aiden339

In this final topic of the course, I really appreciated the choice in reading. Wiley & Hilton do an excellent job communicating clearly about some of the concepts that I was having some trouble defining. Namely, open education practices, which from my understanding includes the fulfillment of some or all of the 5R’s (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute), and the use of Open Educational Resources in the instructional setting. Reading further, the 4 metrics that the authors propose as a test for labeling a learning approach as open-pedagogy also helped clarify the concept of what an OER is as well. This piece made me think on just how valuable open-pedagogy approaches can be for students, especially when applied in the right settings. Their examples in the text made me realize how engaging open practices can be, especially for younger students who have never been given an opportunity in a traditional educational setting to be in a place of control over their own learning. When considering the 4 metrics of an OER set out by Mays et al., (2017), one also has to consider the anonymity of minors when addressing the last two metrics. Simply posting student work anonymously strikes me as opposite the point, as I think the attachment to one’s own public work encourages critical thinking. Finding a solution outside of eliminating personal attachment to coursework when presented to the public would be a very big step in the advancement, and wider acceptance of open-enabled pedagogy at an institutional level. Thinking back on my art courses in junior high, I can still remember a lot of the pieces we made simply because we worked on them ourselves and displayed them in the hallways of the school. Moments where students are in control of their learning can be very powerful, and have very positive impacts on future students as well when enabled. I think this personal connection and public exposure really encourages students to reflect on the work they produce, as it becomes representative of themselves and their relationships to the learning.

As for the four part test, I think these metrics can serve as good tools to identify some key aspects of OER- enabled pedagogy, however I think they are a bit unrefined. Particularly the second example of OER-enabled pedagogy on page 139 brought up a key factor in my consideration for the widespread adoption of OER-enabled pedagogies. That being privacy of minors, seeing as many of these approaches would be most effective on early learners, the public sharing and open licensing may present some barriers to entry early on in the advancement of OER. I think if I were going to be a teacher, I would be hesitant to adopt these two parts of the test, aside from allowing students to make their work publicly available on their own. Reading about the Creative Commons Licenses also helped me understand the importance of what these tools do for the education community, and how important they may be for OER moving forward. Perhaps developing a larger sense of community would allow students to maintain their sense of ownership and pride in their work, while limiting the scope of privacy concerns. Maybe this looks like developing more programs in schools that connect students in different classrooms and grades, in order to foster a larger sense of community within educational settings. The concept of having mentors is something very familiar to Indigenous communities, and I think this is an excellent example of the human-centred nature of Indigenous ways of knowing. Bringing this type of relationship into traditional educational settings can present further options for the development of cognitive, social and teaching presences for students. Further, it encourages students to take on some level of teaching-presence, something that is very seldom asked of students in grade K-12. The conclusion of the reading does an excellent job highlighting the importance of successful OER-enabled pedagogies, as they can serve to be examples of the benefits of adopting these approaches for students, institutions, and educators.

Finally, to answer some of the questions the paper asks on future research, I would say a lot of them are highly dependent on material being taught in the course. For example, on whether or not students assigned to create, revise, or remix artifacts find these assignments more valuable, is heavily dependent on what is being taught, the interest of the student, and how the student learns. Courses such as mathematics would be very different from courses such as art education, despite them sharing some qualities. To expand on my idea of mentorship in grades K-12, this would bring further similarities to courses that seem far apart, as we engage in the same relationships with other students just on different learning materials.

I would like to mention that I think the widespread adoption of OER-enabled pedagogies would have extremely positive impacts for students, and I think the concept shares a lot with Indigenous ways of knowing as well. The most evident relationship between Indigenous ways of knowing and open-enabled pedagogy lies in their human-centred approach. When engaging with Indigenous content, it is very important to be able to include the historical, present, and future contexts of the work being done. This looks like taking time to listen to individual experience, letting those experiences help guide the learning, and understanding the importance of self-location.

I have done way more learning about learning in this course than I could have imagined! Thanks to everyone for all your posts, and my group members for being so lovely 🙂

In this final topic of the course, I really appreciated the choice in reading. Wiley & Hilton do an excellent job communicating clearly about some of the concepts that I was having some trouble defining. Namely, open education practices, which from my understanding includes the fulfillment of some or all of the 5R’s (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute), and the use of Open Educational Resources in the instructional setting. Reading further, the 4 metrics that the authors propose as a test for labeling a learning approach as open-pedagogy also helped clarify the concept of what an OER is as well. This piece made me think on just how valuable open-pedagogy approaches can be for students, especially when applied in the right settings. Their examples in the text made me realize how engaging open practices can be, especially for younger students who have never been given an opportunity in a traditional educational setting to be in a place of control over their own learning. Thinking back on my art courses in junior high, I can still remember a lot of the pieces we made simply because we worked on them ourselves and chose what we got to make. Moments where students are in control of their learning can be very powerful, and have very positive impacts on future students as well when enabled.

As for the four part test, I think these metrics can serve as good tools to identify some key aspects of OER- enabled pedagogy, however I think they are a bit unrefined. Particularly the second example of OER-enabled pedagogy on page 139 brought up a key factor in my consideration for the widespread adoption of OER-enabled pedagogies. That being privacy of minors, seeing as many of these approaches would be most effective on early learners, the public sharing and open licensing may present some barriers to entry early on in the advancement of OER. I think if I were going to be a teacher, I would be hesitant to adopt these two parts of the test, aside from allowing students to make their work publicly available on their own. Reading about the Creative Commons Licenses also helped me understand the importance of what these tools do for the education community, and how important they may be for OER moving forward. The conclusion of the reading does an excellent job highlighting the importance of successful OER-enabled pedagogies, as they can serve to be examples of the benefits of adopting these approaches for institutions, and educators.

Finally, to answer some of the questions the paper asks on future research, I would say a lot of them are highly dependent on material being taught in the course. For example, on whether or not students assigned to create, revise, or remix artifacts find these assignments more valuable, is heavily dependent on what is being taught, the interest of the student, and how the student learns. Courses such as mathematics would be very different from courses such as art education, despite them sharing some qualities.

I would like to mention that I think the widespread adoption of OER-enabled pedagogies would have extremely positive impacts for students, and I think the concept shares a lot with Indigenous ways of knowing as well.

I have done way more learning about learning in this course than I could have imagined! Thanks to everyone for all your posts, and my group members for being so lovely 🙂

Wiley, D. & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 19(4)

This week was very interesting, and really I felt like my understanding of this course was expanded. Even reading the short piece Ryan wrote after the readings on topic 3, massively popular platforms that use algorithms to cater to users have a very big influence on culture. Further, that these apps are created by and for white people, immediately excluding other ethnic backgrounds. This was a concept that was really eye opening for me, and I found myself talking about this with friends and family following this week’s readings. The Mays reading was also very interesting, as it laid out the criteria for being considered an Open Educational Resource, the 5 r’s, those being reuse, retained, redistributed, revised, and remixed. I think this reading really put into perspective the lack of efficiency that our current education systems naturally presents by using closed resources, especially when considering the impact OER’s have on a student’s ability to enroll in, persist through, and complete a course. For me, this is somewhat of an answer to the question everyone asks when they’re a little kid of why all the world’s scientists don’t just get together and bring us into the future. It’s because a lot of the excellent resources our education systems use and develop, are contained within those educations systems themselves. On the topic of OEP’s, I have no experience with any of the recommendations the reading mentioned, but I think the last point made on the list was important. Specifically this point because I feel that this can be a very difficult step, identifying one’s own biases and shortcoming can be very difficult, especially because the intent is to limit any sort of bias or shortcomings when designing courses and instruction.

The third reading was very cool to me, as I am in POLI 369, Indigenous Ideas of Liberation, and we talked this week about creating Indigenous spaces within spaces that have already been created by white individuals with parallel motives. Through this course I have found that a lot of ideas have had similarities to Indigenous ways of knowing, especially the concept of open-learning as it embraces the individual. The individualism of open-learning can be very beneficial, as each person requires their own style of learning, and this is born out of experience. In Indigenous contexts, experience and context are important things to consider as they play a role in our relationships today, and as I learn more through this course and my degree in Indigenous studies, this extends to the relationship with learning.

I found this week to be my favorite so far, and the course really feels like it has come together in the last two weeks and my interest in the material has definitely increased since we started. Anyways, have a lovely evening! Thanks for reading.

Aiden

Coolidge, A., Andrzejewski, A., Ashok, A., Hyde, A. E. Z. W., Squires, D., Higginbotham, G., Barrett, I. with A., Ward, J., Moore, M., Nicholson, M., Jhangiani, R., DeRosa, R., Burns, S., Wagstaff, S., Robbins, T., & Mays, E. E. (2017, August 29). A guide to making open textbooks with students. A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students. Retrieved July 19, 2022, from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/

The Australian National University. (2019, April 11). Press. ANU. Retrieved July 19, 2022, from https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p197731/html/ch04.html?referer=&page=10#toc_marker-11

This week’s readings really shed light on the history of distributed and open learning, and they also really helped me clarify some of the central ideas of open learning. After this week, I have a much better understanding of what open education really represents, and how it takes shape in a traditional education setting. A key point in the 2017 piece by Jordan & Weller for me was the introduction of open practices as a concept, and the recognition that the provision of educational tools and resources is not always sufficient to higher education. I began to ask myself why the provision of resources does not participate as directly to higher learning as one would believe, and the next reading by C. H. Hopkins helped explain the difference in online, blended, and in-person learning environments. One of the key differences that I found was timing, especially in that students are able to have their questions answered in an instantaneous fashion, which I think makes a very big difference to ones learning. Further, this was visualized by the learning pathways in figure 4.1 on page 86 of the Hopkins reading. The learning pathways made me realize that in-person course naturally take a more decentralized or distributed learning pathway by having students interacting in a classroom. On that note, online learning environments present much more of a challenge as I feel as though they naturally take a centralized learning pathway as student communication is limited.

I also found the course hosted in Second-Life was hilarious, and to see such a positive response really made me think of some of the learning platforms that people are using without even realizing it! I look forward to reading some of your posts!

Aiden

References

Jordan, K., & Weller, M. (2017). Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) Openness and
Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network. https://go-            gn.net/research/openness-and-education-a-beginners-guide/

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching online: A guide to theory, research, and practice.
Johns Hopkins University Press.        https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/reader.action?          docID=3318874&ppg=87

The readings this week highlighted some issues that I had not considered about the widespread use of educational technology, and its rapid adoption into the daily lives of tons of people over the last few years. Although my perception was that edtech was only really developed in the last 5 years, I was surprised to learn about InBloom in the piece by Regan and Jesse (2018). InBloom was surprising to me as they were a highly developed software that was being applied in 2014, which would lead me to believe that there are some very well constructed edtech tools today, whether that be for better or worse in regards to the ethical challenges of edtech remains  unanswered. I found the fourth ethical concern brought up in the reading to be especially interesting, that being big data challenging individual autonomy as software in this field is being applied on children from a very young age. In the 2018 reading, The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, Morris and Stommel introduced some terms that I found helpful in the discussion of topics outside of EDCI. Namely, problem-posing education is a concept that I found has been very helpful to my learning, but I did not know the term for it. This was a bit of a ‘aha’ moment for me as I found the first reading really mad me skeptical about the uses of edtech, but Morris and Strommel brought to my attention that knowledge on learning processes can improve ones knowledge creation. I found that the last reading was difficult for me to understand. While I do understand the idea of practitioners creating conditions for critical thinking, rational judgements, and understanding through engagement, I think these conditions are created by individuals at the community level. I think for me the difficulty lies in that I think it is very difficult to foster community in a blended learning environment, so the responsibility largely falls on the individual to do so, or to engage with learning in other ways.

Overall, I thought this week felt very connected, and I enjoyed reading all of these pieces as I felt myself changing my mind a few times throughout on concepts that overlapped within the readings, or between them. This was especially evident for between Regan and Jesse’s 2018 piece and Morris and Stommel’s work, as I felt that the latter touched on how successful applied learning process can be, while the former made me question how much information we should gather on a learners interactions.

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