The following is a guest post by Juliana Meehan - Teacher of English at Tenafly Middle School and candidate for New Jersey principal’s certification through NJ EXCEL, currently interning with Principal Eric Sheninger at New Milford High School. She is also co-creator of IOCS project.
I recently had the honor of traveling to the MIT campus in Boston and participating in a panel discussion on Open Education Resources (OER) at The Sixth Conference of MIT's Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) with three illustrious advocates of these open resources: Nicole Allen, Philipp Schmidt, and panel moderator Steve Carson. The panel discussion, “The Role of Open Educational Resources in Making Education Available to All,” brought together the three of us who have been engaged in very different aspects of open and online education in order to share our respective OER projects and engage in an open discussion on the expanding world of OER with an audience of about fifty individuals from around the world.
“Open educational resources” (OER) here refers to the many free learning resources now populating the Worldwide Web. OER ranges from highly structured college courses (MOOCs) to less structured curricula from colleges and other institutes of learning (OpenCourseWare a/k/a OCW), to free online textbooks, and everything in between. The list is growing as are the populations who can benefit from these resources.
My LINC Conference Panel: Perspectives from IOCS, PIRC, and P2PU
Our panel was wonderfully (and serendipitously) poised to cover a wide array of circumstances. I work in K-12 education, Nicole with college students, and Philipp primarily with adult learners. My project is local; Nicole’s is national; Philipp’s is international. The discussion, which ran from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m., was largely driven by audience questions and comments.
IOCS
My role was to present and discuss the Independent Open Courseware Study (IOCS) program that Eric Sheninger and I developed and piloted this year at New Milford High School in NJ. IOCS is a framework enables high school students to access OCW from prestigious institutions of learning like MIT, Yale, Harvard, and others and earn high school credit for their work. IOCS is aligned to select Common Core Curriculum standards for language arts literacy, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) NET.S Standards, and New Jersey World Class Standards in Technology. Going forward, IOCS plans to partner with MIT to offer New Milford students MIT’s OCW Scholar courses, which MIT defines as “substantially more complete than typical OCW courses and include new custom-created content as well as materials repurposed from MIT classrooms…arranged in logical sequences and include[ing] multimedia such as video and simulations.”
My take-away message to the audience: Visit the IOCS website. Use our model to bring OCW to your students; collaborate with us to refine it; adapt the materials to meet the needs of your students.
PIRG
Panelist Nicole Allen discussed her work as Public Interest Research Group (PIRG)’s Textbook Advocate. Since 2007 she has been engaged in making free textbooks available to college students all across the country through PIRG’s “Make Textbooks Affordable” project. PIRG is a non-governmental organization that defines itself as “a consumer group that stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten our health and safety, our financial security, or our right to fully participate in our democratic society.” Nicole works with students, faculty, and decision-makers to address the relentlessly increasing costs of college textbooks. She explained that, while the choice of text is undoubtedly the prerogative of college professors, she seeks to inform them of the availability of comparable texts that are completely free of charge. The economics are staggering. College textbooks can currently run upwards of $200 each, and the average student now spends $1200 per year in texts. Nicole’s work has resulted in hundreds of professors across the country choosing free texts over traditional costly textbooks and lowering the cost of higher education for thousands of students. Read an interview conducted by Creative Commons with Nicole in 2010 and watch a webinar that Nicole presented with Cable Green of Creative Commons on the website of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.
Our audience was greatly interested in exploring these resources.
My take-away: We must spread the word that there are thousands of free textbooks online available to our students.
P2PU
Panelist Philipp Schmidt is the Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University (a/k/a P2PU) a non-profit organization that offers OER to adult learners—or just about anyone—and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU defines itself as “a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything.” It is operates under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. P2PU is a place where anyone can put up free content, and anyone can take advantage of the learning opportunities available on the site and receive review, feedback, and opportunities for revision. The P2PU consists of six schools:- School of Data, Open Knowledge Foundation
- School of Ed, K12 Handhelds
- School of the Mathematical Future, Planet Math
- School of Open, Creative Commons
- School of Social Innovation, Citizen Circles
- School of Webcraft, Mozilla
My take-away: Become a member of P2PU and explore the educational offerings; spread the word to thought leaders about creating new online material to share with the world.
Panel director Steve Carson, Director of Communication for MIT OpenCourseWare, expertly steered the panel through such topics as:- What is the attraction of OER for you?
- Open licenses
- Widening opportunity vs. improving existing systems
- Business models
- Public policy
Steve also spoke about MIT OCW and fielded some questions. One exchange was exceptionally important for me. An educator in the audience from Uganda noted that in developing countries like his Internet bandwidth is a big problem. Watching just one instructional video—let alone a series of them embedded within an OER—poses great challenges. They cannot download such large files, and their purchased Internet time is quickly used up with such resources. Steve explained that MIT can work with him and his school to provide OER material in a form that they can use, whether it is in a hard drive, a disk, a USB or whatever other way they can accept the material and use it freely within their networks at home. In the course of my educational work in New Jersey, my colleagues, students, and I connect with schools in Uganda and Ghana, and I know this bandwidth problem to be a great impediment to sharing information with people around the world. It is gratifying that MIT is willing and able to meet needs like these.
For more discussion on the role of OER in education, read “The Massive Open Online Professor,” by Steve and Philipp from the May, 2012, volume of Academic Matters: a Journal of Higher Education.
Videos of selected LINC sessions are archived and available.
One other important new piece of information for me was the MIT Blossoms program, which provides OER science and mathematics education for secondary students. Several members of the audience were involved in this incredible undertaking and spoke about its merits. I plan to share it with my peers in New Jersey.
On a Lighter Note…
After the panel Steve took us on a tour of the MIT campus. I got to peer into several of MIT’s science labs; see the Green Building, an edifice on stilts that creates a wind-tunnel effect that they mitigated by interposing a colossal sculpture by Alexander Calder between the it and the open lawn; and, best of all, learn about the MIT Stonehenge where, twice a year—in mid-November and again in January—the corridor lines up with the plane of the ecliptic and the light of the setting sun streams down the building’s “Infinite Corridor,” in a Stonehenge-like effect. I didn’t see any evidence of druids on the site, but it is only June…
Warning: do not tour the campus in heels.
The Bottom Line
OER in all its forms. Free. It’s all free…and open. A shining testament to the educational potential of an egalitarian and democratic society. As the P2PU website puts it, it is “Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything.”
I am very happy to have been a part of this incredible panel. I learned as much as—if not more than—the audience members. I walk away with many new and exciting ideas to bring to my own practice…and have many new questions!
Thank you Eric, for not being available for the panel…thus I was given the opportunity!
Thank you, Steve, for your wonderful leadership (and the delicious breakfast)!
And thank you Nicole and Philipp for your generous camaraderie and the wealth of knowledge and resources that you imparted.
I hope we can do it again soon!
