OER for Teacher Education Identifying needs, finding OER, selecting OER, adaptation

Aims of the Workshop Sharing of practice – awareness of what partners are doing in this area Building networks and friendships that could lead to collaboration Focus on teacher learning – what is important? What do we need from OER? Criteria for selecting OER to support new pedagogies in teacher development Familiarity with a range of existing repositories and an awareness where to find OER that support national policy aspirations Willingness to use and support the use of existing OER and to adapt them for local needs

Activity With the person next to you, share your experience of using OER. Think of two questions you have about OER and write them on a post-it note.

Open Educational Resources (OER) OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open Educational Resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. OER first defined by UNESCO in 2000. Read slide –There are many mis-understandings around OER, so I thought it would be helpful for you all to pause for a minute and really get inside the issue.

OER Conditions Attribution Share-Alike Non-commercial No-modify Freedom to Access Copy Modify Redistribute

OER origins First major project: MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) Project. In 2000 MIT faculty and administrators asked: “How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?” MIT faculty answer was: “Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.” 2002: Proof of concept with 50 courses 2014 : Materials from 2150 courses and 125 million visitors www.ocw.mit.edu

OER: a global movement China, materials from 750 courses made available by 222 university members of the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium. (www.core.org.cn/en/). Japan: resources from more than 400 courses from the 19 member universities of the Japanese OCW Consortium. (www.jocw.jp/). France: 800 educational resources from around 100 teaching units at 11 member universities of the ParisTech OCW project. (graduateschool.paristech.org/). UK: Open University has released distance learning materials via the OpenLearn project (openlearn.open.ac.uk/); over 80 UKOER projects have released many resources. Africa:  OER Africa (www.oerafrica.org) developing and disseminating OER for higher education institution faculties of Health, Teacher Education and Agriculture.

Activity Understanding OER Read the questions provided, discuss with your neighbour and indicate your response to each one. Join with another pair and compare your answers. Discuss any differences. We are going to do an activity. I want you to discuss these questions with your neighbour. It does not matter if you don’t know the answer – the idea is that you help each other and that you will know the answers by the end.

OER: the issues Cost Quality Licenses Culture change Cost Quality Licenses Meeting needs The questions highlight a number of issues surrounding OER. In the rest of this talk, I will go through each one and highlight some of the issues that particularly affect sector leaders and policy makers, rather than users. (we will be working with users on Friday)

Cost Free to the user Author is not paid Not free to produce! – time, quality assurance, editing, production….. How will the creation of OER be funded? OER are free to the user. The author

Quality Who decides? Who checks? What mechanisms can be used to ensure that OER published by an organisation meet quality standards?

Licenses What are the options? What conditions are attached to each option? Which license will meet my needs?

Selection What are our needs? New pedagogy, integrating ICT, improving teacher learning… Do the OER we have found meet our needs? What pedagogy to they embrace? Is the level and language appropriate for our learners? Do we need to adapt them? Who decides? Individuals, Heads of Department? Deans? Heads of Institution? Government Ministers?

Change of culture Universal accessibility Less control from the top More democratic More autonomy for individuals More trust, more collaboration Different ways of working are required in order to derive the full benefits from OER, starting with institutional policies.

The OER adoption pyramid (H. Trotter, G. Cox) http://conference Volition Availability Capacity (technical skills to find, use, adapt and create) Awareness (of OER, the concept) Permission (to use (via Licence) or create (via institutional policy)) Access (to infrastructure) Individuals Institutions The pyramid describes the stages of OER use. The idea is that you need to work up from the bottom. The next slide explains each step.

OER Adoption – Key questions ADOPTION FACTORS Questions for OER users Questions for OER creators Volition Pedagogical values, institutional culture, social context Do you want to use OER? Do you want to get involved in OER creation? Availability Are the resources that we need available as OER? Have you found OER to meet your learning needs? Do you have teaching materials of sufficient quality? Copyright? Capacity Necessary skills, capabilities? Do you know where to look for OER? Do you have the skills to develop and upload OER? Awareness What are OER? How are they different from other resources? Do you understand OER licenses, restrictions and opportunities? Do you understand the OER licenses? Permission Licensing and institutional factors Do you have permission from the institution? License? Who possess copyright over teaching materials you use? Access Electricity, devices? How will you access OER?

OER Potential

The OER cycle From: Enhancing teacher Education through OER (A MOOC written by The Open University UK and available on www.EdX.org

Activity What does learner-centred mean? Write down your ideas on post-it notes – one idea per post- it. What would you expect to see in a learner-centred classroom

Using OER to support teacher educstion The main challenge in teacher education is how to make teaching both in schools and in teacher training institutions more interactive. Teachers and teacher educators need to be able to select OER which support teacher learning and learner-centred education. The next 2 slides highlight the key aspects of teacher learning and learner-centred education. After them there is an activity to help you identify the criteria for choosing OER that are likely to be helpful

What does learner-centred mean? ‘Learner-centred’ is a set of attitudes and values Taking account of the needs of all learners – inclusive teaching Valuing the skills and cultural experiences that learners bring to the classroom Building on prior knowledge Believing that all learners can learn Setting engaging tasks that challenge as appropriate Allowing students to talk about their ideas Skilful questioning to elicit knowledge and understanding

Teacher learning – what is important? Experience of good teaching, modelling Reflection Vision Understanding Practice Motivation Shulman, L. and Shulman, J. (2007) Journal of Curriculum Studies 36 (2) 257-271 Relevant, authentic activities SK, PCK, TPCK, Educational studies Teaching practice, micro-teaching

Activity 3 Imagine you are looking for OER to support teacher learning. Taking account of ideas about learner-centreness and teacher learning, brainstorm the sorts of things that you will take into consideration when recommending OER to teachers and teacher educators. Sort your ideas into a set of criteria that could be used to judge an OER in the field of teacher education Use your criteria to assess the OER provided.

Groups: divide the participants into groups

Looking at OER repositories Example: T-TEL Ghana http://www.t-tel.org/ TESSA, TESS-India, African Storybook project, ACE Maths, OER Africa (including African teacher education network), African Virtual University (AVU) Demonstrate the website given critically. Who has designed it? Are they a credible organisation? Are the resources easily accessible, well-organised, easy to change and adapt? Who would find these useful? Are they relevant to your context?

Reviewing OER repositories Group 1 - OER Africa/Teacher Education network http://www.oerafrica.org/teachered Group 2 – TESSA - www.tessafrica.net Group 3 – African Storybook project http://www.africanstorybook.org/ Group 4 - AVU OER repository - http://oer.avu.org/

Activity 4 – part 1 In your group, complete the review of an OER website. Each person will need to be able to share the group’s comments with others in the part 2. Number yourselves 1-5

Activity 4 – part 2 Move groups – find people with the same number Each person has 10 minutes to share their report with a group of colleagues. After 10 mins a buzzer will sound. Return to home group and share thoughts on what you have heard.

Plenary What have you learnt about OER and how to work with them? How will you take this forward in your work to support teachers and teacher educators?