OpenVentures/OpenPedagogy

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Open Pedagogy

Open Pedagogy refers to the creation and use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Open Pedagogy differs from Open Education by focusing on the use and creation of materials and practices rather than the concern of making these resources available to a wider audience. Use of open educational resources (OER) requires teachers to significantly change their practice. The malleable and collaborative nature of these open resources require a teacher to embrace the innovations and have trust in the wisdom of the collective. Furthermore, educational institutions need to adapt their managerial and institutional frameworks to incorporate OER.

The Open University of the UK has published a report on their analysis of the innovations in the Open Education markets and selected ten aspects that are expected to have great impacts on the future of Open Education. The following are just some details and interpretations on their market analysis:

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)

MOOCs can be customized to fit the needs of the learner, for example making a short (few week) course that could be filled with catchy multimedia and short assignments to keep tasks quick and frequent, but research shows that the drop-out rate of these courses is unfortunately high. Individualized feedback is expected to show greater student retention, but in true open (free) environments, there is very little opportunity for this to happen. However, these downsides can be overcome by the next topic; badges.

Badges

Badges, as previously seen within the course, act as motivational artefacts that not only provide motivation and a status of success for individual students, but also to show how well engaged a participant in an MOOC is. Much like in scouting or even video games, a badge is something to wear with pride, as is an educational badge in an OER. Using badges is an example of a gamification technique, and an attempt to engage learners by infusing game elements into learning.

Learning Analytics

It is one thing to have an Open Course and students participate and obtain badges, but it is just as (if not more) important to analyze the success data of student participants. Instructors can use this data to monitor learning, find patterns, address problems, and develop improvements from massive amounts of data obtained. Learners can also use this data (if open to them) to compare themselves to other students, become aware of their own successes and failures, and become more self-conscious and hopefully proactive learners. Incorporating analytics, such as the formerly existent inBloom,  into MOOCs can lead to more detailed analysis and improvements to courses in any OER. Unfortunately, such open data can lead to privacy issues, which lead to inBloom’s shutdown.

Seamless and Crowd Learning

Seamless learning is the concept of people from all over the world being able to participate together in a learning environment regardless of the technology available to them or their personal life experiences. Students are able to collaborate and learn from each other barrier-free and contribute to an OER and improving it with unique content as well. Storage, retrieval and management of data obtained through seamless learning is its biggest hurdle. Similar to seamless learning, crowd learning is the amassment of a group of students/participants on one topic and contributing equally to one specific (designated) topic. One of the benefits of crowd learning is that despite the large amount of participants, each participating member can claim the whole as their own and share the knowledge to the greater OER.

Geo-learning

Geo-learning is gaining popularity with the help of Augmented and Virtual Realities (AR/VR) by letting students travel and see thing around the world without leaving their seats. Situated cognition relates to the relationship between learners and their environments, and they can become more open for interpretation and widen the range of learning with the use of AR/VR, such as Google Cardboard and Google Expeditions

Maker Culture

Modern education is often focused on maker culture, where students are free to make their own unique artefacts, such as entire cities on Minecraft, and share their creations with the rest of the world to discover for free. Students are able to dive into their own worlds and create to their hearts contents, and then by sharing with others help contribute to a growing online community of open environments to learn and experience from.

Citizen Inquiry

Learning through inquiry is a great way to get students involved in any project at hand, and can often be made game-like, which is known to provide motivation and fun for learners. Open Educational Resources can develop online scavenger hunts, where individual students or groups can work together to search the ends of the web to find information, collaborate with each other to assimilate their findings, and come to a conclusion on the main message of their findings.

Open Educational Practices

Philosophy of Open Educational Practices

“Open Educational Practices (OEPs) constitute the range of practices around the creation, use, and management of open educational resources with the intent to improve quality and innovate education” (OPAL, 2011). Open Educational Practices are rooted in the idea that high quality education should be without cost. This is achieved in an environment where learners and educators create and shape the knowledge that evolves throughout time.

Creation of Open Educational Resources

Creating individual Open Educational Resources (OERs) can be done by anyone, and can be as simple as a shared Google Document among designated people. However, there are some attributes that make the created content better. Armellini and Nie note that higher quality content is copyright-cleared material, created by recognized institutions, resources evaluated with students, up-to-date, and material developed for other subjects or disciplines. Furthermore, Learners are often creators of the content, and that creation is often part of the learning process itself. This fits with the more learner-centered education that is a hallmark of Open Pedagogy in general.

Use of Open Educational Resources

The existence of Open Educational Resources (OERs) are full of benefits for the everyday teacher. Instead of spending endless amounts of time searching for materials that suit their needs, by accessing an Open Repository (as mentioned in the Open Education section) lesson plans, handouts, and other resources are instantly available.

Market Analysis

Using open educational resources can significantly reduce costs. The costs associated with developing, testing, and improving a curriculum can be prohibitive for some educators and educational entrepreneurs. Open educational resources can be used and augmented for particular uses. This low price point could encourage innovation among educational entrepreneurs and established educational institutions.

Example: UBC Course

Many learning environments contain content that constantly being altered or updated. Some pedagogical design may call for the representation of knowledge as "open source", i.e. as a shareable resource that is unfinished, and literally available for revision anytime and anywhere that participants can access the site. UBC Professor Job Beasley Murray's discussion of teaching with Wikipedia highlights the design features of wikis that encourage and support a relationship to knowledge as "persistently beta".

Conversely, some may find it hard to support the idea that knowledge could be considered persistently beta, especially if this is misconstrued to meaning ‘truth is subjective’: this could be interpreted by some that historical ‘truths’ are up for debate (the Jewish holocaust, etc). This battle for epistemological truth may be dangerous waters to tread, but ultimately many see the advantages far outweighing the possible negative consequences of open-source knowledge

Open Education Partnerships

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Educational Perspective: notes on the educational perspective of the example

Market Analysis:

Notes on the market analysis of the example

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Implications

The adoption of Open Pedagogy has the potential to be disruptive in the world of business and education. The ramifications of open and collaborative resources and collectively created content will have to be studied in depth before large scale use will take place. However, there are significant successes in Open Pedagogy already. Below we will consider some of the implications the adoption of Open Pedagogy could have in various areas.

For education

Open Pedagogy has broad implications for education. The philosophy of sharing and the incredible distribution capability available to us allow great educators to reach a wide audience. In more 'closed' practices these exemplary educators reach only those who take their class.

Resources

Open Learning Network, http://www.olnet.org/

Open Educational Practices Scotland, https://oepscotland.org/

13th Annual OPen Education Conference, http://openedconference.org/2016/

OER Commons, https://www.oercommons.org/

Open Education, http://www.openeducation.net/

Open Source, https://opensource.com/

Open Education Consortium, http://www.oeconsortium.org/