Reusing Open Resources

Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education

Allison Littlejohn, Chris Pegler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135040031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every day, learners use and reuse open, digital resources for learning. Reusing Open Resources offers a vision of the potential of these open, online resources to support learning. The book follows on from Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to E-learning. At that time focus was on the creation, release and reuse of digital learning resources modeled on educational materials. Since then the open release of resources and data has become mainstream, rather than specialist, changing societal expectations around resource reuse. Social and professional learning networks are now routine places for the exchange of online knowledge resources that are shared, manipulated and reused in new ways, opening opportunities for new models of business, research and learning.

The goal of this book is to extend the debate of how open, online resources might support learning across diverse contexts. Twenty-four distinguished experts from nine countries distributed across Europe and North America contribute empirical evidence and ideas. Collectively they provide a vision of the potential of open, online resources to support learning across everyday contexts of education, work and life.

1

INTRODUCTION

Reusing Open Resources for Learning

Allison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler

Opportunities for learning are opening up. Societal behaviours and attitudes towards open data have changed, fuelling a transformation in how, where and why online resources are created, shared, manipulated and reused for learning. Open resources provide a substrate that can be reused by anyone, anywhere to pursue their learning goals in education, at work and through everyday activities.

This book aims to extend the discussion and debate on the potential of open, online resources to support learning. The book follows on from Reusing Online Resources: A sustainable approach to e-learning, published in 2003 by Littlejohn, offering a vision of how learners and teachers might produce, reuse and repurpose resources for learning. At that time focus was on the creation, release and reuse of digital learning resources modelled on conventional educational materials. Questions were raised about how these resources support learning, how learning and teaching practices and learning environments might change and whether the models of resource production and sharing could be sustained.

Over the decade since that book was published our view of how online resources can impact on learning has transformed. The open release of resources and data is viewed as mainstream, rather than a specialist endeavour, changing societal expectations around resource access. The open access publishing movement has adopted the terms gratis and libre (Suber, 2008) to differentiate levels of openness. Gratis refers to items available free of charge to users, easily discoverable and openly accessible. Libre refers to openness to more extensive reuse, with freedom to build on and change resources based on permissions granted by the resource creator in the form of open licenses. As the cost of accessing resources or barriers to using them may be a significant deterrent to learning, gratis resources have the potential to open up access to previously excluded learners. In education there has been significant progress in opening access to (gratis) learning resources in the form of Open Courseware (OCW), Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Courses online, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Some, but not all, of these allow libre openness in reuse, for example by using a Creative Commons (CC) licence (http://creativecommons.org/about) to alert users to additional freedoms beyond those offered in conventional copyright. The Open Education movement of the twenty-first century (Downes, 2011; Siemens 2010; Wiley, 2010) has moved beyond these initial steps, not only opening up education in terms of access by end-users to resources, but also in extending what they are permitted to do with these resources.

At the same time there has been wide recognition that access to resources alone is not sufficient for learning and expertise development (McGill et al., 2013). Learning requires the active agency of the learner. One form of reuse of resources is by ‘remixing’, or making something new from resources created by others (Lessig, 2008). This form of ‘read-write’ activity moves learners beyond passive, ‘read-only’ consumption of online resources. There have also been significant socio-technological advances since the publication of Reusing Online Resources, for example social network sites such as Facebook (started in 2004) and Twitter (began in 2006) and media sites such as YouTube (initiated in 2005) now provide spaces in which users can interact around resources, and do so openly. People use these networking sites for learning across a myriad of contexts, accessing and sharing personalised, online resources to mediate the dynamic flow of knowledge and social exchange. As they do so, they draw upon their own hardware and software tools—which increasingly are mobile, wearable, ambient—assembling bespoke, personalised, open learning environments. Learners plan their own personalised learning pathways, rather than necessarily relying on someone else (a teacher or expert) to structure their learning for them. In these situations where learners plan their own learning, the activity is often not recognised as learning. Thus, to open up learning, recognition of what constitutes learning needs to broaden so as to include activity outside formal education.

Even the most promising structured online resources do not encapsulate the knowledge needed to support learning and development (Francis, 2013; Falconer & Littlejohn, 2007). The knowledge that underpins practice has two qualities: scientific knowledge which has meaning in itself and may be codified and instrumental knowledge which involves solving specialist, practical problems (Boshuizen & van de Wiel, 2013). Learning scientific and instrumental knowledge requires open interactions, usually with other people (teachers, experts, peers) (Engeström, 1999) or sometimes with oneself, though inner, mental dialogue. Examples of learning interactions around online resources include collaborative knowledge construction (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005) or resource design (Ponti, 2013). Here, open, online resources serve as a focal point for the co-ordination of learning (either by a teacher or expert, or by learners themselves), rather than as ‘learning materials’ in the conventional sense. The ability to know who to turn to for learning support becomes critical (Edwards, 2010a). These online interactions around open, reusable resources form a basis for new open learning practices.

This reuse of digital learning resources to support learning is the central theme of this book. Sometimes digital learning resources are perceived narrowly as educational content or online courses ‘delivered’ via the web. This is not our intention here. While planning this book and identifying relevant areas and authors, we considered factors that impact on the reuse of open, online resources to support learning. We began by reviewing published and grey literature, identifying interconnected social and technological trends described in the next section.

Social and Technological Trends

Socio-technical factors that influence open, online learning extend beyond the conventional boundaries of education. These factors generally are associated with social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion as well as technological and economic growth in society.

Changing Societal Expectations Around Open Access to Learning Resources and Courses

The focus of open education movements historically has been on using technologies to extend learning support to students who could not easily have accessed university education otherwise. For example, UNESCO’s Education for All initiative (UNESCO, 2014) has, for almost 25 years, been working towards providing ‘quality, basic free-of-charge education for all’, placing Open Educational Resources (OER) and open courses as central to achieving this ambition. Widening access to resources and courses or removing charges to ensure learning is free of charge (gratis) can be viewed as an extension of the open learning movement of the twentieth century (Lewis, 1993), during which very large open universities, or mega-universities, were established, initially in the UK and later in India, South Africa, China and elsewhere (Daniel, 1996). However, resources and learning opportunities were offered only to conventionally registered students of the ‘open’ institution. More recent models of open education include learners who are not registered students at a single institution, extending participation in education. For example, by sampling open courses from across several sources, learners can gain an OERUniversity degree (http://wikieducator.org/OERu/Home). Alternatively, learners can participate in stand-alone courses presented as a MOOC or learn by reusing OCW (www.ocwconsortium.org/).

Significant financial support has been channelled into extending open education by benefactors such as the William and Flora Hewlitt foundation, who provided $11 million of funding to help establish the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OCW initiative (MIT, 2001; Vale & Long, 2003) and have continued to invest in OERs. The potential to translate resources into other languages, taking advantage of the libre nature of OERs, has resulted in translations of MIT OCW into 10 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Vietnamese and Ukrainian; also support to teachers to help them adapt OERs to different cultural teaching contexts, for example the Teacher Education in sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) and TESS-India projects (www.tess-india.edu.in/), have further increased the reuse of open resources available. There is an appreciation that resources for open learning may not resemble conventional educational resources, not only in form and use, but also in the level of unpredictability about how they will develop in the hands of others (McGill et al., 2013).

The high level of political and philanthropic support has given rise to expectations about what reuse of open resources can achieve in helping those who would otherwise be excluded from high-quality learning activity. Whether these expectations take fully into account all problems that learners may encounter when using open resources is a subject which several of the chapters in this book address.

What has been achieved is that institutions which would not formerly have been considered to be ‘open’ universities, including some of the most prestigious universities worldwide, are opening up courses as MOOCs or as OCW (www.ocwconsortium.org/). Other respected organisations are also releasing open resources, including some multinational companies, professional and government bodies as well as third sector organisations (McGill et al., 2013). Motivations to release resources range from providing professional development materials for members or employees to marketisation and reputation building (Falconer, Littlejohn, McGill, & Beetham, 2012).

Reliance on financial support from universities, governments or philanthropists means that the long-term sustainability of these models of production of open resources is unclear (Falconer et al., 2013). Potentially successful examples range from payment or ‘freemium’ models (where basic resources are free but learners pay for additional services) to diversification of who creates online learning resources and how these are released.

Diversification of How Online, Reusable Learning Resources Are Created and Released

Perhaps the most startling difference between open learning online and conventional education is that online resources are created not only by teachers or experts. Resources are as likely to be created or adapted by learners themselves (Falconer, McGill, Littlejohn, & Boursinou, 2013; Weller, 2010). In fact learners now routinely learn through creating, adapting and sharing their own open resources, often as user-generated resources across social networks (Beetham, McGill, & Littlejohn, 2009). There are many examples from everyday life, such as blogging or commenting on other people’s blogs; uploading resources to social network sites such as Facebook; sharing media through social networks, for example videos in YouTube; micro-blogging through ‘tweeting’ or ‘retweeting’ in Twitter; filtering and sharing online resources via social bookmark sites like Delicious; using tools such as Scoop.it to source, discover, curate and share relevant resources. What we see is a less clear-cut distinction between teachers or experts and learners in terms of roles and division of labour, with a shift in agency from the teacher to the learner (Beetham, Littlejohn, & McGill, 2010). This has arisen at a time when publication for a global audience, whether through YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr or iTunes, has made it easier to share resources without attracting high costs. In fact, open sharing of resources has become an everyday activity.

Nevertheless, open sharing does not necessarily signify open, online learning. Another critical factor for open learning is the freedom and ability of learners to connect not just with resources, but also with other people to draw from their knowledge and support (Ponti, 2013). Other people are available online to support learners, or alternatively learners can support peers, providing sustainable models of online open learning (Ehlers, 2011; Littlejohn, Milligan, & Margaryan, 2012). This shift in the division of labour of learners and teachers calls for a reconceptualisation of learning–teaching roles (Candy, 2004; Fiedler, 2012). However, moving from conventional learning–teaching practice to new learning practices that extend beyond the boundaries of formal education has proved difficult (Blin & Munro, 2008). This problem is partly due to the deep-rooted values and cultures engrained in ‘schooled societies’ (Fiedler & Väljataga, 2011). However, attempts to ‘democratise’ learning through opening access to resources without (at the same time) making effort to enable learners to self-regulate their learning could be ineffectual (Francis, 2013).

The Escalation of Social Interaction Around Online, Reusable Learning Resources

As the information requirements for operating effectively in professional or personal life become more complex, we increasingly make use of a multifarious mix of distributed expertise and resources. Some of these resources (now almost inevitably digital) are used as mediating artefacts or ‘social objects’ (Engeström, 2005; Knorr-Cetina, 2001), linking people as they work and learn. For example, studies on medical workers’ work and learning behaviours reveal that online patient records are critical mediating artefacts around which experts within different specialisms collaborate (Engeström, 2009). These resources create a basis for inter-professional learning within the medical professional, connecting doctors, nurses, social workers and ancillary medical professionals (Engeström, 2013). Health professionals relate to one another and exchange ideas using an online patient record as a mediating resource and a focal point for their learning. Other health professionals are a valuable resource to support learning. As learners interact with people with complementary knowledge, they have to have the ability to know who to turn to for learning support (Edwards, 2010a; Edwards, 2010b). This ability to know who to learn with is termed ‘relational expertise’.

Science researchers have further opened up relational practices through the use of open data and ‘open notebooks’ as a focal point for collaborative work and learning (Bradley, 2007). Fears around well-resourced competitors ‘running away with findings’ have been unfounded (ibid). Rather, meta-level studies, which had previously been impossible, have now become a blossoming industry providing important evidence for work in areas as diverse as epidemiology, meteorology and astronomy. Thus, open datasets are online resources that are reused for learning. Progress in sharing open data has been slower in the social sciences, due partly to low interoperability of data, ethical concerns and a culture of individual working. Some social scientists are attempting to change this by opening up data, process and deliberations, for example within OER research, which presents particular problems because of the fluidity in access to and use of open resources by learners (McAndrew et al., 2012).

These examples illustrate that learning has moved from individual problem solving and knowledge acquisition (Schmidt, Norman, & Boshuizen, 1990) to knowledge building negotiated with others around tasks (Engeström & Middleton, 1996), sometimes by interpreting a common problem, then finding appropriate responses to those interpretations (Edwards, 2010a), to knowledge creation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction Reusing Open Resources for Learning
• Section 1 Life
• Section 2 Work
• Section 3 Education
• Index