C4E 'Overview'

Licence

The work in this wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This resource aims to provide a space for you to consider the potential impact of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement on your approaches to teaching and learning. Its eleven different sections can accumulate into a 33 hour 'course'. Each section will suggest a number of possible sources and we hope that you will take advantage of the comments feature at the bottom of each section's page. We believe that the sharing of thoughts, reactions and perspectives can lead to a rich and recursive experience that can benefit each user of the resource.  

Suggested starting dates for C4E 12/13

These dates are optional as participants are free to study in whatever order they like. However, if we have some common dates then this should aid participation and increase the number of comments on the bottom of each page of the wiki. The comments option was a useful learning space for us all last year so please let us know what your thoughts are.

Background to OERs

The OER movement has received major backing from governments in both the UK and USA and has the potential to do to the education industry what the web 2.0 has done to other information industries such as news, music and publishing i.e. create significant and increasing opportunities for public and democratic engagement and interaction. It is inevitable that education will have to increasingly confront (and utilise) these changes; this, presumably is the reason why institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Oxbridge are now producing OER materials (and allowing public access).

Whilst OERs can be seen as a potential threat to the HE 'industry' they also offer new business opportunities, especially for organisations that collaborate and provide multi-disciplinary approaches as part of their provision. The OER field is evolving and it would seem prudent to engage with it now, so that we, as educational practitioners can be prepared to meet the future changes in perception towards HE from students, employers and the general public. 

Our remit, as part of this wiki, is to design a resource primarily aimed at HE in FE staff that comprises eleven (approximately 3-hour long) activity-based sessions, to cover issues related to identifying, locating, releasing and putting OERs into your curricula; understanding the concept of “openness”; as well as pedagogical (or, within the remit of this course, "anarchogogical") issues around student engagement and in particular innovative assessment. In their broadest sense, the resources (and their resultant skills, ideas and activities) should also encourage 'reflection' on the research and practice of the working lives of teaching professionals. The course will pursue a reflexive approach to each of its sections and the subsequent feedback - via the comments feature on each page of the wiki - will provide powerful and dynamic interaction for the development of our 'teaching and learning' knowledge.

One of the main 'themes', or principles that permeates this resource, is an approach to knowledge engagement and creative activity, (what we are defining as) a Proposal for Anarchogogy

 A number of propositions about learning and teaching underpin this approach; as such, anarchogogy is offered to you in the spirit of creating a conversation about learning, and, how as practitioners we can most effectively support this. This proposition considers ‘good learning’ to be:

• Brought about through collaboration and participation – we learn with each other and from each other
• Based around the guided construction of knowledge that is strengthened by developing a collective intelligence – the sum is greater than the parts
• Developed through the engagement of emotions and creativity – it is playfully social as well as experimental
• Linked to the process of thinking differently – learning involves looking at familiar things in a different light
• Drawn from distributed and diverse knowledge sources – learning involves selection, analysis and synthesis of these
• Enhanced through the effective use of technology -  technology helps us to access and produce ideas across different media
• Deepened through reflection and the cycle of reflection – experience is the food for reflection and reflection is the food of knowledge
• Generated by learning to be surprised – some learning is predictable, a lot is unexpected and incidental

With these invitations in mind we seek to develop a creative and 'open' approach to new learning activities, and, also maybe prompt alternative forms of "review and reflection" (as opposed to the cold rigidities of %-age related assessment). (Many thanks to Guy Merchant and Richard Pountney, 'The Pedagogy of Participation', (2011) in press, for reference to these useful definitions). See also the links for further reading below:

http://www.robinalexander.org.uk/docs/Camb_Jnl_article_04.pdf

Getting it wrong from the beginning

Syllabus

Session 1: 'What is the (new) University?' What is the New University

Session 2: Creative Commons Licences (CCLs) and other terminology? CCL and Terminology CCL and Terminology

Session 3: Towards a "Complexity" of Learning: 'De-Schooling' the University Deschooling The University

Session 4:  Innovative Assessment Strategies Innovative Assessment Strategies

Session 5: Digital 'Natives'? Digital Natives

Session 6: Voicethread and Prezi Voicethread and Prezi 

Session 7: 'Bye bye Badman: The Redemption of Hope through Popular Culture' 'Bye bye Badman: The Redemption of Hope through Popular Culture'

Session 8: 'The Power of the Image' 'The Power of the Image'

Sessions 9, 10 & 11: Lecturer as Innovative OER Producer: Producing your own OER Lecturer as Innovative OER Producer: Producing your own OER