Researching Open Content for
Education: Editorial
Patrick McAndrew*, Stephen
Godwin*, Andreia I Santos* and Alexandra Okada**
Â
Editorial
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*The Open University
Institute of Educational Technology Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA iet.open.ac.uk
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Â
**The Open University
Knowledge Media Institute Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA kmi.open.ac.uk
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Just as open source has had a
huge impact on the software we use, the open content approach to
releasing material and tools for free use offers great potential
for the way we educate. Open Educational Resources (OER) from
universities have grown in importance through the action of The
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in its eight year programme to
support projects and initiatives across the world. As the field has
developed and significant investment is now planned by
organizations and other funders it is clear that there is a need to
reflect on results and report on research actions. This special
issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME)
builds from selected papers from the OpenLearn2007 conference [1]
where researchers were invited to report on their research across
themes of software and tools, user experience, sustainability and
the research agenda in open content in education. The papers
published in this issue cover each of these themes.
Software and tools have
emerged as an important element to try to provide an open
environment for learners. Three papers report on tools offered
through OpenLearn where each has been driven by different
requirements and has raised different challenges. Little, Denham
and Eisenstadt review the role that presence can play and the
experience of developing a tool that combines presence with
messaging. Tomadaki, Quick and Scott look at the use of free and
instant video-conferencing alongside open resources and provide a
visual classification of the ways in which it has been adopted in
the open community. Buckingham Shum and Okada look at the community
building a cartography of shared knowledge that can help people
move from consumer of resources to a role as a provider, bringing
out the different patterns of map that have been produced by users
of the Compendium tool.
Open content could change the
experience of developing learning materials. Fulantelli, Gentile,
Taibi and Allegri consider open resources as an evolution in the
way educational material can be produced, presenting an overall
model relating learning objects to open content and identifying
potential benefits for the lifecycle of educational material if an
open approach is more widely adopted. Conole and Weller also
consider the teachers’ perspective in terms of
how to design content to work in the open world and the sort of
tools that would aid the learning designer. Mor and Winters look at
a similar design process by representing designs as learning
patterns that can be reinterpreted and describe a way in which they
have use participation in workshops to elicit possible patterns.
The learner experience is addressed more directly by Lovett, Meyer
and Thille who provide evidence of the effectiveness of open
learning resources that capture learner interactions and can
accelerate the learning experience, gaining efficiency as well as
effectiveness.
Two papers look at the way in
which open resources can be applied in Africa. Issues of how to
sustain and replicate work that was carried out in a project
supporting teachers using open resources in Africa are explored by
Wolfenden leading to four key issues that impacted on the success
of the project. Petrides and Jimes found that creating a community
of contributors was a key component in their work developing the
concept of free text books built from open resources and localized
for use in Africa. Â
Three papers consider
research approaches and direction. van der Baaren, Schuwer,
Kirschner and Hendriks consider how in the future users may
participate in open environments and work back from those scenarios
to consider the research challenges and experiments we need to
address now. The way in which research should be conducted is also
considered by Lawler, who reviews action research as an appropriate
approach for ‘the wiki way’
and applies it in reviewing work on the Wikiversity. Â While
the benefits from open content and OER are being revealed through
much of the research reported in this issue, Santos explains how
the claims and motivations for the work are not yet fully
established and applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the public
statements from initiatives to highlight the need to be clearer
about how to deliver actions for global rather than local
benefit.
This collection of papers
shows just some of the diversity of work in OER community and shows
the value of reflecting and reporting the research activity
alongside the development of practical and useful ways to share
educational resources.
Papers in the special
issue
van der Baaren, J.,
Schuwer, R., Kirschner, P., and Hendriks, M. (2008). Finding your
way into an open online learning community. Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/04/
Conole, G. and Weller,
M. (2008). Using learning design as a framework for supporting the
design and reuse of OER. Journal of
Interactive Media in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/05/
Fulantelli, G., Gentile,
M., Taibi, D., and Allegra, M. (2008). The Open Learning Object
model to promote Open Educational Resources. Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/09/
Lawler, C. (2008).
Action research as a congruent methodology for understanding wikis:
the case of Wikiversity. Journal of
Interactive Media in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/06/
Little, A., Denham, C.,
and Eisenstadt, M. (2008). MSG Instant Messenger: Social Presence
and Location for the "Ad Hoc Learning Experience".
Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/02/
Lovett, M., Meyer, O.,
and Thille, C. (2008). The Open Learning Initiative: Measuring the
Effectiveness of the OLI Statistics Course in Accelerating Student
Learning. Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/14/
Mor, Y. and Winters, N.
(2008). Participatory design in open education: a workshop model
for developing a pattern language. Journal
of Interactive Media in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/13/
Petrides, L. and Jimes,
C. (2008). Building Open Educational Resources from the Ground Up:
South Africa's Free High School Science Texts. Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/07/
Santos, A. (2008). The
Discourses of OERs: how flat is this world? Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/11/
Shum, S.B. and Okada, A.
(2008). Knowledge Cartography for Open Sensemaking
Communities. Journal of Interactive Media
in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/10/
Tomadaki, E., Quick,
K.A., and Scott, P.J. (2008). Videoconferencing in Open
Learning. Journal of Interactive Media in
Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/08/
Wolfenden, F. (2008).
The TESSA OER Experience: Building sustainable models of production
and user implementation. Journal of
Interactive Media in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/03/
[1] Abstracts and
recordings from the OpenLearn conference can be found via
http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007/
