Presentation on Open Educational Resources given at the 3rd Free / Libre / Open Source Software Conference, Athens, Greece, May 27, 2008

1. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
The OER Commons
Initiative: Transforming
Teaching and Learning
Lisa Petrides, Ph.D.
Institute for the Study of
Knowledge Management in
Education (ISKME)
FLOSS, May 27, 2008
Athens, Greece
http://flickr.com/photos/transcendent/2300591251/

2. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
An imperative for education: We need to…
• Move beyond education as a static, one-way exchange
of information
• Enable teachers and learners to contribute back to the
process of education
• Support dynamic content that is continuously improved
• Learn from experts as well as non-experts
• Bridge formal and informal learning to solve
contemporary scientific problems
• Look beyond the web page and formal curriculum—how
to connect people

3. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Motivated by the open source movement
• Groundwork for harnessing innovation from dedicated
and enthusiastic users rests in the legacy of the Open
Source movement
• Inspiration for facilitating OER use found in:
– Remix cultures formed around on music and video
– Wikis and text-based re-authoring sites
– Social networking sites focused on ratings, reviews,
and recommendations

4. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Research questions from case studies of
open education projects
4. WGBH - What do teachers
understand about licensing,
and how can they be
supported in their use of
alternatively licensed
materials?
5. Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy – How do can
funding models for OER be
developed and sustained?
6. CurriculumNet – What
funding models can be
developed and sustained that
are unique to developing
countries?
1. Free High School Science
Texts - How can volunteers
be recruited, engaged and
supported in the process of
collaborative content
creation?
2. Curriki - How are users
inspired and motivated to
engage within a wiki
platform?
3. Telecentres.org – Which
characteristics of peer
production models are
effective and which are
not?

5. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
• Curating and aggregating
metadata from over
20,000 resources
• Enhancing metadata
through standards
mapping, as a way to
improve findability of
resources
• Creating services around
metadata—i.e. Facebook
apps and other web
services
OER Commons: Using OER to transform
teaching and learning

6. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
How it works
• Zope 3 platform
• Running on Elastic Cloud at Amazon (servers)
• Harvest metadata from OAI PMP, RSS, other data feeds,
spreadsheets, hand-harvest
• Offer metadata back as web service
• Collect user-generated metadata to add value to discovery,
use and re-use (tags, ratings, reviews, pedagogy)
• Facilitate collaborative content creation through shared
workspaces and other content creation tools (wikis and
building in interfaces to existing

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How is this done?

8. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Adding to knowledge base
• Engagement inspired through
tagging tool, prompting new
knowledge about resources
from which others can benefit
• Library of Congress’ historical
image collection on Flickr
• Images not formally licensed, but
shared under the terms “no
known restrictions”

9. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Adding value through continuous
transformation of resources, which requires:
• Alternative licensing,
as a way to invite
users to share, remix,
and modify existing
resources to meet their
own teaching and
learning needs
• (Re) Authoring
platforms and models
that facilitate users’
ability to repost their
modified content back
to the wider community

10. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Incorporating geo data (physical addresses,
maps/directions) into teaching and learning
• Resources that
support local
needs, community
interfacing, and
preservation of
place
• Resources that
grow globally and
allow different
groups of teachers
and learners to
contribute to them
from anywhere
GPS, global positioning coordinates, long/lat 2D or 3D

11. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Global collaboratories: Modeling inquiry and
learning by doing
Contemporary
Scientific
Investigation
& Discovery
E-Science
Resources
(e.g., online
data sets, tools,
simulations)
Open Educational
Resources (OER)
(e.g., lesson plans,
assessments,
assignments)
Communities
of Educators,
Students,
Scientists
OER
Collaboratories
• Pilot project with 18 middle school
science teachers across four
countries
• Teachers work together and with
their students to find resources,
post project documents and share
teaching strategies about climate
change studies and data
collection
• Emphasizes the development and
exploration of student questions
as they come to understand
analytical procedures, and the
formulation of data-based
inferences

12. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Potential barriers to learning (within
traditional education sector)
• How to reinforce structures that
support collaborative ways of
working
• What is the reward for teachers in
taking the time to do this
• Can teachers reclaim
professionalism of teaching and
step into role of curriculum creator
(as opposed to delivery person)
• Will teachers willingly step into the
role of OER author, remixer, or
online collaborator
• Who will pay for this?
http://flickr.com/photos/meantux/312313689/

13. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
61%
17%
15%
11%
10%
To expand
knowledge, stay
current, or get ideas
To
supplement
lessons
To improve
teaching
methods
To connect with
other teachers/
learners
Other
Why are teachers and learners accessing
open content on the web?
Note: Data from 2007 OER Commons user survey of 400+ teachers and learners

14. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
In summary, open education involves a process of
knowledge sharing, creation, and continuous learning
1. Expand knowledge creation and problem solving by
gathering user-generated data and information
2. Facilitate teaching and scholarship through input
from diverse populations, leading to cross pollination
of ideas and expertise
3. Add value to resources through reuse, adaptation,
and localization
4. Provide opportunity to test ideas and learn by doing,
modeling good practices of (scientific) inquiry

15. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
• Increase attention to interoperability to facilitate exchange
and syndication of resource metadata with other open
data initiatives (Facebook apps, Ariadne/Globe, EUN)
• Develop or adopt new functionality and tools that allow
active and collaborative engagement with open content
• Facilitate workshops and training opportunities for
teachers and learners to become active participants in the
use, reuse, and development of content
• Ultimately, figure out how to embed these processes into
formal and informal learning environments
What we’ve learned so far…

16. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Cape Town Declaration
http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

17. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Cape Town Declaration
• Educators worldwide are developing a
vast pool of educational resources on the
Internet, open and free for all to use.
These educators are creating a world
where each and every person on earth
can access and contribute to the sum of all
human knowledge.

18. ISKME: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
iskme.org
oercommons.org
Contact:
lisa@iskme.org