The document details a PhD research project by Sarah Lambert at Deakin University, focusing on how Australian higher education can utilize open education programs to promote student equity and social inclusion. It discusses the limitations of free educational resources and emphasizes the importance of support structures for marginalized groups. The research employs a critical, realist method and aims to identify effective practices and collaborations that can enhance the effectiveness of open education initiatives.

1. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
deakin.edu.au/cradle
How inclusive is the
“Openness” of Open
Education?
Sarah Lambert – 5/3/17
slambe@deakin.edu.au
Twitter @SarahLambertOz
CC-BY-SA

2. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Quick overview
19 years in
Wollongong
South Coast of
NSW, Australia
Now at Deakin -
Regional Unis,
Diverse cohorts
Photo by Sarah Lambert CC-BY-SA

3. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
• Full time on scholarship with Cradle
– Started, moved to Melbourne Feb 2016
• 1 year down, 2 to go
• Passed Colloquia Nov 2016 and now
collecting data
Quick PhD overview

4. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
PhD Research Question
How can Australian Higher education providers make use of
Open Education programs
for Student Equity and Social Inclusion?
Access, progress
and success in HE
Lifelong learning, health
info, empowerment,
personal goals,
community development

5. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
PhD Research Question
an educational program offered freely to the community with a
mixture of resources, activities or assessment, and instructional
materials to guide learning and mastery of a particular topic
How can Australian Higher education providers make use of
Open Education programs
for Student Equity and Social Inclusion?

6. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
The Personal
• Motivated by practitioner enlightenment
– 18 yrs ed tech, 3 yrs Open Ed/MOOC practitioner
– Are we really reaching the un-reached?
– Early MOOC evals: Great for educated white guys
• Dawning realisation
– More digital divide?
– What if ed-tech is part of the problem?

7. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Critical approach, Realist method
• Critical: include the excluded voices and
perspectives, privilege the unprivileged,
what is missing?
• Realist: what works for whom in what
circumstances; the state of the actual;
beyond “promise” or “potential”

8. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
2 Phase research project

9. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Your input
• Help me find good cases for Phase 2 (in
depth case studies)
• Where OE is working for particular
underprivileged groups – for real, in
practice

10. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
In theory: Free stuff. So what?
• Selwyn(2011): advantaged people tend to take-up and
take advantage of the new techs
• Rohs & Ganz (2015): MOOCs increasing the digital
divide
• Tinto (2008): access to education without support
does not lead to equal opportunity of education

11. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Free is not enough
• Warshauer’s major work “Technology for Social
Inclusion” (2003)
– providing technology for free on its own rarely
improves the lot of disadvantaged learners
– Also required: physical, digital, human and social
forms of support for learning and making meaning
of the new techs
– Irish “Information Town Competition” winner ($22M free stuff, failed)
vs 1.5M runner up (plan, partner, embed/engage, success)

12. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
HEI student Equity lit
• Major Australian and English program
reviews of HEI interventions:
– Targetted: LSES schools, Indigenous mentoring
– Universal: FYE, transition, Inclusive pedagogy,
– High-touch, low-tech
– Community Partnerships are key, bring more
resources, acknowledge community strengths,
avoid colonial discourse and deficit discourse

13. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
In practice: Inclusion Forum
• FiF Forum Nov 2016: revealed more interest in
online technologies (as compared to journals)
– Syncronous techs: keep F2F flavour
– Virtual techs: keep sense of place or campus
– Digital storytelling: privilege FiF/LSES/Indigenous
student experience in their own words

14. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Virtual student mentoring
Synchronous
+
Virtual sense
of place

15. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
New thinking
• Universal and targeted
– Universal social inclusion programs for normalising
cohorts, sharing common ground?
– Targeted social inclusion programs for valuing
cultural difference and strengths?
• Both needed, complementary
– Will Open Education programs of both types also
exist and be mutually supportive and helpful?

16. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
New thinking
• Many social inclusion projects run over
many years, build and enhance
relationships
– Part of the ‘How” question needs to look at “Where”
and “When” to locate/embed the digital
– If there is interest in synchronous techs, will Open
Education programs remain mostly asynchronous?

17. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Method: Systematic Review
Who is putting OE
to use for
inclusion?
What contexts?
What
interventions?
What supports and
resources?

18. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Title/abstract screening
• 91 citations imported
– 49 from Google Scholar, 44 from Scopus
– 59 judged as suitable, useful, in scope
• Observations from 59 abstracts
– MOOCs + study groups
– MOOCs about inclusion, MOOCs for inclusion programs
– Piloting techs for remediating knowledge gaps (new supports)
– Different types of inclusion partnerships (new contexts)
Thanks to
Marc Singer,
my 2nd
reviewer

19. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Sample set of data: 17 of 59
• Completed full paper review and data extraction from
the first batch of 17 papers
• Hooray, papers from diverse global authors and
settings:
– America (6), England (4), Spain (3)
– Switzerland, China, Scotland, Australia, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Chile, Italy and the Netherlands.
• Half conference papers, 35% journals, the rest reports

20. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
4 staff accounts
• Staff accounts of designing OE: 4 papers
– technical accounts, innovations in auto-generating
support for students (Miranda, Mangione, Orciuoli, Gaeta,
& Loia, 2013; Muñoz-Merino, Rodríguez, & Kloos, 2014);
– MOOCs and embedded support in classrooms (de
Waard, Anckaert, Vandewaetere, & Demeulenaere, 2016);
– assessment design perspectives (Hills & Hughes,
2016).

21. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
1 national policy paper
• synthesised a broad range of national data
and successful interventions to improve the
skills of low-skilled Americans
• explicitly referencing multiple types of OERs
and open technologies (Strawn, 2015).

22. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
11 student evaluated OE projects
• majority (11) completed projects, run with - and
evaluated by - students
Outcomes
exceeded
Outcomes
met or largely
met
Mixed
outcomes
Unclear/Other Totals
Universal
interventions
1 3 3 1 8
Targetted
interventions
1 1 1 3

23. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Partners and supports
No
partners
+
technology
partner
+ community
partner
+ community and
technology partner
Totals
Single Higher
Education Institution
6 3 1 1 11
Multiple Higher
Education Institutions
3 1 0 1 6
Total 9 4 1 2 16
Cases with a community partner provided a set of physical spaces
and technologies, and human/personalised one on one and group
support (de Waard et al., 2016).
Project sponsored by Samsung had both education, technology and
community organisation partner support (McDougall et al., 2016.)

24. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Examples
Identifier Study setting/institution Types of open technologies, author/s reference
U (#71) 8 week introductory computer science MOOC on edX
platform
The "Recommender” tool helps students who get stuck prior to doing a quiz, was
deployed as an "XBlock" into the edX MOOC platform, uses staff and student
crowdsourced resources (Li & Mitros, 2015)
S (#34) Design of auto-generated multiple choice quiz questions
for MOOCs and a process of academic quality checking
at the University of Salerno
"Adaptive Remedial Work Environment (ARWE) based on adaptation and
personalization features provided by the IWT platform. The resulting MOOC
platform is released in beta version as MOMAMOOC." (Miranda et al., 2013)
U (#24) MOOC used as flipped classroom resource for a campus
cohort of engineering foundation students at École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Students had the option of a voluntary peer study group, were provided with
technology and spaces to learn together - by watching MOOC videos and solve
quizzes collaboratively each week, for a 5 week period (N. Li et al., 2014)
U (#45) Coursera Human Trafficking (HT) MOOC aiming for
attitudinal change
Coursera MOOC The MOOC was designed for both attitudinal (cognitive) and
behavioural change in mind. Students were not only exposed to powerful
"undercover" videos and first hand accounts of trafficking, but were encouraged to
develop their own form of activism by developing a Public Service Announcement
(PSA) as an assignment." (Watson et al., 2016)

25. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Examples
T (#12) "The Hands-On ICT (HANDSON) MOOC included seven teams of facilitators
to manage forums in 7 different languages: English, French, Greek,
Slovenian, Bulgarian, Catalan and Spanish."
The MOOC was developed and delivered in the Canvas
platform, combined with weekly Google hangouts (Colas,
Sloep, & Garreta-Domingo, 2016)
S (#15) Belgian upper secondary students follow an English or French MOOC of their
own choosing. Prep for university, language and digital skills.
Multiple MOOCs were used as classroom learning resources,
firstly in groups, then individually. (de Waard et al., 2016)
T (#61) Spanish speaking learners, including a cohort from the University of El
Salvador, learning in the edX MOOC "MIT 6.002x Circuits and Electronics"
On campus informal study groups. Guidelines developed which
cover use of "three platform components: a learning
management system (LMS), a content management system
(CMS), and an adaptive content engine (ACE)." (Sanchez-
Gordon & Luján-Mora, 2016)
S (#37) Design of MOOCs and organisational change at Universidad Carlos III de
Madrid
Khan Academy technologies for Small Private Online Courses
(SPOCs) plus Moodle for communications tools (Muñoz-Merino
et al., 2014)

26. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
OpenEd programs: how inclusive?
• So far, not bad for STEM, NNS/ESL, college prep
equity cohorts
• Not yet seeing focus on other equity groups (but there
are 32 left to look at)
• A number of technical and pedagogical designs that
could be put to more targeted use for equity needs

27. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
My wish
• More interdisciplinary conversations and
collaborations
• some common aspirations yet different strengths, skills
and knowledges
social
inclusion/widening
participation
Ed tech/IT/analytics

28. Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Comments and questions
• Email slambe@deakin.edu.au
• Twitter @SarahLambertOz
With thanks to supervisors Prof. David Boud,
Assoc. Prof Phillip Dawson, and Dr Nadine Zacharias