Source : OER University group

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January 25, 2012

For Immediate Release

Contact: Sydnee Dickson, Teaching and Learning director
801-538-7739 * sydnee.dickson@schools.utah.gov

Utah State Office of Education to Create Open Textbooks

SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah State of Office of Education (USOE) today
announced it will develop and support open textbooks in the key
curriculum areas of secondary language arts, science, and mathematics.
USOE will encourage districts and schools throughout the state to
consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.

Open textbooks are textbooks written and synthesized by experts,
vetted by peers, and made available online for free access,
downloading, and use by anyone. Open textbooks can also be printed
through print-on-demand or other printing services for settings in
which online use is impossible or impractical. In earlier pilot
programs, open textbooks have been printed and provided to more than
3,800 Utah high school science students at a cost of about $5 per
book, compared to an average cost of about $80 for a typical high
school science textbook.

“Utah’s open textbooks are a great use of technology,” said State
Superintendent of Public Instruction Larry K. Shumway. “Texts get into
classrooms quickly and can be updated as needed rather than on a
publishing schedule – something that’s particularly important in
science. The open textbook also adds to Utah’s reputation as the most
cost-efficient school system in the country. This is a fantastic way
to get the latest textbooks into the hands of Utah’s nearly 600,000
public school students.”

“We’re thrilled that the State of Utah is encouraging school districts
to consider adopting open textbooks,” said Barbara Chow, Education
Programs director at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which
helped fund the project. “At a time when education budgets are under
increasing stress, digital technology in the form of open textbooks
now offers the potential to save school systems millions of dollars.”

Later this spring the Utah State Office of Education will invite all
districts and charter schools across the state to attend informational
meetings and professional development designed to help open textbook
adoptions succeed.

The decision to pursue open textbooks at scale comes after two years
of successful open textbook pilots led by David Wiley of Brigham Young
University’s David O. McKay School of Education. Each pilot was
conducted by the BYU-Public School Partnership in partnership with the
Utah State Office of Education. The William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation provided funding. Mathematics and science textbooks will be
based on books originally published by the CK12 Foundation, a
not-for-profit organization based in California founded with the
mission to produce free and open source K-12 materials aligned to
state curriculum.

In new research soon to be published in the International Review of
Research in Open and Distance Learning, Wiley and his colleagues found
that Utah high school students learn the same amount of science in
classes using the $5 open textbooks as they do in classes using the
$80 traditional textbooks.

www.schools.utah.gov
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Live blogging -3pm

Curriculum Innovation in patnership – embracing the new challenges together

First talk: Mark Dawe, CEO, OCR

‘The curriculum should be driving assessment rather than the opposite’, Mark argues. Assessment should be derived from the needs of the learners. Education needs to be meaningful and prepare students for a place in society.

There is a need to use cutting edge technologies which are available for assessment of IT skills. Traditional paper-based exams are not the way to assess IT qualifications. Assessment needs to be relevant to the learning. There needs to be a virtual circle of curriculum, innovation and qualification, all feeding each other, and curriculum being the driver.

OCR is an NGO with partnershisp with a number of private companies. As a qualifications organisation the focus is on assessment, but OCR partners with organisations to provide training.

There has been lots of discussion whether A Levels are fit for purpose.The primary purpose of it is progressing through to the university. Lecturers need therefore to be satisfied with A levels to allow progression to the university. OCR helps creating a qualification framework to allow that. HE institutions are involved, and work has been done on it for the past 12 months. The primary goal is to assess gaps in understanding, in knowledge.

Mark then introduces the next generation of vocational qualifications: Cambridge Nationals (15-16 year olds) and Cambridge TEC (16-19 year olds), the latter having just been launched.

2nd talk: Tim Oates, National Curriculum Review, Chair

Increasing school autonomy: creating curriculum chaos or securing curriculum coherence?

Autonomy in relation to what? He asks, and then gives examples: curriculum, teaching approaches, funding etc. He argues that autonomy is not only an ideological argument; it is rather practical.

Locating the Curriculum

There is an issue about how we define curriculum. There is a tendency towards introspection in relation to curriculum in the UK. It is a concern that a national curriculum, instead of also looking at what is happening in other nations, is only looking inwards. A national curriculum is extremely important, curriculum coherence and control too. Subjects really matter, and the curriculum should provide good epistemic maps on subjects. Knowledge is a very strong predictor of performance. It is important that people understand key concepts in science for example. Knowledge really matters.

There has to be principles of inclusion in the curriculum, otherwise overload is the result of changes. There should be considerable detail on certain aspects of the curriculum, perhaps including more pages in the curriculum, that is, more detail in certain things, less in others.

He suggests the need for challenging models of progression in the first phase. There is a difference between the national curriculum and the school curriculum. The national curriculum should be a guide to the school curriculum. It is important some level of flexibility in this aspect.

Citizenship, creativity and innovation should be taught as well as a basic curriculum. In Japan they relaxed in terms of textbooks and standards went down. “There is no perfect education system, but optimal systems”.

Fewer things in greater depth – this is the stand out element for a new curriculum in primary education.

His full paper on the subject can be found here

Live blogging 13:30 pm

Roundtable Discussion – The state and future of our education system

Participants: Russell Hobby, General Secretary NAHT, Mary Bousted, General Secretary, ATL, Martin Doel, ChieF Executive National Association of Colleges, Dale Basset, Research Director @Reform, Rachel Wolf, Founder, New Schools Network, Ian Budd, Chairman @ Association of Directors of Education in Wales

The discussion revolves around the need to qualify teachers and headteachers to effectively run schools (for example by joining MBA programs), and how institutions are accountable to the communities in an autonomous framework for education. The focus is therefore on giving responsibilities to individual institutions.

Concerns from councils are the performance of schools and whether there will be enough spaces for the pupils. In terms of accountability, Mary thinks that there is a need to make both parents and schools accountable for what happens in schools, as passing this responsability primarily to parents is no accountability at all. If the school is not performing well it is the role of local authorities to monitor it. Parents accountability must be only a part of it as it is not enough. She thinks that more autonomous schools will be harder to be monitored in relation to performance. In summary, she seems to be in favour of local authorities to perform this monitoring role.

Not all members in the panel agree with that, arguing that parents do care about the quality of education and would be able to report on bad schools quickly. Mary thinks parents may not know pedagogy well enough to perform the role of accountability solely. The panel suggested that accountability can also involve students, in college contexts, and that there should be in fact a network of accountability.

Bad performing schools are a main concern since local authorities do not seem to be doing their job well – the panel argues. The implementation of peer accountability (peer review) between institutions is a sytems suggested as a solution.

Vertical accountability versus horizontal accountability in terms of school performance seems to be what is necessary. They suggest that there needs to be a strong involvement with parents. There is no agreement in the panel however in relation to giving parents total freedom to choose the school for their children. It has been argued that choice needs to take place only when ‘informed choice’ is possible.

Question: What is the right balance between the autnomy of the teacher and the national curriculum?

The pane argues that research has shown that more flexibility in the curriculum is needed in some areas. It is important to think of motivation and progression when addressing this issue.

Comment from audience: The dept of education seems to be taking chaotic decisions and not to have a vision for education in Britain.

The panel feels there needs to be an open discussion about what the purpose of education is. A panel member thinks that there is inevitably some chaos in policy making, so schools need to be accountable for properly responding to what is requested of them. They also think the role of governing bodies remain essential.

Comment from audience: informal learning needs to taken into account in the discussion. Lots of learning have been done outside school, and the discussion in the panel revolved around curriculum and control. It has been argued that one of the schools’ role is to keep kids out of the street (Mary). The role of school goes beyond curriculum, she argues.

The session finished with an open question: why is it suggested that computer sciences studies is not for everyone? It could be argued that Romeo and Juliet is not either… (laughs).

(Portuguese version to come) - UNESCO URL: http://iite.unesco.org/publications/3214695/

The aim of OportUnidad is to strengthen and sustain the EU-LA Common Higher Education Area,  through a bottom-up approach, by the increasing use of open educational practices and resources (OEP & OER).

The lead partner is Universitá degli Studi “Guglielmo Marconi” in Rome. The project will be launched in early 2012. More news to come soon.

Contact: OportUnidad in Brazil (Andreia Inamorato ainamorato@gmail.com)

“Escolas, colégios técnicos ou cursos superiores técnicos frequentados por estudantes entre 14-21 anos de idade, onde haja significativa evidência de que o processo de ensino e aprendizagem presencial esteja sendo substituído por processos baseados no uso da tecnologia, na aprendizagem pela Internet, cursos abertos e a distância. Tais escolas podem ser parcial ou completamente ativas no sentido da virtualidade, mas espera-se que, de qualquer forma, a virtualidade seja um componente essential nas atividades da instituição”.                                                                                                                   

(P.Bacsich, D. Newbould and A.I.Santos, 2011)

Tratando-se do Brasil, o objetivo do projeto VISCED no de 2011 é atualizar o banco de dados na wiki no que diz respeito às iniciativas de escolas virtuais em todos os estados, com o intuito de divulgar as iniciativas existentes, veicular as melhores práticas, bem como recomendar medidas de qualidade.

Para participar do projeto de pesquisa, basta que a  instituição de ensino médio ou técnico responda ao seguinte questionário virtual (leva apenas 5 minutos):

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MKVYMVN

Os pesquisadores responsáveis pela pesquisa no Brasil são Dra Andreia Inamorato dos Santos e Dominic Newbould. O coordenador da pesquisa é Professor Dr Paul Bacsich.

Contato: Andreia Inamorato –  ainamorato@gmail.com

This afternoon I ran a session on OER reuse for the Open University SCORE short-term residential fellowship course. The task was for the fellows to pick a theme and look at their colleague’s OER created during the residential course, and also throughout the web and discuss a set of reuse questions. Interestingly, reusing OER does not seem to be the a simple task. Participants  have argued that quite often the OER sites link to resources that are not clearly OER (licensed materials) and it was very difficult for them to keep track of the licenses as they were searching for OER.

Finding suitable OER and assessing quality were also issues raised. Participants argued that they could not always find OER for the topic that they had chosen to work around. If they found OER, assessing quality did not seem to be straightforward. They mostly compared OER  in terms of the usability of the websites  rather than going through a checklist of OER quality indicators – authorship (credentials), design, license (copyright clearance),  etc. This shows the importance of the tools provided/not provided in the websites to reuse OER . Most academics in this group argued that the OER websites they came across did not seem to pay attention to the reuse aspect – they often used pdf materials and had complex navigation.

Talk by Jia Yimin (lecturer) – Future Education Research Center, South China Normal University

Mentor at OLnet: Dr Elpida Makriyannis

Live blogging, 2pm

Jia Yimin came to visit the OLnet project as a fellow in the open educational resources program.

Yimin Jia

The focus of OER in China was initially to build resources, and then to sharing, using and on sustainability. Most OER research is into exploring the economical, legal and social systems for sustainable use of OER. Since 2000 higher education in China changed from a focus on the elite to mass education. For the  past 10 years the Ministry of Education has launched a series of projects to control quality on HE, and the National Courses of Excellence project (which is based on OER) is one of them.

OER in China have synergies with the international OER movement – it started with focus on developing resources (11139 National Courses of Excellence open to all universities in China from 2003-2006) and moved to a focus on sustainable development and use (although new resources are still being developed).

The 5 components of Chinese ‘open’ higher education are:

• Open Standards and licences
• Open Source software
• Open Course Management System
• Open Access Content
• Open Sharing Consortium

The main OER initiatives in China’s higher education are:

• The “National Course of Excellence” Project – funded by the Ministry of Education
• Translations and collaborations around foreign OER, as for example, CORE (China Open Resources for Education:non-governmental organisation funded by foundations). It is a consortium of 100 Chinese universities and 44 provincial radio and TV universities – the focus is on translation and collaboration around foreign OER. It also aims to translate the courses developed by the National Consortium of Excellence.

Efforts to improve teaching quality and innovation in Chinese institutions are in 3 fronts: National, Provincial and University levels.  To date there are 3,910 National Courses of Excellence, 6,000 Provincial courses and over 10,000 University Courses of Excellence.

Courses of excellence are defined by the policy of the Ministry of education as courses that: “exemplify the characteristics of first-class teaching team, first-class teaching content, first-class teaching methodology, first-class course materials, and first-class teaching management”.

The national courses are selected in the following way: University level courses are proposed, approved and recommended by the Provincial level,  then eligibility is checked and finally the Ministry of Education select the courses to be funded (which therefore become a National Course of Excellence). These courses need to be 100% online and offered as an OER to all universities in China.

Challenges: after award of ‘national course of excellence’, some universities do not update them; low use and reuse rate, lack of follow-up funding, intellectual property rights issues.

Usage: 75% of students use the resources as reference material; and 77.2% of teachers use them as teaching resources.

Benefits: teachers learn from other courses ‘how to teach’.

The courses are distributed in the websites of all universities. The problem is that people find it difficult to find the courses. However, at www.jingpinke.com most resources are collected (this website is a research project funded by the government).

Question: What are the motivations for universities to apply for National Course of Excellence status?

Answer: It is the ‘honour’ aspect of it – both for the professionals/lecturers and for the universities. It helps them to progress in their career. It is about the status it provides, and also the funding they get from the Ministry of education to help maintain the course. The money can be used by teaching team to update the course.

Question: What is the platform that courses are made available as a National Course of Excellence? How does interoperability work?

Answer: Some universities use their own platform, some  others use  commercial services – companies which transfer teaching materials into a platform. Some universities use Moodle, Blackboard, etc. Interoperability of systems do not seem to be a concern at this moment.

Question: How are the courses eligible for the National Course of Excellence standard developed? Are they developed through collaboration within a group of universities or developed by a particular university?

Answer: The courses are developed collaboratively by the teaching team of individual universities (constituted of experienced lecturers and young lecturers). The teaching method used is an important theme, because another aim of the government is to improve the quality of teaching in HE  - lecturers can learn from one another.

Mural de ideias dos participantes. Comentarios abaixo.

Workshop title: Exploring the potential of the use and reuse open educational resources in the classroom. Wall of ideas of the participants. Comments below.