Archive for the 'teaching' Category

$16.5 million in grants for groundbreaking remedial education programs

Published
by
Terri Bays
on June 25, 2009
in education, news, oer, open educational resource, open educational resources, remedial education and teaching
. 0 Comments

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and MDC, Inc. announced today that they are awarding $16.5 million in grants to community colleges and states “to expand groundbreaking remedial education programs that experts say are key to dramatically boosting the college completion rates of low-income students and students of color” (http://bit.ly/wouV8). A significant portion of the grants, especially those made to the states, will go towards enhancement of tracking systems so that systems can tell how well their efforts are succeeding.

These are important initiatives, and we hope that the grantees will follow the lead set by the beneficiaries of a recent £7.8 million grant in the UK (see bit.ly/ibBcB), designing their solutions with openness in mind. For much of what succeeds in these efforts defies description in an academic article or conference presentation. If successful methods are not to slip away they must not only be measured and celebrated but also shared at a level of specificity rarely delivered outside of classroom observation or the publication of open educational resources. Naturally, we at the OCWC favor the OER approach!

Nor is OER useful only as a way of promulgating retention methods. Carol Lincoln, director of the Developmental Education Initiative and national director of Achieving the Dream for MDC says:

The pressing need to shore up weak academic skills in first-year students is one of the most significant, but least discussed, problems confronting higher education. Colleges that can figure out how to quickly and efficiently boost basic skills, particularly among students of color and low-income students, will play a leading role in helping them earn the college degrees necessary for economic success in America today. (see http://bit.ly/wouV8)

Teaching with OER provides quick, efficient, strategic remediation in the form of Flash Forward-Flash Back, a technique where an instructor “flashes back” to openly available background skills and information, granting students access to learning they missed the first time around. An instructor may also motivate current learning by flashing forward to applications in later coursework. This technique, and others like it, are particularly valuable to students who may be the first in their families to attend college and thus have considerably less opportunity to imagine where their efforts might lead them. As more and more courses become openly available, techniques like this will only increase in value.

Bridging the gap between 2- and 4-year colleges

Published
by
Terri Bays
on October 8, 2008
in education, educational, oer, online, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and teaching
. 0 Comments

Great article by Jeffrey Brainard in the Nov. 10th Chronicle of Higher Education about collaborations which assist aspriring engineers as they make the transition between 2- and 4-year colleges. This type of collaboration strikes me as a great opportunity for OCW-providers. Brainard observes that:

the road leading a two-year engineering student to be a full-fledged engineer has proven to be rough because it travels through four-year degree programs. Universities’ requirements for transfer credits vary, sometimes in unpredictable ways, making admissions hard and forcing some students to repeat course work. Even a little additional time and expense can force some of those students, who are frequently from lower-income families, out of engineering altogether.

He goes on to report on efforts in California and Maryland to smooth the transition, including an agreement among schools in Maryland which defines:

analytical skills and areas of knowledge expected of prospective transfers. Participating two-year colleges would ask their governing board, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, to certify that their courses leading to an associate degree in engineering provide students with all of those “learning outcomes.” Participating four-year institutions would, in turn, agree to accept all of the credits earned by those graduates.

The movement towards defining “analytical skills and areas of knowledge” is where the opportunity arises for OCW-producing institutions. From the 2-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows the faculty to demonstrate that their courses foster the requisite skills and knowledge for successful transfer. From the 4-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows greater communication with prospective transfers, who can supplement their learning at a 2-year institution with materials from the 4-year institution to which they aspire. Since engineering students transferring from two-year colleges “perform quite well. . . earn[ing] better grades and graduat[ing] at slightly higher rates than those who started at the four-year institutions,” they ought to be worth recruiting, and what better way to convince them to enroll than to give them a taste of what they can expect to get from your institution? What we’d love to see is a situation where students could demonstrate independent acquisition of skills and knowledge for transfer or placement credit, further reducing the chance that time and expense will force worthy students out of professions where they are sorely needed.

Nor is there any reason this should apply only to engineering. Any number of professional fields are suffering from a shortage of skilled workers. Any number of communities are suffering from a shortage of affordable training opportunities. Schools who open up their course materials will attract and place better students. And we all will benefit from that.

Re.creat.ion

Published
by
Laura Dewis
on March 18, 2008
in creative commons, education, intellectual property, ocw, oer, open educational resources, remix, resources, reuse, sharealike and teaching
. 0 Comments

So this week I have been mostly ranting about creativity (or lack of). I’ve been inspired by a few things recently such as the We are what we do approach to friendly, guilt-inducing, but essentially practical advice marketing around environmental awareness - their key message is small actions, lots of people, big change. Then there was the Metro ReCreate competition encouraging people to create something new from their newspaper. Here are some people randomly collaborating to create a house from newspapers.
Newspaper house

It constantly strikes me how fun, simple and beautiful these things are. They appeal to people’s creativity. They join people in a creative mission. They create something tangible (actions in the case of We Are What We Do.) They promote the creations in a way that encourages more contributions (today the top of their homepage declares 1,247,119 actions completed). And they badge their contributors as responsible citizens (wear that organic cotton shopper with pride).

So what is the relevance for Open Educational Resources? Those in the OCWC (and many others) are working hard to publish educational resources freely and openly under a Creative Commons license. Made available as building blocks for new courses, people can amend the resources to create new, possibly richer versions with wider relevance to a global audience - essentially recreating rather than reinventing course materials. There are examples of remixed versions of Open University materials in the LabSpace. In accordance with the 1% rule only a tiny proportion of OER users are being creative in this way. But you can bet your bottom dollar that its not 1% of the global academic community who are making contributions in this way. There are many, many reasons why - which is another day, another blog post. But if one reason is time we should consider that the “small changes x lots of people = big change” message works. We have to enable our contributors to make those changes quickly and easily. Another barrier is awareness of open educational resources.

So how do we communicate the principles in a fun, simple and beautiful way?

We have some ideas for why remixing educational resources are useful, and why open licensing is important for inspiring creativity, but until/unless remixing becomes commonplace we won’t be able to test our assumptions (that sharing resources might reduce costs of course development, increase the time tutors spend interacting with students and increase quality of materials for example). More importantly we won’t be able to find out from users what is the real value to them of having these materials. It sounds obvious, but until you understand the benefits, it’s impossible to communicate them.

So we need to coax the 1% of creative remixers in the educational community to make use of these materials. Taking lessons from We Are What We Do and ReCreate we need to induce guilt (do not waste these intellectual resources), inspire creativity and creation (take our blocks and build), reward and badge our contributors as responsible resource creators (an I’m in the 1% t-shirt?) and give them a creative mission to join (academia is by nature serious and complicated but we all have a fun and simple side we like to indulge. Even pitch the resource creators in a battle with the resource haters).

Creative suggestions on the blog’s equivalent of the back of a postcard - be in the 1% and comment below. I might even get you a t-shirt.

Open Teaching and Open CourseWare

Published
by
Timothy Vollmer
on February 5, 2008
in class, course, ocw, oer, online, open, open educational resources, opencourseware, public and teaching
. 1 Comment

Check out The Web Difference, the class blog for John Palfrey and David Weinberger’s fantastic class at Harvard Law. The site is an interesting take on dynamic open education–the instructors utilize lots of open content and encourage students to participate in class discussions publicly via the blog.

This is not entirely new–Wiley’s been doing this with his online course Introduction to Open Education by maintaining a wiki with content and input from students around the world. Eventually the wiki content is ported to the OCW site. This semester Chuck Severance is maintaining his own flavor of OCW for his undergraduate Python course at the University of Michigan.

These projects demonstrate the evolving nature of open education. Not only will open coursewares continue to provide and support open content, but will also begin to explore a more open, transparent, and collaborative teaching pedagogy.