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The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs From open content to open thinking Conference Item
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Liddo, Anna De |
| Copyright Year | 2016 |
| Abstract | So far Open Educational Resources (OER) research has focused on the objective to ‘open’ education by making accessible free educational resources to the world. In the latest years the movement has matured, and a growing amount of OER have been made available by universities, researchers and scholars through several portals. Nonetheless, the level of adoption of OERs into common teaching practices remains quite low. In this paper we suggest that one of the main barriers to OER’s adoption is the lack of “opening up” to people’s thinking around OERs and we propose Cohere, a tool which aims at making this thinking visible and exportable in ways that support the emergence of “collective intelligence” around OERs research. Accessing Collective Intelligence (CI) around OERs is presented as a medium to know and understand what people think, how people design and use OERs thus increasing the easy of re-use of OER in learning and research practices. Introduction and Motivation Open Education is an umbrella term used to refer to several research topics at the crossroad of Online Learning, Higher Education and the Web. It is an increasing phenomenon that is resulting in the explosion of Open Educational Resources and Open Courseware projects and initiatives all around the world (Atkins et al. 2007). Together with these initiatives, an increasing number of learning technologies are being developed to support free accessibility, management and delivery of education online (McLoughlin & Lee 2007). Despite the widespread diffusion of the Open Education movement, the level of adoption of OERs into common teaching practices remains quite low. Why is this the case? Why is it so difficult reusing OERs? Common sense would suggest that it is in a teacher interest, who has access to free educational material, to use it to inspire and enrich their courses, but evidences show that when it comes to course preparation most of the teachers prefer to “make it their way”. In this paper we propose that one of the barriers to OER adoption is the lack of transparency of practitioners’ ‘thinking’ around OERs. The thinking we refer to is not necessarily translatable into formalized knowledge; it is rather informal and dialogical knowledge such as in example knowledge about people’s experiences with an OER, knowledge about people’s issues, ideas and opinions, not just in term of design, use and potential reuse process around that OERs, but more generally about the evidences and stories of use in concrete practice examples. In fact, where some teachers and scholars in higher educations may not be comfortable to reason in term of design patterns they still are practitioner and therefore they hold a knowledge and experience that may be of great value for others. What would happen if we capture and “open up” this thinking and this knowledge to the world? In this paper we propose the concept that one of the main barrier to OER’s adoption is the lack of “opening up” to people’s thinking around OERs. In order to support a paradigm of “open” educational resources we propose to open people’s thinking about OERs. In order to support this framework we present Cohere, a tool which aims at making this thinking visible and exportable by users in a way that support the emergence of collective intelligence around OER. We define Collective Intelligence an emergent phenomenon in which unforeseen opportunities occur as a byproduct of the collective users’ action and interactions around OER. We aim to support and enhance the development of Collective Intelligence with the design and development of a socio technical infrastructure that underlines, recommend and point out the collective view around an OER. In the following we present Cohere a prototype socio-technical infrastructure to gather Collective Intelligence around OER. In section one we introduce the background knowledge, which motivate the design of Cohere. In section two we describe the conceptual framework behind the user experience and activities supported by the tool. Finally in section three we present snapshots of the Cohere’s user interface and describe the main tool’s functionalities. We conclude with section four by discussing future development and research activities. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://oro.open.ac.uk/22283/1/De-Liddo-Ed-Media2010.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
