If our first issue in 2013 (vol. 5 issue 1)
was focused on openness in higher education, again an Open Praxis issue is devoted to open education. In this occasion,
the special issue is the result of an agreement between ICDE and the
OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) and a collaboration with Open Praxis since May 2013 to feature, in the journal, research
presented at the 2014 OCWC conference, held in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in April
23-25.
The selected papers presented in
this issue make visible at least two significant and complementing aspects:
- The breaking relevance of openness as a concern in
education. In this sense, the recent
election result deciding that the name of the OCW Consortium will change to the
Open Education Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/news/2014/04/election-process-and-results/) is a meaningful shift that puts the focus in
education and, specially, in the meaning of "open" in education. This
emphasis in conceptualizing openness and translating it into policies and
practices addresses us to both refine our epistemological position and widen
our perspective when reflecting this approach in education.
- In this
sense, this issue makes visible the wide
range of dimensions that openness relates to; beyond OpenCourseWare and OER
-traditionally- and beyond MOOCs -more recently-, openness expands its
tentacles to very diverse pedagogical, technological and political issues, at
the core of education: assessment, mobility, reuse, metrics, economical
implications, among others. The potential that the arisen discussions and
conclusions can have in education in general (and not only in open education)
can be easily appreciated.
As stated in the website (http://conference.ocwconsortium.org/2014/about), the OCW Consortium global conference is the annual
opportunity for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and educators to
deeply explore open education and its impact on global education. Participants
have the opportunity to share ideas, practices and discuss issues important to
the future of education worldwide. The conference covers new developments in
open education, research results, innovative technology, policy implementation,
best practices and practical solutions to challenges facing education around
the world. The convergence of these topics with those of interest for Open Praxis, as stated in our website (www.openpraxis.org), has facilitated the partnership for the preparation
of this issue.
Papers submitted for publication in Open Praxis followed a separate review
process. Submissions were first reviewed by the OCWC 2014
Programme Committee for inclusion in the conference; those accepted for
presentation and best rated by the committee were then recommended to Open Praxis for peer review and possible
inclusion in this issue. The papers followed the usual submission guidelines in
Open Praxis; additional revisions
were requested during the peer review process, and finally nine papers were
accepted for publication. These papers fit the conference general strands:
- Open Educational Policies: policy issues and their impact on open educational
practice, including licensing issues, alternative business models, cooperative
efforts and governmental funding. Four papers relate to this track.
- Pedagogical Impact: novel uses of Open Educational Resources and their impact on
education, analysis of the impact of Open Educational Resources on the learning
process itself, as well as deployment of OERs in MOOCs, flipped classrooms,
hybrid educational approaches and online education. Two papers deal with topics
related to this theme.
- Research and Technology: new technologies allowing scaling and sharing of Open Educational
Resources in a faster or more economical way, to index the multimodal and
multilingual material, or to navigate and remix available material. Three
papers fall within the spectrum of this strand.
Following the usual paper types
published in Open Praxis, the papers
have a research-oriented approach and/or an innovative practice character.
The first two papers focus on
national open educational resources (OER) policies and strategies, located in a
country in the first case (the Netherlands) and in a wider region in the second
case (different Latin American countries).
Robert Schuwer, Karel Kreijns and
Marjan Vermeulen (Wikiwijs: An unexpected
journey and the lessons learned towards OER) analyze a five years program
for the use, creation and sharing of OERs and identify seven valuable lessons
learned. They do so based on three theoretical models
and highlight aspects to consider in the future of this program or in similar
ones, among which quality, support and clear policies are pointed out.
Amalia Toledo Hernández, Carolina
Botero and Luisa Guzmán (Public
Expenditure in Education in Latin America. Recommendations to Serve the
Purposes of the Paris Open Educational Resources Declaration) also analyze
some national contexts in relation to the use of educational content -mainly
textbooks- and provide recommendations for developing policies supportive of the
use of OERs, specially remarking economic aspects. The paper presents a summary
of an extended report funded by UNESCO.
The third paper relates to
strategies, benefits and policy implications of MOOCs. Andy Lane, Sally Caird
and Martin Weller (The potential social,
economic and environmental benefits of MOOCs: operational and historical
comparisons with a massive ‘closed online’ course) present a critical
review of the impact of MOOCs and compare the analysis with those traditionally
done with regards to open and distance education in general. The questions they
formulate throughout the paper will surely promote reflection and discussion,
in an effort to get further in the research and debate in the
re-conceptualization of higher education.
The last paper on the open
educational policies strand focuses on alternative forms of assessment and
accreditation using OER. An international team composed by Rory McGreal, Dianne
Conrad, Angela Murphy, Gabi Witthaus and Wayne Mackintosh (Formalising informal learning: Assessment and accreditation challenges
within disaggregated systems) draws a new scenario, reflected in the case
or the OER universitas. This partnership of 30 institutions conceives an
accreditation model whose characteristics and challenges are explained in the
paper.
A second set of papers is related to
pedagogical impact of open education. Two papers deal with very different
topics: maximizing student mobility with OER and making MOOCs truly open.
Frederik Truyen and Stephanie
Verbeken (Scenarios for the Use of
OpenCourseWare in the Context of Student Mobility), within the frame of a
European project and handbook focused on student mobility, identify the roles
that OpenCourseWare can play in the different phases of the mobility cycle,
from helping students to choose a course to facilitating professional training.
A specific section is dedicated to virtual mobility as an alternative.
José Vida Fernández and Susan
Webster [From OCW to MOOC: Deployment of
OERs in a Massive Open Online Course. The Experience of Universidad Carlos III
de Madrid (UC3M)] relate the process of converting an already tested
OpenCourseWare into a MOOC. They describe in detail the undertaken steps and
compare the two experiences, identifying both drivers and difficulties.
The last section comprises three
papers under the research and technology strand, dealing respectively with
multilingualism in OpenCourseWare, MOOCs related research and usability.
Darya Tarasowa, Sören Auer, Ali
Khalili and Jörg Unbehauen [Crowd-sourcing
(semantically) Structured Multilingual Educational Content (CoSMEC)]
propose a concept to create multilingual content with the participation of the
crowd and not only experts. Based in previous works by this group and in an
implementation developed with SlideWiki, they explain the CoSMEC concept and
its evaluation. The results support the viability of the concept and suggest
new possibilities to continue working in the conversion of educational
resources into multilingual content objects.
Nelson Piedra, Janneth Alexandra
Chicaiza, Jorge López and Edmundo Tovar (An
Architecture based on Linked Data technologies for the Integration and reuse of
OER in MOOCs Context) explore how to reuse, integrate and interoperate
isolated OER repositories using Semantic Web Technologies. They present an OER
recommender model and an example of implementation, with the purpose of helping
MOOC designers in the process of selecting OERs.
Finally, Jaclyn Zetta Cohen,
Kathleen Ludewig Omollo and Dave Malicke (A
Framework to Integrate Public, Dynamic Metrics Into an OER Platform)
narrate their experience of inclusion of dynamic metrics and analytics into
their OERs. They have collected feedback from different types of people
involved with these OERs (faculty, librarians, etc.) and highlight the benefits
of the availability of the data, thus providing useful information to other OER
platforms that don't have such a project for metric-sharing.
It is our wish to contribute to the
current debate about open education with the papers compiled in this issue.
We specially thank from Open Praxis to the reviewers that have
participated in this issue, whose useful comments the diverse authors have
reflected in the final and published versions of their papers.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.6.2.127