DEHub Launch
Australia
February 25, 2010
by
Professor Asha Kanwar
Commonwealth of Learning
It is a privilege to address such a distinguished audience. I am very grateful to Prof Belinda Tynan for giving me the opportunity to represent my organisation, the Commonwealth of Learning on this important occasion.
The Commonwealth of Learning, or COL as it is commonly known, is an intergovernmental body, established by Heads of Government in 1987 with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada.
COL believes that learning is the key to development and works with developing countries in the Commonwealth to expand the scale and quality of learning by using new approaches and technologies, that many of us subsume under the broad head of ‘open and distance learning’.
The DEHub Innovation in Distance Education Project is a unique initiative to develop a repository of cutting edge research in distance education; develop models of best practice that can be replicated in other jurisdictions and lead innovations in the uses of appropriate technologies. With its formidable and globally renowned partners, the Central Queensland University, Charles Sturt University, University of Southern Queensland and Massey, I’m sure DEHub is off to a flying start.
It is also fitting that the DEHub is located in the University of New England, one of the oldest providers of distance education in Australia. As your Chancellor Dr Richard Torbay MP put it ‘In key output areas such as research, and learning and teaching, UNE performs equally well if not better than many of the country’s oldest sandstone universities. While in one sense, we are a smaller, regional university, in another sense UNE is something much, much bigger, with world class researchers and first-class research’.
Distance education institutions, the world over have had to contend with the question: what kind of research? Discipline based or systemic? What is the nature of research that open universities conduct? There are open universities that are engaged in disciplinary research with considerable success.
The UK Open University is rated among the top fifty British universities for excellence in research. But there are many open universities that struggle with a variety of challenges. Some of the more commonly reported impediments are inadequate technology infrastructures, lack of human capacity, deficiencies in planning and management and inadequacies of teaching and learning resources.
It would be worthwhile for ODL institutions to start their research work on ODL itself by systematically recording their experiences in all aspects of the implementation of their programmes and tracking the progress of their learners. Such an effort could also help develop a body of best practices, identify strategic issues, analyse learner response and experiences, design effective support systems and appropriate student assessment procedures and practices. Research into these aspects would give ODL institutions a leadership position in improving the quality of mainstream tertiary institutions.
Keeping the need for quality research in distance education in mind, COL, in collaboration with the International Research Foundation of Open Learning (IRFOL), Cambridge has developed a 6-module course on Practitioner Research and Evaluation Skills Training or PREST. These materials are available at www.col.org and are available freely and free of cost. In short these are Open Education Resources or OERs. Since one of the key focus areas for the DEHub is OER’s, let me reflect on some recent developments in this emerging field.
The last ten years have seen tectonic shifts in how technology is being used in education. The Open Education Resource or OER movement is one such groundbreaking initiative. OERs are materials that are i) free and freely available; ii) suitable for all levels of education; iii) reusable and i v) online.
Professor Bob Bernard of the Educational Technology group at Concordia University, Montreal, and his colleagues carried out a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies in which distance education students were treated in different ways. They distinguished three types of interaction: student – content; student – student; and student – teacher. They then analysed all the studies to find which type of interaction made the greatest difference to student performance when it was increased.
The results were very clear. Increasing student – content interaction had much the greatest effect; with student – student interaction coming next and student – teacher interaction last. Within this context, the importance of content cannot be underestimated.[1] What implications does this have for the teacher-centred paradigm within which we operate?
However, the notion of OERs has evolved and changed over the past decade. The MIT Open Courseware (OCW) can be seen to mark the first generation of OERs, in which teachers placed their lecture notes online for free use. Teaching was being shared and opened up as never before. The UK Open University’s Open Learn project marks the second generation [2] in which existing self-instructional materials, are placed in online format. Here it is the learning which is being shared. The third generation sees the convergence of both teaching and learning in the experience of the VUSSC, an initiative led by the Commonwealth of Learning. Here courses are developed collaboratively using an authoring tool, the wikiEducator and shared freely by all stakeholders.
In Africa, for example, one of the most successful collections of OERs is those developed and disseminated by the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Consortium. It has 18 member-institutions in nine African countries. TESSA has developed a wide variety of audio and text materials (online and print) that provide support to primary school teachers and teacher educators in Africa. COL supported the development of the STAMP 2000+ materials in the late nineties, long before the term OER had entered the educational lexicon. 140 course writers from eight Southern African countries, wrote 46 modules of materials for training upper primary and junior secondary school teachers. The modules focussed on four subject areas: Science, Technology, Mathematics and General Education. The second OER initiative which COL supported was the development of the Commonwealth Computer Navigator’s Certificate (CCNC), an open Information Technology (IT) literacy course modelled on the International Computer Driver’s License (ICDL). The two main objectives for developing this course were : i) that it would be developed collaboratively by academics from around the world using wikiEducator, an easy-to-use open database software and a non-proprietary medium for online group collaboration supported by COL; and ii) it would result in a high quality print based course that would be available under a free content license so that any institution in the Commonwealth and beyond could use it to teach basic IT skills.
OERs are seen as a major breakthrough in expanding access to education in the global south. Some of the advantages include:
1. since course development is so resource intensive, OERs help developing countries save both course-authoring time and money;
2. OERs foster the exchange of global knowledge;
3. online collaborative OER development supports capacity building in the developing world thereby bridging the digital divide;and
4. the availability of high-quality OERs can raise the quality of education.
However, despite their huge potential, so far the promise of OERs has often not translated into concrete and tangible results. First, there are not enough data yet to substantiate the claims listed above. Second, the flow of OERs has so far happened mainly in one direction, that is, from the global north to the global south. Most of us have heard of OER initiatives such as the MIT OpenCourseWare, Rice University’s Connexions. It is true that OER initiatives are beginning to emerge in the developing world but how many of us have heard of the China Open Resources for Education Initiative or Sakshat in India?
Even though there is a great paucity of quality content in the developing world, why are higher education institutions in developing countries not rushing to adopt, adapt and use the freely available materials? Some of the reasons are: lack of awareness, no ownership of the content and the limited capacity to use them.
What can institutions do to benefit from the OER movement? Can institutions develop a policy that requires teachers to search the web for open content before developing fresh materials as is the case in Athabasca University and Asia eUniversity? Can incentives be provided to faculty by recognising the development, adaptation and use of OERs as a legitimate academic activity that could be counted at par with publications towards promotions? In order to benefit from the OER movement, can institutions define their copyright policies?
Yet there are issues that still remain.
First , how can we scale up and deepen the impact of OERs in developing countries?
Second, how to bridge the divide between centralised institutional administration and the decentralisation that OERs demand?
Third, which pedagogical approaches can turn passive consumers of knowledge into active producers of OERs?
Fourth, how can technologies be harnessed for innovation rather than the mere replication of old practices?
These are some of the questions to which there are no easy answers. If, in the beginning, content was the major constraint, OERs seemed to be the answer. When content became easily accessible, there are major challenges in using them. There have been heavy investments in capacity building in education across the developing world, especially in the least developed countries. Have they been able to absorb those investments and sustain the outcomes to develop their own systems? From ideas to methods and from methods to practice, ODL has travelled a long way. Has it really reached the unreached that it was meant to serve?
These are larger philosophical questions that cannot be addressed on this platform. We are all engaged in a common endeavour—that of providing the opportunities for learning that will lead to development. Technology allows us to mobilise communities of practice and to reach out to the communities that have hitherto remained outside the purview of education and training. Your communities live in remote rural locations within the Australian Commonwealth; ours are spread in remote regions of the wider Commonwealth of nations. What can we learn from each other?
I do hope that the DEHub that you are launching today, will in due course, also turn its attention to some of these larger questions. On behalf of the COL, I assure you of our full cooperation and continued interest in your endeavours.
Thank you for your attention.
REFERENCES:
[1] Bernard, R.M., Abrami, P.C., Borokhovski, E., Wade,C.A., Tamim, R., Surkes, M.A., & Bethel, E.C. (2009), “A meta-analysis of three types of interaction treatments in distance education. Review of Educational Research”, http://rer.aera.net; qted in Sir John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić ‘Breaking Higher Education's Iron Triangle: Access, Cost, and Quality’ Change: the Magazine of Higher Learning, March/April, 2009
[2] Open Educational Resources: Help or Hindrance to Open Learning? John Daniel, Asha Kanwar and Paul West, June 2007