Education – Didacticums blogg

During university I got tired of the curriculum. I only recovered my interest when I joined a research group in Oncology and worked on a real research project. There we were allowed to design our own experiments, to fail and to reflect about our mistakes. We didn’t get bad grades for that. In fact, we felt trusted and important. We learned as students and taught our peers about other things we were good at.

During postgraduate years, the preferred course was taught in a “chaotic” lab where the teacher said: here you have all reagents, decide for yourself what is the most suitable for your experiment. Improvise and be creative!

The best pedagogic course was an international MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) where we learned from and during the interaction between each other in multidisciplinary and multicultural groups. At the end we produced a blog where we reflected on what we’ve learnt.

But I’ve never reflected on why I liked these experiences so much until now after passing the edx course “Leaders of Learning”. Here, Dr. Richard Elmore presents a frame that helps to organize different points of views about learning, leading, organizing and even designing different learning spaces. It was then he made me think about where did I learn best? Which learning environments did I enjoy the most? Who were my best teachers? Why?
In this video that we co-produced with Filip Levälahti from Arcada, I explain Elmore’s frames more in detail and in this picture produced for the ONL course 2021 we illustrated with examples the way different learners might think about their learning situation.

So, as teachers we are facing an heterogeneous group of students where some will learn best from a structured and teacher-centered approach (Hierarchical Individual), some will enjoy some structure but also group work and interaction with the community (Hierarchical Collective), some will appreciate more a self-pace course they found in the internet where they don’t need to pass an exam (Distributed Individual), some will bloom in personal learning networks (Distributed Collective) and some will go over boundaries in this frame.

Therefore, as a teacher I started to think about what kind of students I wanted to form and how would I do that? If my duty is to make sure the students reach all learning goals, how should I formulate such? Which learning goals and outcomes should I strive for? Should I allow the students to formulate their own learning goals in line with certain topics? What possible ingredients should I incorporate in my courses to engage and motivate the majority of my students?

Now, dissecting the elements that made my experiences so appealing I could identify some factors that resonate somehow in the way we intend to teach at LiU: real world-inspired problems, design, experimentation, allowance to fail and time for reflection, trust, group discussions, multicultural and interprofessional environments, teacher and students interchangeable roles… I am just missing more of improvisation, transdisciplinary projects, creation/production where the students leave the class with something they’ve accomplished and can use sort of more of skillshares or makerspaces.

After revising this model, I also started to think about my son who said to me that he learns more from the internet than in school. I remembered my friend who dropped out from school because “he was bored”, the one student that jumped from engineering to medicine and was taking philosophy courses on the side, the ones learning through Domestika, Coursera, Khan Academy or Edx and tailoring their own curriculum…Logan LaPlante being happy in finding something fulfilling to do for a living…All of these people might not fit in just one learning type, in just one frame and might not thrive in one prearranged educational path, not because they’re are failures but because there must be other opportunities for them to fit in. Maybe we can start designing learning experiences that also accommodate those students who learn best in the collective distributed frame?

If we play with the idea of the future being about active choices, a place where knowledge is everywhere, content is everywhere as well as the teacher, where we learn in networks and in a personalized way maybe we discover that we won’t need to feel like a square peg in a round hole anymore.

How many times do we find ourselves trying to engage our students with a nice video, some quiz or even a nice cartoon? Then we realise that we have to do it by ourselves and that the time is not enough. We then go back to the worn out ppt presentation or pdf and use that picture from the same review that we have always used. Well…good news is that there are a lot of free available resources for us.

These are called in the pedagogical language, open educational resources (OER). The first time I came across this term was during the Open Networked Learning course

The term OER, was coined in 2002 by UNESCO and it encloses “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”.According to Lumen’s 5Rs of OER, “The term “open content” describes any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like “open source”) that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities”

Where these 5R’s stands for:

1-Retain – is the right to download own copies of the content and store and manage.

2-Reuse – is the right to use the content in your lecture, video, course site, student group, etc

3-Revise -is the right to change, modify, adapt the content to your specific class situation

4-Remix-is the right to combine the original or modified content with some other material, OER in order to create something new.

5-Redistribute -is the right to give a copy of the original, revised or remixed material to other colleagues, students or friends.

So I happily realised that I too could find these OERs and reuse them. Generally I will also need to revise them and even remix the material in order to adapt it to my students’ needs. Some materials are too simple while others too broad. After that I could also redistribute my new material with my colleagues, students, friends so they can take advantage of my work. However, I would also like to be properly attributed when my colleagues and friends redistribute my material. I might even have some requirements: for example, the people using my material can proceed according to the 5Rs but I don’t want them to get commercial profit!

Although the open licences are open they might include certain requirements that makes the content less open in practice. For example, Wikipedia, with a very good will, attributes a CC BY SA licence to all the derivative content while MIT (see below) requires a CC BY NC SA licence (SA stands for share-alike and NC for non-commercial). Additionally the open content publishers can make choices that limit the engagement in the 5Rs, for example, by making the published content difficult to remix using free tools, difficult to download from the open content site, when advanced technical skills are needed to remix the content, or when the content simply is not there anymore.

Finding OERs can be a little bit of a challenge: is the content right? Can I trust it? Therefore it is good to know a few curated sites, for example, if I am a teacher I will trust other teacher/educator communities that join efforts in order to create hubs OERs hubs. Here are some of them

The wikiEducator is a community of educators who believe the educational resources should be shared and be free. Moreover, OER commons is a public digital library of OERs and also OER world map is an interesting site to visualise the ongoing efforts. Another site that you might want to visit in your ONL hunting is Merlot and a huge collection of OERs put together thanks to the tiny earth initiative is also worth visiting! Here you can also add and collaborate! I particularly found it super useful during the past locked down when we had to launch all the labs online in no time.

Even Though I might be very happy with the existence of OERs, because they are free, save my money, time and are accessible! I might also consider that OERs

Need to be found
Need to be customised for particular situation/students
Need to be critically reviewed
Need to be easily accessible and user-friendly to the students (including to students with disabilities or functional variations)
Need to be translated from a foreign language

So therefore I wanted to write this blog to help you save a little bit of your time. Here you can find some useful examples of OERs their Links follow below

Courses

mOOCs (micro online open courses) OERu
Coursera (watch out! Not always free!)

Lectures

MIT

Khan Academy (One of my favourites!)

For creation of lectures

Mini lectures that can be adapted to your course

Books

Openstax

Repository of free textbooks at University of British Columbia

Slideshares

Laboratories, demonstrations, lab manuals