The document discusses the need for higher education to adapt to an open future through open educational resources (OER) and emphasizes the analysis of different learner types on platforms like OpenLearn. It highlights the importance of understanding student behaviors and the evolving roles of learners and institutions in a digital age, alongside the challenges faced in transitioning to more open learning environments. Additionally, it addresses the need for institutions to balance control over quality with the flexibility to promote learner autonomy, ultimately questioning the purpose of universities in this changing landscape.

1. Open Educational
Resources and Learning
Spaces
Josie Taylor, Professor of Learning Technology,
Director, Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University

2. The Open University, UK
• Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a
more open future by embracing openness and the
implications for change that it entails
• These changes are likely to be profound
• However, we don’t yet fully understand what they are,
or what the impact on organisations or students is likely
to be

3. OpenLearn at The Open University
• 2006 – William and Flora Hewlett foundation provided
us with funds to investigate sharing educational
resources and more open approaches
• Our definition of OER:
“The open provision of educational resources, enabled
by information and communication technologies, for
consultation, use and adaptation by a community of
users for non-commercial purposes.”
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk

4. OpenLearn
• Designed on a model analogous to the open source
software movement
• >11million unique visitors have used OpenLearn since
2006
• Gradual build of user base

5. Studies by OLNet
• Patrick McAndrew and the OLNet team at the OU
• Analysis of user behaviour, targeting those who used
the site more heavily, supported by follow-up interviews
and monitoring of activities taking place with the open
content
• The results from one of these studies (n = 2,011)
highlighted two distinct clusters of learners: "volunteer"
students and "social" learners.

6. Volunteer students
The volunteer students sought the content they wanted to
learn from, and they expected to work through it. These
learners were most interested in:
– more content
– tools for self-assessment
– ways to reflect on their individual learning.

7. Social Learners
The social learners were less motivated to work through
the content. Rather, they seem to see learning as a
way to meet people with shared interests. This cluster
of learners ranked communication tools more highly
and were more interested in advanced features on the
website.

8. What are these learners trying to
do?
• How might they frame those tasks?
• How will they know when they have succeeded? i.e.
what ‘counts’ as success?
• What will be the quality of the experience?
• How can we best support them?

9. Massive challenge for new
learners on a trajectory
From
Solitary to learner to
Sharing teacher?
Passive to
Active
Informal
to formal
Lots of other stops along the way...

10. What is this process?
• It is not just a process of skill acquisition
• These are profound developmental stages for the
individual
• There are equally profound issues for the academy –
what is a university for?
• In a completely open world, who determines what is
(or should be) of value?
• Who holds the power to say ‘this is worthy’? Will that be
determined by the employment market?

11. Digital Literacies
(Mary Lea & Sylvia Jones 2011)
• Learners bring a wealth of experience to bear – some
appropriate, some not
• Learners are engaged in meaning-making
• Recognition of the central role of texts in construction of
knowledge and practice of learning
• Potential shifts of power between learners, communities
and institutions
• Role of the institution is critically important
• Boundaries of ‘texts’ are more fluid and unstable than in
previous times

12. Improving our understanding of
student behaviour?
• ‘Rich accounts in the literature of students’ use of
technology’
• ‘No detailed or in depth examination of what students
actually do in contexts when using different
applications, or how meanings are being made from,
and through, engagement with digital technology’
• ‘Recognition of the central nature of texts both in the
construction of knowledge and the practice of learning’
Lea and Jones (2011)

13. Building on 25 years of previous
studies
• Learning programming:
• Taylor, J., PROLOG project 1983-88
• Learning from multimedia:
• Laurillard, D., Plowman, L., Taylor, J., Stratfold, M.,
The MENO project: Multimedia, Education and
Narrative Organisation (1996 – 2000)
• Mobile Learning:
• Sharples, M., Taylor, J., McAndrew, P., Vavoula, G.,
MOBIlearn (2004 – 2008) Mobile Learning

14. Also building on ...
• Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education.New York: Free Press.
• Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher
psychological processes.Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical
approach to developmental research.Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
• Engeström, Y. (1996). Perspectives on activity theory.Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
• Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge MA

15. Summary of studies learning
from digital resources
• Less experienced learners benefit from explicit
narrative support to assist in process of narrative
construction, which can be effected through interface
design
• Leaving (even quite experienced) learners to drive their
own learning resulted in incomplete coverage of all the
necessary material
• Need to explicitly support the development of this
literacy

16. Support ‘Volunteer’ students
• Structure interfaces to optimise narrative construction
by learners
• Have experts providing services, offering narrative
guidance
• Provide some explicit pathways through materials, with
options to branch and return
• Provide implicit support embedded in the interface that
influence learners implicitly

17. Pask: Conversation Theory (1975)
o Conversation is the converse of control.
o Concepts are exchanged in a conversation and often
some public concept is shared …
o ‘But may just as well lead to enrichment by divergence
(of our personal concepts) as to convergence...'
(1987)
o Cybernetic view of conversation: participant might be a
computer or a person (or anything else)

18. Sharples, Taylor, McAndrew, Vavoula
• ‘The analysis of learning as a conversational system
might imply that a teacher has no ontologically privileged
position, but is simply another participant in a continual
conversation ...Traditional education needs to be
explored in relation to the new world of global knowledge
and mobile technology. It is not sufficient to assert that
authoritative knowledge is always located in the specialist
professions and disciplines...’

19. Space in which learning happens
Strong
Low
support for
barriers to
creating
entry
and sharing Members
Contribute
feel some
when you
connection
want
Informal
Members – they care
believe
mentorship
their
from expert
contribution
to novice
matters

20. Ecological approach (Jenkins 2004)
• interrelationship among all the different communication
technologies and
– the cultural communities that grow up around them
– the activities they support.
• Interactivity is a property of the technology, while
participation is a property of culture.

21. Affinity Spaces: James Paul Gee (2009)
…sustained by common endeavors that
bridge difference
… deploy peer-to-peer teaching model
with participation according to skills and
interests – participants motivated to
acquire new knowledge or refine their
existing skills
…allow each participant to feel like an
expert while tapping the expertise of
others

22. Gee’s distinctions
Formal education system Informal affinity space
• Conservative • Experimental
• Static • Innovative
• Structures to sustain are • Structures to sustain are
institutional provisional
• Remain little changed over long • Can respond to short-term
periods of time needs and temporary interests
• Communities are bureaucratic • Communities are ad hoc and
and often national localised
• Does not allow for easy • Allows for easy moves in and
movement in and out out of informal learning
communities

23. Support Social Learners
• Provide ‘affinity spaces’ for learning
• Ensure it is populated with a rich mix of people (look at
the ecology of the community to make it sustainable)
• Optimise conversations between peers
• Optimise conversations between learners and experts
• Allow people to come and go easily

24. TECHNOLOGY/MEDIA
TRUST
PEDAGOGY
IDEAS
COMMUNITY

25. SocialLearn
• This work is at the heart of our SocialLearn project, an
affinity space optimised for learning
• Pilot running from November 10 – Mar 11 with staff in
the area of professional development (~ 11k staff
potentially)

26. Research questions
– What is required to establish a successful distributed
community of learners?
– What is required to ensure sustainability of learning
communities, and to support their growth?
– How can the community determine and agree ‘what
counts’ as learning and how it should be ‘counted’ and
‘accounted’ for?
– How are leaders identified, and supported in these
communities?

27. Role of organisation is critical
• Establish control where needed (i.e. to maintain quality)
• Release control where it is not (i.e. restricting learners’
choices and activities)
• What is the role of the academy, and how is it
supported by the organisation?
• Are we ‘just’ selling courses?
• Are we developing capacity in the knowledge
economy?
• Are we developing capacity in our organisation?
• Are we ethics-led or market-led? Can you be both?