Redrawing the Boundaries in Online Education through Media Literacy, OER, and Web 2.0

This chapter presents lessons learnt after reflecting on a distance learning course based on Web 2.0 tools, which was promoted in order to teach visual communication concepts to students on a teaching degree programme at a Federal University in Brazil (UFTM, Minas Gerais State). The authors assessed the potential of open learning to bring changes in education to the new generations of teachers, in pace with cultural transformations induced by the emergence of a digital culture. The course was structured in four modules: About visual language; Elements of visual communication; Design and style and Non-verbal text coding and decoding. The exercises in each one of the four modules mixed resources of a variety of sources, but all of them had in common the fact that they were open, free to use, and available to the general public. Results suggest that this is a productive approach to introduce new subjects into traditional curricula, but it forces educators to rethink established uses, particularly those related to assessment.

The UNESCO OER Community 2005-2009

This is the story of an international community convened to raise awareness of the growing Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. The experience of the international OER Community underlines the potential of the Internet to link people in an inclusive manner to promote collaboration – individuals who would never normally be able to meet and hold focussed discussions over a sustained period. Launched by an international organization, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), and supported the primary champion of the OER movement, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the OER community was exemplary in its interaction, action, and longevity. From 2005, the members of the community have come together from time to time to discuss OER in what can be described as a series of virtual seminars. At two points they put forward their opinion of the priorities to advance the OER movement. Now, with support from the UNESCO Chair in OER at Canada’s Athabasca University, they are about to be invited to make another contribution. This is both the story of a community as a case study, and a personal reflection.

Managing Assessment Resources in the Open ICOPER Content Space

With the introduction of the Web 2.0 philosophy in the learning arena, the way learning actors interact has changed substantially. From a collaborative perspective, all the actors in the learning landscape could make use of a variety of tools for collaboration, making up what it is called: “collaborative learning 2.0.” In this chapter, the discussion is focused on the open educational resources (OER), concretely open assessment resources, i.e., open resources used in the assessment process (formative and/or summative). The authors explore the way to create, share, search, manage, and access to these resources; all these actions are described from the context of collaboration inherited from the Web 2.0 paradigms: collaboration among teachers and course designers, teachers and learners, and any other factors that could arise in the assessment process. On the other hand, the approach to managing the open assessment resources is based on an outcome-based assessment process because of the great importance of the outcome-based learning.

Crowdsourcing Education on the Web

Learning online has significantly evolved over the past decade due to the emergence of Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies that facilitate social learning in adaptive online environments. The open content movement and the associated techniques of crowdsourcing (i.e. assimilating several small contributions into resources of high quality) have further influenced education on the Web. This chapter investigates the concept of crowdsourcing in education through an analysis of case studies dealing with two open online learning communities, Peer 2 Peer University, and PlanetMath.org. The case studies proceed via an analysis of the various roles played by the individuals involved in each organization. The outcomes of this analysis are used to extract general recommendations for building online communities and applying crowdsourcing techniques in educational contexts.

Towards a Social Learning Space for Open Educational Resources

This chapter examines the meaning of “open” in terms of tools, resources, and education, and goes on to explore the association between open approaches to education and the development of online social learning. It considers why this form of learning is emerging so strongly at this point, what its underlying principles are, and how it can be defined. Openness is identified as one of the motivating rationales for a social media space tuned for learning, called SocialLearn, which is currently being trialed at The Open University in the UK. SocialLearn has been designed to support online social learning by helping users to clarify their intention, ground their learning and engage in learning conversations. The emerging design concept and implementation are described here, with a focus on what personalization means in this context, and on how learning analytics could be used to provide different types of recommendation that support learning.

Supporting Collaborative Learning in the Architectural Domain

This chapter discusses the use of technology in supporting the study of architecture and design in Higher Education. Digital (often open) educational architecture resources are widely spread throughout a number of repositories that do not interoperate with each other. This means that no single point of access or support for potential collaborative learning exists. The potential impact of these barriers on education in architecture, in terms of its availability as a series of digital objects through the Web, is strongly limited. The authors introduce Metadata for Architecture in Europe (MACE), a Web based support system for architecture education that has been designed as a means of creating a collective external memory of architecture content that reduces those barriers to knowledge-sharing in architecture. After introducing MACE, the chapter presents the results of an evaluation of the MACE system that was carried out in architectural design courses in four European universities by a total of around 200 students. Much of the analysis focuses on the collaborative learning aspects of the architectural design courses.

Web 2.0 Open Remote and Virtual Laboratories in Engineering Education

This chapter presents challenges in deploying remote and virtual laboratories as open educational resources with application to engineering education, as well as current trends in using Web 2.0 technologies to enable broader adoption and ease of development. The Spanish initiative to establish a common remote and virtual experimentation infrastructure between various universities is presented as an example of an open laboratory network. This example shows the benefit of sharing complex educational resources. The difficulties that impair the adoption and dissemination of current remote experimentation environments are then analyzed. Smart devices and widgets paradigms are proposed to transform current remote laboratories into new user manageable social entities. The Internet of Things and the Web of People concepts are introduced as a framework for further investigating collaborative, active, and social learning environments. This framework is illustrated in the context of a control course in which smart devices are interfaced through widgets integrated into personal learning environments and shared in a flexible and agile way by the learners.

Open Educators and Colearners as DJs

The aim of this chapter is to examine key factors for facilitating the development of reusable learning content (RLC) from the perspective of open educators and collaborative learners (colearners). Reusability is an essential feature of online resources for users having the facility and flexibility for adopting and/or adapting them. Authors then investigate the benefits and challenges that educators and learners may face when producing RLC collaboratively through an open and flexible framework called “the Flow,” using the knowledge mapping software Compendium. Results indicate there is good evidence that the OER Flow becomes a clear and flexible approach for users being aware of key steps to reuse and recreate new OER having reusability in their mind. With an easy-to-use visual technology, such as Compendium, which can be applied in several steps to adapt OER in order to represent different styles of learning paths, reusability might be more widely promoted in different and more diverse communities and institutions.

Collaborating over Rich Media

Open Educational Resources comprise many types of assets, including rich media. However, dynamic rich media offer different opportunities and challenges for learners, teachers, and higher education institutions alike than do more static items such as text. The Open University in the UK (OUUK) has been extensively developing and using rich media in collaboration with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for its distance teaching and outreach programmes since it was established in 1969. As new media technologies have arrived, so have the capabilities of the OUUK and the BBC to create rich media in partnership and make them openly accessible. This chapter describes these developments and then discusses the approaches and evidence required to guide them in a way that both serves the BBC, the OUUK, the higher education sector, and the wider community. It concludes that rich media are an essential part of the developing OER landscape and that openly sharing them brings defined benefits to an HEI beyond their traditional student body.

OERopoly

The Open Educational Resources (OER) community supports the belief that knowledge is a public good and, combined with technological advancement, can provide an extraordinary opportunity to help equalize the distribution of high-quality knowledge and educational opportunities for everyone in the world. This chapter’s hypothesis centres on the premise that: “The OER ecology does not seem to be widely adopted or understood and that game-playing has the potential to raise awareness and improve understanding of such relationships in an entertaining manner, while engaging in a deep discussion about OER best practices.” To address this hypothesis, the authors present OERopoly, a game that has been designed and developed to raise awareness about OER. They set out to assess game-playing as a means of improving collaborative learning opportunities around OER projects through this OER ecology: the OER projects themselves, the online communities, and the Web 2.0 technologies used by OER projects.