OER’s & A good educational system
Terry Anderson, PhD
Professor and Canada Research
Chair in Distance Education

 “Canada is a great
country, much too
cold for common
sense, inhabited by
compassionate and
intelligent people with
bad haircuts”.
 Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 2002.

Athabasca University,
Alberta, Canada
Fastest growing university in
Canada
34,000 students, 700 courses
100% distance education
Graduate and
* Athabasca University Undergraduate programs
 Athabasca University Master & Doctorate – Distance
Education
Only USA Regionally
Accredited University in
Canada

Presentation Overview
1. Traditional Opening Joke
2. Components of a Good Educational
System
3. A way to conceptualize Net Tools –
Taxonomy of the Many
4. Interaction Theory revisited
5. Your Comments and questions

Why is E-learning so Popular?
Online Nation: Five Years of
Growth in Online Learning
Allen and Seaman 2007

E-Learning is
Better Than Sex !
• You can finish early without feeling guilty.
• You can get rid of any viruses you catch with a $50
program from McAfee
• If you get tired, you can stop, bookmark your place
and pick up where you left off.
• With a little coffee you can do it all night.
• You don’t usually get divorced if your spouse
interrupts you in the middle of it.
• And If you're not sure what you are doing, you can
always ask your teacher.

A good educational system should have three
purposes:
 it should provide all who want to learn with
access to available resources at anytime in
their lives;
 empower all who want to share what they
know to find those who want to learn it
from them;
 furnish all who want to present an issue to
the public with the opportunity to make
their challenge known. (Illich I.,1970)
Full text available:
http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/deschooling.htm

1. Access to resources at anytime
Imagine a world in which every single
person is given free access to the sum
of all human knowledge.
That's what we're doing. –
Terry Foote, Wikipedia

Open Education Resources (OER)
Vision + Affordance
 “At the heart of the open educational resources
movement is the simple and powerful idea that;
 the world’s knowledge is a public good in general
 the World Wide Web provides an extraordinary
opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse that
knowledge.”
Hewlett Foundation Smith, & Casserly. The promise of open
educational resources. Change 38(5): 8–17, 2006

OER Granularity
 Diagrams, photos
 Articles (Open access publications)
 Games, simulations, activities
 Units of learning (IMS LD)
 Units and courses
 Programs

OER’s are Open (Mostly)
 Meaning they can be:
 Augmented
 Edited
 Customized
 Aggregated and Mashups
 Reformatted
 Returned
 But they need to be licensed –
 not just put online
See Scott Leslie’s 10 minute video at
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/opened.htm

Ownership and Licensing
 Familiar problems
 Who owns resource - educators or the institution?
 inflated expectations
 New problems
 OER’s are not just journal articles
 Articles are not “reworked”
 Is attribution critical?
 What defines commercial exploitation?

4 Ownership Models
 Institutional ownership
 Default under most ‘work for hire’ law
 Shared institutional and Academic
 Often unworkable
 Tragedy of the anti-commons
 Individual (academic ownership)
 Rights of succession? Multiple authors?
 Produsage
 Assume that each producer does not enforce their rights, all
can treat product as a private good
 (copyleft, public domain, no tragedy of the anti-commons)

A Tale of 3 books
Commercial E-Learning for Open Access
publisher the 21st Century
Commercial 100,000 downloads plus
934 copies sold at Pub. indiv. Chapters
$52.00 1200 sold @
$135.00 500 hardcopies sold @
Buy at Amazon!!
2,000 copies in $50.00

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER)
Movement Achievements, Challenges, and New …
DE Atkins, JS Brown, AL Hammond, William and Flora

Major Problems with OER
 Little take up by conventional teachers
 Too little reward and recognition for authors
 Too few learners actually engage with the content
 Undeveloped business case
 Too few teachers remix and repost content
 Too difficult to upload, tag and share
Solution?? Vibrant communities of Produsers??

Challenges and Solutions
 Wrong timetabling/chunking  Modularized units
 Cultural constraints  Tools Distributed with content
 Not invented here  Transparency and objective display
 Wrong technical format  Dogged adherence to standards
 Wrong Language  Produser translation
 Lack of Accreditation/authority  Consumer and peer review
 Challenge for credit

Our own Experiment:
Course development based on OER’s
 4 courses:
 Nursing,
 Communications (Theatre)
 English for Business, &
 Educ. Tech
 Vastly different results
 Critical variable was the attitude of the developer(s)
Christiansen, J., & Anderson, T. (2004). Feasibility of course development based on
learning objects: Research analysis of three case studies. International Journal of
Instructional Technology and Distance Education,

What is missing?
 Culture of development,
sharing and remix
 ‘Community of Practice
Solution
 Social Software
affordances
 Easy to use Tools
 Harnessing student energy
to create OERs

The Political Economy of Peer Production:
Michael Bauwens
 “produce use-value through the free cooperation of
producers who have access to distributed capital
 a 'third mode of production' different from for-profit
or public production by state-owned enterprises.
 Its product is not exchange value for a market, but
but use-value for a community of users
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

Prod-Users - From production to produsage
- Axel Bruns (2008)
 Users become active participants in the production of
artifacts:
 Examples:
 Open source movement
 Wikipedia
 Citizen journalism (blogs)
 Immersive worlds
 Distributed creativity - music, video, Flickr

Produsage Principles
produsage.org
 Community-Based –the community as a whole can
contribute more than a closed team of producers.
 Fluid Heterarcy – produsers participate as is
appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and
knowledge, and may form loose sub-groups to focus on
specific issues, topics, or problems
 Unfinished Artifacts –projects are continually under
development, and therefore always unfinished;
 Common Property, Individual Rewards –
contributors permit (non-commercial) community use,
adaptation, and further development of their intellectual
property, and are rewarded by the status capital they
gain through this process

Case study: Open University UKʼs
Development of Open Learn
openlearn.open.ac.uk
 Rationale Opportunity:
 The risk of doing nothing when technology and globalization issues
need to be addressed.
 A testbed for new technology and new ways of working
 way to work with external funders who share similar aims and
ideals
 A chance to learn how to draw on the world as a resource.
 Brand Promotion
 A route for outreach beyond our student body
 Demonstration of the quality of Open University materials in new
regions.
Social Learn: to devise means to put ourselves out of business -
before our competitors do!!

Open Learn Example 490 units
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

Next evolution to Social Learn
 “For 3000 years education has made the learner adapt to
the system. SocialLearn [1] aims to reverse this and make
the education system adapt to the learner.”
 Make the formal informal, and the informal formal.
 Web 2.0 tools, attitudes, learning designs
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/sociallearn/
Martin Weller

Why Don’t we Use and contribute OERs??

2. A Good education system:
“empowers all who want to
share what they know to find
those who want to learn”

Creative Literacies:
“The ability to experiment with
technology in order to create and
manipulate content that serves social
goals rather than merely retrieving and
absorbing information”
p. 107 Burgess, J. (2006) Learning to Blog. Uses of
Blogs Bruns &Jacobs

 Need to insure that our use of the Web actually results in
increased access and not just more expensive access for
those with existing high quality access to educational
opportunity
Jim Farmer, 2006

Two-Way Use
 65,000 videos uploaded to YouTube every day
 Facebook and Myspace over 100 million
profiles
 Facebook 24 million photos uploaded daily
 50 million blogs, 50% written by under 19 year
olds
 Scientific America 229(3) 2008 & FaceBook Home

Example
 My presentation at ECEL 2007 in Copenhagen -
maybe 200 in attendance F2F
 On Slideshare:
 2322 views | 4 comments | 6 favorites | 91 downloads |
5 embeds

3. A Good Education:
Furnishes all who want to present an issue
to the public with the opportunity to make
their challenge known.
 “One month after a virtual protest
staged in Second Life with almost
2,000 avatars demonstrating on IBM
islands, a new contract with IBM
Italy has been signed” Labour news from
UNI global union, 2007

Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices) 2008

From a Deschooled society to a Learning
Society that includes new models of formal
and informal learning

Steven Warburton, 2007

Taxonomy of the Many
Groups
NETWORKS
Collectives
Dron & Anderson,
2007

Social Learning 2.0 3.0 3.5
 Each of us participates in Groups, Networks and Collectives.
 Learning is enhanced by exploiting the affordances of all three
sources of social learning.
 Issues, memes, opportunities and learning activities arise at all
three levels of granularity.
 Tools are optimized for each level of granularity
 Formalize the formal
 Informalize the formal (Martin Weller)

Choosing the right tool?
OR
Your Institutions
LMS
http://www.go2web20.net 2770 logos as of Oct 31, 2008

Formal Education and
Groups:
 Classes and cohort
 Increases:
 completion rates,
 achievement
 satisfaction
 Same logistic challenges as for institutional,
campus -based learning
 Can operate ‘behind the garden wall” to allow
freedom for expression and development
 refuge for scholarship

Formal Learning and Groups
 Long history of research and study
 Need to optimize:
 Social presence
 Cognitive presence
 Teaching presence (Communitiesofinquiry.com)
 Established sets of tools –
 Classrooms,
 Learning Management Systems
 Synchronous (video & net conferencing)
 Email

Problems with Groups
 Restrictions in time, space
pace, & relationship
 Often overly confined by
teacher expectation and
institutional curriculum
control
Relationships
 Isolated from the authentic
world of practice Paulsen (1993)
 Poor preparation for Lifelong Law of Cooperative Freedom
Learning

Challenges of using informal social
software tools for formal tasks
 Control
 Support
 Privacy
 Assessment
 Ownership and perseverance

Group Example: The Educational Blog
 Structural characteristics:
 Multimedia
 Chronological order
 Web based, easy to edit
 Networked Characteristics
 Linked to other sites
 Syndicated (RSS, Atom etc)
 Comments and Trackbacks– spammed
 Pedagogical
 Reflective, personal, archival, communicative, public

How are Blogs used today in Groups?
 “You are required to post at least two messages to your blog
and respond to the postings of at least two other enrolled
students.
 Please use your postings to address the issue discussed on
pages 34-38 of your text.
 Your post and responses will be assessed for 10% of your final
grade
 To protect your privacy, your blog is not accessible outside of
the LMS and postings will be destroyed at the end of the
course.”
Paraphrased from major UK university graduate school requirements

2. Formal Learning with Networks
 Networks create and sustain links between individuals
creating communication and information spaces
 Each of us may belong to many networks
 Network use creates social capital
 Networks can connect self-paced and independent
learners to cooperative study activities
 Network leadership arises in multiple
formats
46

 Networks combine personalization with socialization
creating transparency (Dalsgaard 2008)
 Focus is on the individual’s spaces and the way they share
and expose their space to others
 Reflections (blog)
 Resources (photos, links, tasks)
 Accomplishments (portfolio, artifacts)
 Sharing sand growing interests and skills
47

2. Networks
 Provide resources from which students’ extract and
contribute information
 In school one should learn to build, contribute
to and manage one’s networks
 Transparency provides application and validation of
information and skills developed in formal learning
 Provides models for new students
 Networks last beyond the course - basis for
ongoing support and advise from alumni and
professional communities
48

Network Tools
 Most web 2.0 apps including:
 Profiles: Finding significant others
 Blogging - outside the garden wall
 Resource recommendations finding highest quality content
(Slashdot, Diig, Cite-u-like)
 Scheduling meet-ups for study, debate, collaboration
 WIKIs, Google docs and other open collaboration tools
 Commercial Social Networking sites- Facebook etc.
49

Network Tool Set (example)
Text
Text
50
Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007

Network Pedagogy
 Connectivism
 Learning is network formation: adding new nodes, creating new
neural paths
 “It is not what you know, but who you know to ask.”
Siemens, G. (2007)
 Learning as a means to develop social capital
 Social capital and social relationships “enlarge the concept of
individualism to include the ability and obligation to
work with others when the task demands it.” Edgar H.
Schein, 1995
51

Groups are Managed -
Networks Emerge!
 Cannot be controlled like a group - requires new types of
learning activities
 Need to both amplify and extinguish interaction
 Facilitate quality knowledge and artifact construction
 Emergent behaviours, complexity, and adaption
52

3. Collectives: Harvesting the Wisdom of
Crowds
53

3. Formal Education and
Collectives
 Collectives aggregate, then filter, compare, contrast and recommend.
 Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning
 Smart retrieval from the universal library of resources – human and
learning objects
 Need to develop and practice skills and interest to easily contribute to
collectives (tagging, sharing whenever possible, leaving traces)
 only 16% of users are taggers (Pew, 2005)
 Allows discovery and validation of norms, values, opinion and “ways of
understanding”
54

Hive mind? Borgs?
Group consciousness?
 Collectively managing planet Earth
 What does it mean to be aware of each other?
Collectives operate as mirrors to monitor and learn from
our collective selves (Spivack, 2006)
55

Collective Tools
56

Example: Determining our Effect?
 Analysis of blog postings using semantic and matching
techniques
Potential uses:
uncover suicidal ideation
mental health of the community
understand evolving communication genres
measure impact of popular memes
57

Collective Example:
Terry’s Store at Amazon
58

 Explicit recommender systems:
Explicit
59

Digg Monitoring collective recommendations
in real time
60
http://labs.digg.com/swarm/

Collective Examples for Educational
Application
 Artifact Ranking systems: Google Search; CitULike;
 Tag Clouds
 Recommendation Systems:
 Wikis: Contributions from the crowd
 Folksonomies: Bottom up classification systems
 Voting and auction
 Prediction Markets

Is DE Better than Classroom Instruction?
Project 1: 2000 – 2004
 Question: How does distance education compare
to classroom instruction? (inclusive dates
1985-2002)
 Total number of effect sizes: k = 232
 Measures: Achievement, Attitudes and Retention
(opposite of drop-out)
 Divided into Asynchronous and Synchronous DE
62

Primary findings
 DE and CI are essentially equal (g+ ≈ 0.0 to low
average effect) on all measures
 Effect size distributions are heterogeneous; some
DE >> CI, some DE << CI
 Generally poor methodological quality
 Pedagogical study features account for more
variation than media study features (Clark, 1994)
 Interactive DE an important variable*
*Lou, Y., Bernard, R.M., & Abrami, P.C. (2006). Media and pedagogy in undergraduate distance
education: A theory-based meta-analysis of empirical literature. Educational Technology
Research & Development, 54(2), 141-176.
63

Summary of results: Achievement
Achievement Outcomes
*Significantly heterogeneous average effect
64

Summary of results: Attitudes
Attitude Outcomes
*Significantly heterogeneous average effect
65

Summary of results: Retention
Retention Outcomes
*Significantly heterogeneous effect sizes
66

Equivalency: Are all types of
Interaction necessary?
Anderson,
2003
IRRODL

Anderson’s Equivalency Theorem
(2003)
Moore (1989) distinctions are:
 Three types of interaction
o student-student interaction
o student-teacher interaction
o Student-content interaction
Anderson (2003) hypotheses state:
 High
levels of one out of 3 interactions will produce satisfying
educational experience
 Increasingsatisfaction through teacher and learner
interaction interaction may not be as time or cost-effective as
student-content interactive learning sequences
68

Do the three types of interaction differ?
Moore’s distinctions
Achievement and Attitude Outcomes
Interaction Achievement Attitudes
Categories k g+adj. k g+adj.
Student-Student 10 0.342 6 0.358
Student-Teacher 44 0.254 30 0.052
Student-Content 20 0.339 8 0.136
Total 74 0.291 44 0.090
Between-class 2.437 6.892*
Moore’s distinctions seem to apply for achievement (equal
importance), but not for attitudes (however, samples are low
for SS and SC) 69

Does strengthening interaction improve
achievement and attitudes? Anderson’s hypotheses
Achievement and Attitude Outcomes
Interaction Achievement Attitudes
Strength k g+adj. SE k g+adj. SE
Low Strength 30 0.163 0.043 21 0.071 0.042
Med Strength 29 0.418 0.044 18 0.170 0.043
High Strength 15 0.305 0.062 5 -0.173 0.091
Total 74 0.291 0.027 44 0.090 0.029
(Q) Between-class 17.582* 12.060*
Anderson’s first hypothesis about achievement appears to be supported
Anderson’s second hypothesis about satisfaction (attitude) appears to be
supported, but only to an extent (i.e., only 5 studies in High Category)
70

 Bernard, Abrami, Borokhovski, Wade, Tamin, & Surkes, (in
press). Examining Three Forms of Interaction in Distance
Education: A Meta-Analysis of Between-DE Studies. Review
of Research in Education

Conclusions
 The Net provides means to drastically improve education
effectiveness, efficiency and engagement by providing
access to learn, to teach and to speak one’s truth.
 Equally useful (and disruptive) to distance and campus
education
 Our challenge, as educators, is to insure that our students
and our world benefit from these Net affordances

 Illich tells us to search for and build
“educational webs which heighten
the opportunity for each one to
transform each moment of his living
into one of learning, sharing, and
caring” Illich, 1970

\"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”
Chinese Proverb
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
Blog: terrya.edubogs.org
Your comments and
questions most
welcomed!