For Children in and out of Class During a Pandemic

In a pandemic, when schools have either closed, gone “blended” or “hybrid” (part-in-person and part-online), or gone fully online, teachers have to master online teaching quickly. At these moments, various online and published resources are referred to and used as guides. Some are willing to offer open-shared learning resources on the Social Web. This work involves an environmental scan of open-shared learning resources for pre-K12 and K12 on (1) an online teaching repository/referatory, (2) slideshow-sharing site, and (3) a social video sharing site. This includes bottom-up thematic coding of the journalistic literature (of COVID-19 and children), a review of the available recent open learning resources, and analytical observations about how to improve the available contents.

Towards a SDG Compliant Framework for the Open Learning Modules

The implement-ability of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depend on effective Project Planning, Development & Management (PPD&M). This applied research bases on the extensive possibilities for open learning modules via distance education. The two-fold research gap addressed are content and delivery. Participants need a SDG-embedded Project Planning, Development and Management offering. This curriculum redesign initiative is in line with the book's aim to disseminate, sustain and continuously improve content and practice incorporating new tools, insights, methods, necessary for proper implementation of the SDGs. The re-designed content emphasizes the ability to inter-relate through appropriate tool-sets on challenges, priorities, themes, sectors in the project development management domain. Complex developmental concerns are best served when the participant deploys the right combination of tools. Need for re-look at the evaluation system is highlighted with an interesting proposal to engage PPD&M alumni for continuous improvement on SDG-led growth.

Open Learning Experience Bingo

Definitions of openness and open education abound, but with so many, how can we use them effectively to explore the openness of assignments, activities, classes, or programs? Open Learning Experience Bingo is a game that a group of collaborators have created to give people a way to surface and discuss the many different ways that educational experiences can “open” beyond traditional practices. Each bingo card includes boxes containing possible “ingredients” in a learning experience, and radiating from the center of each box, “dimensions” of openness along which an ingredient might be opened. You “play” bingo by reading or hearing about a learning experience and marking areas on the bingo card that you think the experience opens. The game incorporates broad concepts of openness and seeks not to measure the openness of learning experiences, but to identify and spark discussion about areas in which experiences are opening — or might be opened further. As artifacts, completed bingo cards display a sort of “heat map” of openness that can be used to compare and contrast bingo evaluations of various learning experiences.

Towards a Trusted and Unified Consortium-Blockchain-Based Data Sharing Infrastructure for Open Learning—TolFob Architecture and Implementation

Open learning is now facing a complex higher education ecosystem that involves a variety of heterogeneous information systems and comprises decentralized stakeholders, such as universities, professors, students, and software vendors. Authentic, non-repudiable, and fast available data sharing among open learning information systems and stakeholders is a key issue that remains unresolved. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a consortium blockchain extended architecture featuring integration and cross-chain functions to provide a unified and trusted data-sharing infrastructure for open learning. The overall architecture consists of three elements: a blockchain-integrated open learning scenario schema; a blockchain-integrated open learning application model; and a pragmatic blockchain integration framework. The proposed blockchain integration framework is implemented based on Hyperledger Fabric 1.4. A trusted open-learning behavior and achievement management application is developed as a proof-of-concept which integrates two educational institutions’ four productional learning systems into a blockchain network and has stably run over six months. A suite of experiments is designed and executed to verify our blockchain system’s viability and scalability. The test result shows the implementation of the blockchain system is competent for the production environment and outperforms related works investigated. However, it does have limitations and optimization potential, which will be studied in the future.

Social Media Improves Students’ Academic Performance: Exploring the Role of Social Media Adoption in the Open Learning Environment among International Medical Students in China

Numerous studies have examined the role of social media as an open-learning (OL) tool in the field of education, but the empirical evidence necessary to validate such OL tools is scant, specifically in terms of student academic performance (AP). In today’s digital age, social media platforms are most popular among the student community, and they provide opportunities for OL where they can easily communicate, interact, and collaborate with each other. The authors of this study aimed to minimize the literature gap among student communities who adopt social media for OL, which has positive impacts on their AP in Chinese higher education. We adopted social constructivism theory (SCT) and the technology acceptance model (TAM) to formulate a conceptual framework. Primary data containing 233 questionnaires of international medical students in China were collected in January 2021 through the survey method. The gathered data were analyzed through structural equation modeling techniques with SmartPLS 3. The results revealed that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and interactions with peers have positive and significant influence on OL. In addition, OL was found to have positive and significant influence on students’ AP and engagement. Lastly, engagement showed a positive impact on students’ AP. Thus, this study shows that social media serves as a dynamic tool to expedite the development of OL settings by encouraging collaboration, group discussion, and the exchange of ideas between students that reinforce their learning behavior and performance.

Open Education

Open education expands access to learning resources, tools, and research through collaboration and connection in a flexible learning framework that removes technical, legal, and financial barriers so that learners can share and adapt content to build upon existing knowledge. The foundation of “open education” first emerged in England when the Oxford Extension Movement was established in 1878 to provide education to the general masses. Following the success of these extension centers, the US Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 to create a system of cooperative extension services connected to land grant universities. These extension cooperatives provided courses in agriculture, administrative policy, economics, and other subjects at little or no cost. Participants were given flexibility to direct their own learning by accessing instructional materials as they needed. In the late 1960s, theories regarding the value of this self-directed learning began to transform traditional classroom practice and again, interest in open learning gained popularity. By 1969, Prime Minister Harold Wilson garnered support to establish the British Open University, which globalized education through television and radio instruction. During the 1970s, even though open learning practices were favored in K-12 schools, ongoing criticism redirected educators back to standardized teaching methods. In the 1980s, the invention of the Wide World Web (1989) led to the creation of applications and networks that could deliver web-based education. The development of online “social” networks fostered the expansion of collaborative projects such as Wikipedia (2001) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001), which broadened the educational landscape to support barrier-free learning. The emergence of online participatory platforms enabled several leading academic institutions who had been using web-based applications to curate and share their learning materials. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created the MIT Open Courseware Project (2002), which led to the creation of massive open online courses (MOOCs). As educators worked together on the development of open educational content, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2009) was written as a statement to promote the use of open resources and open teaching practices in education. This declaration catalyzed further emphasis of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which included freely adaptable textbooks, journals, and open data projects. To share these resources, instructional repositories such as MERLOT and the OER Commons evolved. Open repositories enable educators to find instructional materials they can adopt, adapt, and create without financial or legal constraints. In some cases, OER projects focus on a disciplinary area such as digital humanities, open science, and open courses. To protect the rights of content creators, Creative Commons licenses assist with the attribution of these resources. The expansion of the open education movement has also prompted new explorations into open educational practices (OEP) to include mobile learning, personalized learning, and other open pedagogies. In 2012, the World OER Congress published the UNESCO OER Declaration, which states that “everyone has the right to education.” This statement reflects the foundation of open education.

Associations of Classroom Design and Classroom-Based Physical Activity with Behavioral and Emotional Engagement among Primary School Students

Educational reforms worldwide have resulted in schools increasingly incorporating open and flexible classroom designs. Open learning spaces may contribute to a student’s behavioral and emotional school engagement directly and by facilitating classroom-based physical activity (CPA). We investigated the associations between accelerometer-assessed CPA and student ratings of task-focused behavior and attitude towards school as indicators for behavioral and emotional engagement, respectively, with the associations of gender, grade, and classroom design on CPA among 206 3rd and 5th grade students in open learning spaces and conventional classrooms. Structural equation modelling showed open classroom design to be directly associated with better attitude towards school (B = −0.336; CI95% −0.616 to −0.055), but not with task-focused behavior. The relationship between task-focused behavior and attitude towards school was statistically significant (B = 0.188; 95%CI 0.068 to 0.031). CPA was not associated with task-focused behavior and attitude towards school, while classroom design (B = 1.818; 95%CI 1.101 to 2.536), gender (B = 1.732; 95%CI 20 1.065 to 2.398), and grade (B = 1.560; 95%CI 0.893 to 2.227) were statistically significantly associated with CPA. Open learning spaces seem to be associated with better emotional engagement, which is associated with behavioral engagement. Longitudinal studies investigating associations of open learning spaces and CPA on students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement concurrently are warranted.