schools around the state. Participating institutions
would then develop OERs that address these standards. These could take
multiple forms:
- digitized video lectures, demonstrations, or experiments
- problems to be solved by individual students or collaboratively by groups of students
- elements from online college credit courses
- collections of existing online resources that teachers and students could use to gain experience in finding information, evaluating it, and using it to solve problems or create innovations.
The
OERs would be housed a central online “You-Tube”-type environment, along with
downloadable teacher guides, lesson plans, quizzes, assignment ideas,
etc.
Ideally,
a K-12 OER initiative would be complemented by online learning communities—MOOCS—that
would address two related needs: (1) one that teachers could join to
learn about how to use the OER collection and, equally important, to share
their experiences as a community on how to implement them in the classroom, and
(2) a MOOC for students to help them supplement their classroom learning or,
possibly, earn high school credit. Ideally,
both of these could also be structured so that teachers would be able to earn
graduate credit and students would be able to simultaneously earn high school
and college credit.
The Long View
As
noted earlier, it is easy to draw comparisons between the OER initiative
described above and the early days of educational television. It might be helpful to look at that comparison in more detail
to get a longer view of what might happen if a truly strategic OER initiative
were to be organized around K12 needs.
In
the 1960s, educational television was a statewide and regional affairs. Most stations had an
“Instructional Television” coordinator and a formal relationship with school
districts in their service areas.
The daytime schedule was devoted specifically to television programs
that had been selected by teachers and broadcast for use in classrooms. In Pennsylvania, where I worked, the
State Department of Education funded the acquisition of programs for broadcast
to the schools, as well as the production of new programs that met otherwise
unmet needs. Regional networks—the
Eastern Educational Network and the Southern Educational Communications
Association as examples—were collaboratives where stations could share local
productions and group-purchase programs that would be broadcast in multiple
viewing areas.
With
the arrival of (1) the national Public Broadcasting Service and (2) satellite
delivery of educational/public television programming, production and
distribution became a nationally coordinated affair.
Programs like Sesame Street
and The Electric Company arose to meet national needs. Over time, however, this three-level
system of national, regional, and local engagement faded as nonbroadcast
technology—videocassettes and videodisc, cable television, etc.—bypassed the need
for coordinated broadcast directly into school classrooms.
Today,
as we think about how to develop an effective system for production, delivery,
and support of OERs to ensure that all students have effective access to
learning resources that address strategic national needs, we should ask: How might the lessons of educational
television be used to help shape this new service? It is impossible to predict. However, we have already seen the emergence of several
inter-state higher education collaborations—most notably the Great Plains IDEA
and CIC’s CourseShare—that suggest the possibility that an OER initiative might
help foster new kinds of academic communities for which, like the online
environment itself, geography provides a focus but not a limitation.
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