OpenLearn 3 years on & OLnet

[Additional (25/1/10): Many thanks to Patrick McAndrew for taking the time to comment and clarify some points in my post that I had misinterpreted from the presentation. Please read Patrick's comment for correction to my piece.]

Thanks to a tip off by @mweller I found out about the Berrill Stadium webcast by the Open University (OU) about OpenLearn 3 Years On. I didn’t manage to see the webcast live, but watched the video afterwards (available from the Berrill Stadium link – click on “Past Events”, then look for Tuesday 19th January 2010 in the list and click on “OpenLearn 3 Years On” – videos are at the bottom of the page). All I can say is Wow.

Here are some of the points I pulled out from Patrick McAndrew’s initial presentation. Patrick is the Associate Director (Learning & Teaching).

OpenLearn:

• reached 10 million users by January 2010
• has a global reach
• less than 50% of users from UK
• brings students into UK (~13000 went on to enroll on OU courses)
• reaches new sectors of students not usually entering HE
• the fact that it’s free reduces the barrier to participation
• means the OU can experiment with courses and technologies
• improves the understanding of the learning process

OpenLearn acted not only as a place to provide open resources, but as a research mechanism to reflect on the experiment and gather evidence to share what advantages OER can bring to the world. The OU worked in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in the US, who had the Open Learning Initiative, allowing them to research and explore people’s use of open resources.

There has been an expansion of this type of work through the Open Courseware Consortium, of which many universities are members.

From this work, the OU is to act as a hub for OER in the UK, and receive hefce funding.

OLnet is the next phase in this activity (due for public beta Feb 2010), and will be subsuming the resources from OpenLearn. OLnet will be collecting and collating views from the wider community, listening to others, testing ideas including designing materials and other tools for learning, and gathering data through interviews and generally talking to people. This will generate evidence about OER for sharing with the community. It is hoped that findings about participatory learning and how people learn from key resources will lead to a greater understanding of potential future learning.

What has come out of OpenLearn is that quality content attracts people and enables a community to develop around a topic. And a proportion of people want to learn with people like themselves as a social activity, where they can collaborate, share expertise and spread control.

The OU has developed a useful structure where open research runs in conjunction with open learning.

Laura Dewis, the Managing Editor for OpenLearn, explained a little more about OLnet and how open resources can bring people closer to the OU. There are to be more regular updates of content, so that people interested in items making the news can develop a greater contextual understanding.

There are three levels of use for the open resources site;

• Explore – play & browse,
• Try – a bit more depth,
• Study – no degree or tutorial support.

There will also be easy links to registration for formal learning courses.

I find it very interesting what the Open University is doing here. I’m also interested by the linkage between informal and formal learning processes, and this desire for at least a big enough proportion of informal learners to want to enroll and study a formal course. But it also emphasizes this latent desire for knowledge from quality OER, and that is the area where I’d like to be involved, as shown from my recent post that considered the use of a VLE for Open Education.

Openness via Martin Weller

I really like Martin Weller’s thinking, and have referenced him during presentations in the past. I enjoy his ‘The Ed Techie’ blog, and his comments often get me thinking.

Today I had the pleasure of reading his Reflections on openness post. Whilst reading it and watching his presentation via Elluminate I typed the following.

Surely if you where going to start a university now, you wouldn’t do it.

Universities would seem to be institutions designed to perpetuate elitism. With open education are we really still tied into the promotional rewards of these institutions. Should the emphasis in reward come from the community and its valuing of the resources you provide to them, the time you invest, the quality of the discussions you initiate/perpetuate? I believe one has to question from a society perspective the value of closed environments for education now; when digital resources are enabling free access by anyone to some of the greatest thinkers in the world, and providing a platform for anyone with a well-reasoned opinion to be heard and entered into dialogue with. We no longer have to be told who the experts are, we can make a more valued judgement ourselves. I’m not foolish enough to believe that the openness presented to us by this digital world will lead to a free, utopian education for all, and the demise and dismantling of universities, but there are people willing to provide their time and effort to assist by freely sharing their time and resources without necessarily requiring re-numeration for their work. Creative Commons is showing us that.

Whilst accessing Martin’s post, I also had the pleasure of following Mark Smither’s link to his blog. Here is someone else whose writing are going to influence some of my thinking from now on.

I love this social web thingy, and the path of inquiry it can lead you on; a winding path for sure, but one with many places of interest.

I’ve been following Martin on Twitter for a while, and I’m now also following Mark.

A couple of other things occurred to me whilst reading the post and response:

Has the idea of a journal gone to the wall, when open information can have reviewed directly by the community – i.e. peer review?

The Cloudworks concept seems to be looking at unifying resources, a concept that I considered a couple of years ago and then abandoned. It seemed to me more appropriate to retain information on the open web and search for it there, rather than ‘close’ it down again; cloudworks  potentially is an elitist approach attempting to corral and vet information and therefore a philosophy I don’t necessarily hold with. Not even sure it will work. Howard Rheingold created something similar, and I found I didn’t have the time to engage with that. I’m personally moving further away from several Ning based communities for similar reasons or time and access.