Tag Archives: conference

Fontys symposium ICT In Practice

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On 4 February my department, the School of ICT of Fontys University of Applied Sciences, organises its annual symposium ICT In Practice. This year it will be  online for well-known reasons. Get inspired by practice-based research on topics like Artificial Intelligence, Data Services, Robots and Applied Games. Contributions will be presented in English. Participation is free, but requires registration on the website of the symposium. Here you also can find more information.

I have organized two sessions under the theme Human Capital. In the session Micro-credentialing and Open Badges, the analysis Towards a European approach to micro-credentials of the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sports and Culture of the European Commission will be presented by the lead author, Dominic Orr (Adj. Prof. for Educational Management, Nova Gorica University in Slovenia). Henk van de Heuvel (Fontys) will reflect on the consequences and opportunities of this analysis for Fontys and Cees van Tilborg will give a presentation about a first implementation of open badges in the programme of Fontys School of ICT.

The second session is devoted to the value of a Community of Practice for the sustainable creation and sharing of open educational resources. Findings and future directions of an initiative in the field of Nursing will be discussed between project leader Marja Versantvoort (Fontys) and myself, led by discussion leader Ben Janssen (OpenEd Consult). Special attention will be paid to the value of connecting working professionals to such a Community of Practice, their role and how to accomplish that. Background information about this initiative is available here (in Dutch).

In both sessions, participants can discuss with the presenters about the opportunities and challenges they identify.

 

OEGlobal Conference 2020, a personal impression

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This year’s edition of the OEGlobal conference was, for reasons well-known, transformed to a fully online event that took place from 16-20 November. For this occasion, they had divided the world into three timezones, where each timezone was hosted by an institution. Almost all presentations were recorded and each presentation had its own thread on a social platform, connected to this conference. That made it possible to offer a program running from 2:00 – 23:30, where the recordings and the different time-different place discussion opportunities made it possible to virtually participate, even if you had missed the presentation. I consider that as one of the main gains of a fully online conference, next to the low costs for participation that makes the conference more accessible for everyone. On the flipside however really connecting like in the usual offline events was much harder and, I guess, even more for participants new to this conference. For next years occasion in Nantes (France), maybe a hybrid form could combine the best of both worlds.

In the remainder my personal impression of the conference and the things that caught my eye. Links to the presentations are available at the end of this post.

The conference paid a lot of attention to the role of “open” to achieve greater inclusivity and equity in education. This trend has been going on for some time, but this year it seems to gain even more attention and importance as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. It is not only about the difference Global North-Global South, but also about making everyone’s voice heard more, regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation. Didactical approaches that fall under the umbrella of Open Pedagogy, with attention for principles of social justice, is one way to tackle this issue. At this conference, this translated into a lot of attention for Open Pedagogy, going from principles to practical experiences.

The presentation of Leigh-Ann Perryman When Openness Excludes: Strategies for Equitable Open Pedagogies in Various Contexts was exemplary for me. Among other things, she points to pitfalls for open approaches (e.g. cyber bullying or cyber violence when insufficient attention is paid to a safe environment during implementation). She, but also a few others, points to Universal Design of Learning as one of the ways to avoid these pitfalls.

Another good presentation on this topic is by Glenda Cox c.s. Participatory Pedagogy and Open Textbook Publishing Journeys: Emerging Models at the University of Cape Town about the experiences they have gained and researched during their DOT4D project and where they mainly focus on open textbooks as a tool for open approaches. She presents a.o. some authorship models that can be used as inspiration when thinking about forms of education in which the creation of artifacts by students is an activity (a typical feature of Open Pedagogy).

In a workshop Building a Social Framework for Sustaining Open Educational Resources, Paul Stacey and David Wiley discussed the need for a form of community building for the sustainability of OER, and which factors do or do not influence this. Some of these factors mentioned (also in the chat) included: a possible role for publishers; available funding on its own is not sufficient: recognition and a form of passion are at least as important. In my opinion, this passion should not only be for acting “open” (which is too much like missionary work to me), but more in the passion to achieve good education. Unfortunately, recordings of this workshop are not available, but in the thread on the social platform, many valuable contributions have been placed by participants in this workshop.

Coming from Dutch soil, the presentation of a very passionate Pim Bellinga: Stories from the Field: How educators from different institutions collaboratively create open resources is worthwhile. His company Grasple publishes open interactive math and statistics exercises and develops them together with higher education institutions. He has analysed which forms of collaboration they have observed in recent years and identified seven patterns. For me, this raises questions such as: what can you do when you have identified such a pattern? Could one formulate best practices per pattern? Or will these best practices ultimately be very similar because it is primarily about involvement, commitment and support?

The keynote from Catherine Stihler and Vanessa Proudman Connecting the Open – Open Access, Open Scholarship, Open Science, Open Education, drew attention to the similarities between open movements, especially Open Science and Open Education. UNESCO has formulated two Recommendations to increase adoption of both initiatives, with the Recommendation on Open Science still a Draft (see my blogs here and here). They argue for more joint initiatives and learning from each others experiences. In the Netherlands, we have paid attention to this before, for example in a symposium Open Science meets Open Education, organised by SURF and the SIG Open Education, but so far no follow-up has been given to this.

The presentation by Bryan McGeary et al., Building Sustainable and Scalable OER Initiatives Through Faculty, Librarian, and Student Partnerships that Encourage Open Pedagogy, comes under the heading “practical experiences”. For OER adoption from the point of view of the library that generates initiatives and provides support to instructors, giving workshops is not scalable. Instead, they have set up grants for OER development and their role then changes from that of implementer to project leader, which is more scalable. In these projects, students co-create open textbooks with instructors.

A remark made by Andy Lane in the chat at one of the presentations caught my attention: ‘(We) need to promote learning design as praxis – the braiding of theory and practice which covers the full range of ‘closededness’ and openness’. This may be an approach to achieving greater adoption of OER by promoting this in teacher education programmes.

Finally, I noticed that there was relatively little attention for MOOCs. For me, this marks the maturity of this type of course/learning material: it has passed the hype and is one of the tools in the large toolbox available to a teacher/institution.

I myself was involved in two contributions. Together with Lieke Rensink I presented a workshop on some intermediate results of an national innovation program on digital (open) educational resources, the creation of a vision document (with as horizon 2025) and development of a national technical infrastructure for digital educational resources. And, together with Ria Jacobi, I was involved in the creation of a videoclip on reuse of OER by Marjon Baas.

Links

All recordings made at this conference are available here.

Leigh-Ann Perryman: When Openness Excludes: Strategies for Equitable Open Pedagogies in Diverse Contexts

Forum – Slides – Recording

Glenda Cox, Michelle Willmers, Bianca Masuku: Participatory Pedagogy and Open Textbook Publishing Journeys: Emerging Models at the University of Cape Town

Forum – Slides – Recording

Bryan McGeary, Ashwini Ganeshan, Christopher Guder: Building Sustainable and Scalable OER Initiatives Through Faculty, Librarian, and Student Partnerships that Encourage Open Pedagogy

Forum – Recording

Paul Stacey, David Wiley: Building a Social Framework For Sustaining Open Educational Resources

Forum

Pim Bellinga: Stories from the Field: How educators from different institutions collaboratively create open resources

Forum – Slides – Recording

Catherine Stihler & Vanessa Proudman: Connecting the opens – Open Access, Open Scholarship, Open Science, Open Education

Forum – Recording

Robert Schuwer, Lieke Rensink: Acceleration of Innovation of (Open) Learning Materials in The Netherlands

Forum – Slides – Recording

Marjon Baas, Ria Jacobi, Robert Schuwer: Reuse of OER Considered from Different Perspectives

Forum – Recording

OEGlobal 2019 Milan

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From 26-28 November, the OEGlobal conference took place in Milan. This conference is the annual event from the Open Education Consortium. During the conference, they announced a name change to Open Education Global, to be realized somewhere over the next weeks.

The conference attracted around 200 participants, mainly from Europe and North America. In three days, a wide variety of topics in a variety of formats (presentation, world cafe, action lab, 10 minute lightning talks) came across, and ample opportunities to informally meet each other.

The absolute highlight for me was the keynote of Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams from the University of Cape Town titled The Warp and Weft of Open Education and Social Justice. In a catchy manner she made me start thinking about the economic, cultural and political consequences of my activities in the open world. I am still thinking about it and how these insights may change my behaviour. The slides can be found here.

Another highlight was the closing session where a.o. Mitja Jermol presented about the process that has led to the acceptance by the UNESCO General Assembly of the OER Recommendation. In another blog I will go deeper into this. For me, the beginning of his presentation was emotional. He asked for a 1 minute applause to remember Fred Mulder and Indrajit Banerjee. Both have meant a lot in the process, but have passed away last year and early 2019.

If I have to name one trend visible at this conference, I would say the many presentations involving student-generated content as a means to create OER. For me, these are concrete examples of how Open Pedagogy can be implemented in teaching. The Dutch SIG Open Education has just published a theme edition about this topic to provide concrete handles to teachers for how to implement these ideas in their teaching practices (in Dutch, but translation into English will soon be available). In 2020 this publication will be extended, resulting in an online tool for teachers to get inspired by cases of Open Pedagogy.

I was involved in three presentations and an action lab about policy making. Details of the presentations are now following.

The butterfly effect: how connecting digital learning materials to the constructive alignment theory may accelerate adoption of OER

This presentation is about the Dutch Acceleration Plan for Innovation of Education using ICT, more specifically the topic Towards digital (open) learning materials.

How about reuse?

Results of a study on practices of reuse, conducted together with Marjon Baas.

Community of Practice and OER, a successful formula?

Study of the role of a Community of Practice in adoption of OER in Nursing. Marjon Baas is conducting this study as part of her PhD study. It is work in progress.

Next years edition of the OEGlobal will be organized in Taiwan.

OER18 and OEGlobal18, trends and findings

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Two conferences in two consecutive weeks, both on research and experiences with open education. The first conference, OER18, took place in Bristol on 18 and 19 April. The second, OEGlobal18, in Delft from 24 to 26 April.
This blogpost contains a personal reflection on both conferences.

Are the conferences very different?

In order to characterise the two conferences, the following table shows some characteristics for comparison.

CharacteristicOER18OEGlobal18
# Participants160380
# Countries represented17 (**)45
Country with highest # participantsUKThe Netherlands (33%)
# Submissions (initial)91216
% accepted80%82%
# Presentations75± 160 (*)
ThemeOpen for allTransforming Education Through Open Approaches
SubthemesOpen Learning Skills, OER, Open and Learners, Politics in Action, Diversity and Inclusivity, WildcardConnections, Formal education, Innovation, Institutionalizing, Open Education research, Policies, Practices, Student perspectives, Tools
ContentMainly researchResearch, experiences (cases)

(*) A number of accepted proposals were finally withdrawn by the proposers for various reasons (mostly financial).
(**) Based on 59% of the participants who provided this information
(Thanks to Maren Deepwell and Martin Hawksey for providing the data for OER18)
This table shows that there are significant differences between the two conferences. The larger scale and greater diversity of subthemes in OEGlobal18 are particularly striking. As a result, the atmosphere at OER18 is a little cuddlier and things are a little less tightly regulated, albeit both events were running smoothly.

Can clear trends be derived from both conferences?

Not really new trends, but more a confirmation of trends earlier observed: attention for the adoption of OER, both at the level of the institution and at the (inter)national level (the latter often at the policy level), practices concerning open textbooks, educational innovations with open educational practices or open pedagogy and their impact on learners and results, and more intertwining of different fields of openness, in particular between Open Science and Open Education. Little experience yet with techniques such as VR/AR and AI and their applications in the open domain.
One theme, however, was highly present in OER18 and (to a lesser extent) in OEGlobal18: attention for the inclusiveness of openness. In particular at OER18, this was the subject of many presentations and of the keynote, not surprisingly regarding their theme “Open for all”. Terms that were often mentioned in this context:

  • Narrative: the story of an individual or organisation about openness in education. Many of these stories are based on a fairly homogeneous environment and culture: that of the Western, highly educated middle-aged white man. This carries the risk that (unintentionally) entire groups in the world will receive less attention and will therefore experience less benefits from more open education. Closely related to this:
  • Underprivileged groups: those groups of people who are less reached by the open movement. Particular mention is made of women.

These debates are necessary, otherwise inclusiveness and equality as mentioned in UNESCO SDG4 (Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) would be at risk. At the same time, I have the following comments on this:

  • These debates are being held, consciously or unconsciously, in the context of higher education. This carries the risk that a large part of the world’s population will remain “underprivileged”. For example: a study by Ben Janssen and myself on the adoption of OER in the Technical and Vocational Education and Training sector showed that hardly any attention is paid to this sector from the perspective of the open movement, both in research and in practice. There also seems to be much less attention for K-12, although several presentations addressed this sector, in particular at OEGlobal18. This may however also be related to the target group targeted by both conferences (higher education and (OEGlobal18) community colleges). But the question then becomes: where will these debates for other sectors than Higher Education take place?
  • These debates are, by their nature and subject matter, very philosophical and theoretical. David Wiley asked the question “Purist or pragmatist?” in his keynote at OER18. As a “pragmatist”, I find it difficult to translate findings from these debates into the practice of teachers and lecturers who we want to make aware of the benefits of open education. I have already described this dilemma in a blog post in 2012 (English version), in which I asked (in slightly different terms) the question “purist or pragmatist”.

Are there current trends less present at these conferences?

Yes, in addition to the aforementioned developments with VR/AR and AI applications, open badges and credentials and applications of learning analytics did hardly feature in the presentations at both conferences.

What does this mean for (higher) education in the Netherlands?

Just carry on with what we are already doing in terms of research, experiments and implementations, aiming at a wider adoption of OER, but with more focus on open practices and open pedagogy. However, an effort towards primary education, secondary education and MBO would enable initiatives for the adoption of OER to substantiate the observation that most seems to happen in higher education. There was such an initiative in the years 2009-2013 with the Wikiwijs programme. In the meantime, Wikiwijs has become increasingly well known, in particular within secondary education. This can form a solid basis for concentrated actions in research and implementations for the adoption of OER.
Looking back at OEGlobal18

Looking back at OER18

 

Long and Winding Road to a Program for OEGlobal18

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The 1st of December, notifications of acceptance and rejection were submitted to the authors. Before this was made possible, a trajectory of opening a call for proposals, waiting for the submissions, closing the call, divide the proposals among reviewers, waiting for the reviews and, finally, based on the reviews, per proposal reach a decision about acceptance or rejection has been walked.
After opening of the call in July, the 1st submission already came in on 20 July. We had set the deadline for submission on 23 October. On that day we had received 82 proposals, where we (based on previous OEGlobals) aimed at 120 proposals. We therefore decided to extend the deadline with one week to 30 October. The next graph shows you what happened in that week.

On 30 October, 66 submissions came in, with an additional 19 on 31 October. The pool of reviewers however was calculated on 120-130 submissions instead of the 202 we had received. This would mean that each reviewer had to review 13-14 proposals instead of the 6-8 I had asked them for. It was heartwarming to experience that the majority of reviewers did not bother the extra workload when I asked them. Even more heartwarming was that an extra 12 reviewers offered themselves voluntarily within 24 hours, after 1 tweet and some retweets! This showed me the value of a warm and strong open community.
With some late submissions we ended up with 207 proposals. After the reviews were submitted, the conference team discussed about the reviews, especially those proposals where the reviewers did not agree or where one or both reviewers had hesitations on acceptance or rejection. We kept in mind that the OEGlobal should reflect the Open Education Consortium: a global consortium with both experienced members and newcomers in the arena of open education, represented by policy makers, management and support staff, teachers, students, and researchers. So there should be a place for both proposals based on scientific research as for proposals about policy or practices, not per se based on scientific research.
In the end 151 proposals are accepted (73%) and 34 are rejected (16%). 22 proposals are accepted under conditions. They are asked to rework their proposal taking into account remarks by the reviewers. Depending on their reworked proposals, we can decide about their acceptance or rejection.
Here are some statistics about the 151 accepted proposals. First, the number of proposals per country of the corresponding author.

To get a better picture about globalness, the same information is displayed in a worldmap. The green areas represent the origin of accepted proposals.

Proposals are connected to specific tracks of the conference:

This picture reflects the large diversity of proposals received.
And a last statistic: authors of proposals could determine about the type of session:

What these statistics do not reflect is the high quality of many of the proposals. I am looking forward to a vibrant and interesting conference in April next year.

Call for Proposals #OEGlobal18 is open

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In 2018, the yearly Global Meeting of the Open Education Consortium will be from 24-26 April in Delft, organized by Delft University of Technology. Behind the scenes, many people are already busy with the myriad of issues that comes with organizing such an event.
Today, the website for the event is launched, simultaneously with the Call for Proposals. Proposals are welcome under the theme for the 2018 conference:
Transforming Education Through Open Approaches, and should fit into one of the subthemes:

  • Open Connections
  • Open Education Research
  • Innovation through opening traditional practices
  • Policies & strategies for Open Education
  • Institutionalizing Open Education
  • Tools & Technologies for Open Education
  • Open Educational Practices/Open Pedagogy
  • Connecting Open Education to formal education
  • Student perspectives

Four session formats will be distinguished:

  • Presentation
  • Panel
  • Action Lab
  • Poster

Papers will be made available in Conference proceedings. For those interested, there is an opportunity to publish a paper in a Special Issue of Open Praxis. Both publications will be made available full Open Access (under a CC-BY license) and publishing in Open Praxis does not require an author fee.
Due date for sending in proposals is 23 October 2017.
>> Detailed information and a link for submitting
We hope to receive many interesting proposals that will contribute to a wonderful event in 2018!

Global Meeting OEC 2017, some impressions

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Image by Rob Farrow


Last week I was present at the yearly Global Meeting of the Open Education Consortium. The event took place in CapeTown, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education.
To get an impression of which topics are currently in the focus of the open community at this conference, I have categorized the presentations that took place. In total there were 107 sessions (8 panel discussions, 15 action labs and 84 presentations). The distribution among the categories I distinguished was as follows:

The category “Miscellaneous” consists of sessions with a subject that was presented only once (e.g. business models). The categories are not disjunct, so for some presentations I had to judge what category was the best fit. But overall it can be seen that focus is more and more on adoption by (in Rogers’ terms) the early and late majority of teachers. Some presentations in this category also mention access for individual students (self-learners).
The overview of the program provides access to the information of each presentation and the slides that were used. At the time of writing of this post not all slides were made available yet. I expect they will be in the next coming days.
>> Overview program
I was involved in three presentations, each about activities and research I am currently involved in with a focus on the Netherlands:

Personal impressions

The ROER4D project is nearing its end and the results are increasingly becoming available. The presentation of Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (Principal Investigator of ROER4D) titled The adoption and impact of OEP and OER in the Global South: Theoretical, conceptual and methodological framework for the ROER4D project meta-analysis provided an impressive overview of what was accomplished in the 18 case studies that were conducted in ROER4D. Glenda Cox and Henry Trotter presented Understanding lecturer’s adoption of OER: a multi-factorial approach. They have put me on the track of an alternative way to approach the question of broad adoption of OER, where Rogers’ Innovation theory was not sufficient. Unfortunately, I missed the presentation of Catherine Cronin (Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices for teaching in higher education) about a similar research on adoption, but a paper of her in IRRODL about her research findings is in press (preprint).
Although all three research projects started from a different perspective, the findings were more or less similar and comparable with our research in the Netherlands. It may be worthwhile to expand on this in the coming period to see how the different perspectives can be joined into one framework to approach the question of how to increase adoption of OER among the early majority of teachers. We had an inspiring discussion with Henry Trotter on this as a start.
It was also good to see that more and more the narrow view on open learning materials is expanded to a broader view on openness, including open infrastructures (with Norway and the Netherlands as two fine examples) and open pedagogy. My opinion “We should be more open about open”, quoted by Tom Caswell already in 2012, is necessary to connect to the early and late majority. The presentations from Rajiv Jhangiani (Pragmatism vs. Idealism and the Identity Crisis of OER Advocacy) and Jamison Miller (The Constraints of Policy: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Open Education Policy in Virginia) hit the nail on the head.
Indications to be more open on open came also from my research project on adoption as was mentioned earlier, and I intend to go deeper into this the next period to find out in more detail how such a connection can be made fruitful. The toolkit Martijn Ouwehand and myself have developed, may support one of the approaches (connect to the core of the teacher).
And finally, the presence and achievements of members of GO-GN was wonderful to experience. Too bad, a virus catched some of them (we call this now the OERHub-virus), so they could only be partially present at the conference. GO-GN has developed into a vibrant community, both online and offline, which was intended at the start of this.

Next year

Next year the Global Meeting will take place in beautiful Delft, 24-26 April 2018. I am honoured to be appointed the Program Chair of that Meeting. Glenda Cox, the Program Chair in Cape Town, has set the bar high with an excellent accomplishment!