CaseStudyProject
From iCommons wiki
Contents |
Background and opportunity
A wide range of organizations and individuals are actively involved in the development of open educational resources (OER). Partly because the field is so new, there have been few opportunities to share learnings and advances within and across projects and boundaries. We still know very little, e.g., about how projects are facilitating the localization of OER among diverse users, what structures they are instilling to support peer production, and how they are attempting to inspire community engagement. Therefore there is great potential for knowledge-sharing in order to advance and improve the development, use and reuse of OER.
The question is, how can projects evaluate and assess their own activities and share their knowledge about how they have improved and created a culture of learning within and across individual projects. In other words, how can projects assess what they can learn and have learned internally, while at the same time, share their learnings so that others also benefit?
Project purpose and aims
Leaders of the open education content movement met in 2006 to work from this opportunity and develop a coordinated work plan that would benefit open education communities around the world. These included the Hewlett Foundation, The Shuttleworth Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Global Education Learning Community (GELC). As a result of further discussions, these Founding Partners agreed that the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), as a research leader in open education content, will:
- Develop one complete participatory case study with an open education content project - Due date: 31 August 2007;
- Develop and disseminate an accessible case study framework, which will include protocols and other resources for use by other program leaders interested in tracking and sharing their key learnings - Due date for initial framework: 31 August, 2007 and Due date for revised framework: 15 January, 2008; and
- Support six to eight programs in developing their case studies, as well as leadership and quality control in comparing the contextual learnings of the case studies, in order to advance the field of open education content globally - Due date for progress report: 15 January, 2008; Completion date for this phase: 30 April, 2008; and
- Compare case studies in a formal white paper on lessons learned + final report - Due date: 30 June, 2008.
Participatory research model
The approach for the case study project is based in participatory research and evaluation, which means the purpose in OER project self assessment is to draw on existing and embedded ways of assessing its own progress and process. ISKME’s role is to be a critical friend and facilitator, but not a decision maker or power holder. As such, the voice of the formal researcher is just one among many, and the goal is to help communities and projects develop continuous learning methodologies, and in doing so build the capacity to shape and improve their activities.
As part of the first phase of the iCiC case study project ISKME is facilitating an initial case study with Free High School Science Text (FHSST). So far this has included conducting background research on the FHSST project and over three hours of interviews as a way to learn about current work processes, past and current challenges, methods of addressing them, lessons learned, their work with stakeholders who could inform and participate in the assessment work, and potential communication channels for facilitating additional stakeholder involvement.
FHSST: Early learnings
FHSST is a South African based open content initiative, founded by graduate students seeking to address their country’s dearth in science and math textbooks for high school students. The initiative draws on volunteers and an online collaborative authoring platform that supports the creation of textbooks that are relevant, useful and adaptable to local teaching and learning situations, both in South Africa and elsewhere.
A central strategy of FHSST has been to make content creation as volunteer-centric as possible through ongoing technology, content and process improvements. Examples include breaking the content assignments into smaller chunks that are more manageable for volunteers than entire textbook chapters; facilitating local face-to-face content “hackathons” for groups of volunteers living in the same location; providing social networking tools through which volunteers can communicate and offer feedback on the content creation process; and supporting a division of labor structure by assigning various task roles, including content evaluator, mediator and coordinator.
In order to ensure that finished textbooks will be relevant, useful and adaptable to local teaching and learning needs, FHSST has conducted teacher and learner trials and workshops in several pilot schools. Feedback from these trials has been incorporated into the textbooks and also filtered back into the ongoing process improvements. For example, the trials revealed a need for more science lab activities within the texts, especially those that paid heed to the lack of lab equipment and tools and the homemade materials that served in their place. In an effort to address this need, FHSST added an activity creation component to its authoring platform, so that volunteers could more easily submit new activities.
Other practices include making internal information and communications transparent and open so that dialogue is inspired within the FHSST community, and leveraging external content providers (teachers and paid contractors) alongside the volunteers’ work so that new content is continuously added. Challenges that remain include finding ways to facilitate ongoing, steady contributions from volunteers; getting the textbooks into classrooms and understanding their impact; establishing processes that allow for the continuous filtering of teacher and learner use experiences back into the textbooks as they are used; and potentially leveraging unintended outcomes of project work, such as allowing other, external projects to draw on the structures and the technological platform that have been created within the original FHSST project.
Continuous Learning Framework
An important by-product of the FHSST case study work has been the creation of an initial framework to potentially guide other OER projects through their role as active participants in the development of mechanisms to begin their own, ongoing collection of data around activities, challenges, successes and lessons learned. Below are the early components of the framework.
- Determine expectations and readiness for assessment and research into project learnings, which includes setting and understanding the goals of the work as well as the identification of project stakeholders who will participate.
- Develop mechanisms for research and assessment that build on embedded processes for measurement, assessment, and continuous learning that incorporate input from multiple project stakeholders. This includes identification of existing communication and information processes used within the organization, and the collaborative creation of an ongoing project assessment plan.
- Collect, analyze, report, and reflect through collaboratively developed assessment mechanisms.
- Facilitate a culture of learning through ongoing project assessment, which allows for the continuous alignment of theory in action (expectations, or what the project thinks it should be doing) with theory in use (actual practices).
Next steps
Next steps for the project include additional email-based interviews with FHSST volunteers and teachers/learners by mid July, as well as ongoing discussions with core stakeholder team members. ISKME has also completed a draft of a protocol for FHSST that core FHSST stakeholders will review and provide feedback on. The protocol will facilitate their role as active collaborators in the development of the mechanisms that will then be used in self-assessment and reflection, with the goal of enabling them to begin their own, ongoing semi-structured collection of data around activities, challenges, successes and lessons learned. Next steps are to begin to flesh out the framework so that it might be applicable and usable across multiple OER projects.
Templates, Tools, Activities
OER Lexicon - A Primer on OER-related Terms - What is localization? What do we mean by metadata? Find short, simple explanations to common OER terms here.
Tell Your OER Story Template - A template with guiding questions that help OER projects share and reflect upon their practices and what they’ve learned.
OER Volunteer Survey Protocol - A protocol consisting of 9 questions, which relevant OER projects can adapt, augment and reuse to understand volunteer perceptions around the recruitment process, the content authoring process, and the communication channels that support volunteer work.
Localization Activity - A group activity that simulates aspects of the localization process by taking an example of content and adapting it for another purpose, situation or locale. The aim is to analyze and reflect upon the process and gain insight into the challenges for both practitioners/users and content developers.
Metadata/Descriptor Activity - A group activity that explores various types of content metadata and descriptors that are needed to facilitate user engagement, use and reuse.
Community Engagement Activity - A group activity that explores what practitioners might need to know about each other in order to successfully share in the creation and evaluation of new content.
Possible Programs/Case studies
Shuttleworth
1. FHSST http://www.fhsst.org/
- Description: Online collaborative creation (by volunteers) of science, math, computer literacy textbooks
- Potential Framework Contribution: Use of volunteers (recruiting, training, retaining, supporting); localization and the context for use/reuse; approval, review, credibility and quality; ownership and the role of the evangelist for new projects; sustainability; community engagement; reuse of content by students and teachers
2. Other?
Hewlett Foundation
1. WGBH [URL?]
- Description: Transitioning from copyrighted content to open content
- Potential Framework Contribution: Licensing; process of making content “open”; possibly: insight into facilitating the transitioning of users from consumers to producers
2. Encyclopedia of Philosophy at Stanford http://plato.stanford.edu/
- Description: Open philosophy content created, maintained and updated by an expert or group of experts
- Potential Framework Contribution: Use of experts and referees in the content creation process; appreciation, credit and recognition for content contributions; quality, credibility and review; economic and content sustainability; revisions, edits and the incorporation of new ideas and innovations into the content
IDRC
1. Telecentre.org http://www.telecentre.org
- Description: Telecentre.org offers resources, content and community tools to support the impact and sustainability of telecentres globally. (Telecentres are public places that provide access to IT so that individuals can gather information and interact with others while they develop digital skills.)
- Potential Framework Contribution: [Need more information]
2. Other?
Curriki
1. Nortel LearniT http://www.nortellearnit.org/
- Description: LearnIT has developed lesson plans that support teachers in using video and other technologies as instructional tools. This project is about adding those lesson plans to the Curriki site, and creating templates for new lesson plans from the iteration of this process
- Potential Framework Contribution: Process and tools; templates and frameworks to facilitate content creation; and possibly localization and the context for use/reuse
2. Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) http://www.cast.org/
- Description: Building open source textbooks through Curriki tools
- Potential Framework Contribution: Growing community around content creation; collaboratively creating content; incentives and disincentives to content creation; technology and structures to support online content creation; standards alignment; the role of group structure in the content creation process; process and tools; sustainability
3. AARP http://www.aarp.org/about_aarp/nrta/
- Description: Recruiting and inspiring retired teachers to create content for the Curriki site
- Potential Framework Contribution: Inspiring volunteerism; driving, training and retaining volunteers; growing community around content creation; collaboratively creating content; creating content metadata and context for future users
