SEMINAR
“Open Education for All: The Role of ICT“ In the Framework of the
EDEN Annual Conference 2013, Oslo 13 June 2013 Oslo, Norway
Organised by European Distance and E‐Learning Network
Deliverable information Deliverable Number: 4.2 Type of deliverable: Discussion and Exchange seminar Work package number: 4 Work package Lead: EFQUEL Partner responsible for this seminar: EDEN Author: András Szűcs, EDEN Contributing authors: Livia Turzó, EDEN
Introduction to WP4: The VISIR seminars After the identification of micro‐innovation practices, the VISIR project aims to facilitate good practice exchange among network members. During the second and third year of the project, each partner will organise a project seminar for its network members embedded in a major event where a number of these practices will be discussed, guaranteeing at the same time a strong visibility of the operation and a continuous communication strategy. Each seminar is followed by an online discussion, animated by the partner that organised the event, to allow the stakeholders to comment on the seminar results. ‐ The assessment (r)evolution: EFQUEL ‐ Open education for all: the role of ICT: EDEN ‐ Learning from your office chair: business simulation and virtual mobility: EFMD ‐ Universociety: university and lifelong learning in Europe: EADL ‐ Learners in change: EICI ‐ Learning and the Future Workplace: Linkspace / ELIG This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution‐Non‐commercial‐Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐nc‐sa/2.0/be/
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VISIR Seminar “Open Education for All: The Role of ICT” In the framework of the EDEN Annual Conference 2013
Table of Contents PRACTICAL INFORMATION
4
AIM OF THE EVENT
4
AGENDA
4
INTRODUCTION ABOUT THE TOPIC
5
OPENING KEYNOTE
5
PRESENTATION OF CASES
6
MICRO‐INNOVATIONS WOMEN TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURS ROBOBRAILLE IN EDUCATION
6 7 7
CONTROVERSIAL QUESTIONS: GROUP DISCUSSION AND ONLINE DEBATE
7
GENERAL COMMENTS FROM THE PARTICIPANTS DISCUSSION ON CONTROVERSIAL QUESTIONS: RESULTS
7 9
LINK WITH MAIN NETWORK EVENT
11
ANNEXES
12
ANNEX 1: SLIDES FROM THE PRESENTATIONS ANNEX 2: LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
12 27
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Practical information Date and venue: 13 June 2013, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Event: EDEN Annual Conference 2013 Website URL: http://www.eden‐online.org/2013_oslo.html Number of participants at the Conference: cc. 400 Number of participants at the VISIR seminar: cc. 40 Distribution of information material: 9 VISIR leaflet (200 pcs) 9 VISIR announcement poster: placed by the registration desk and by the seminar room 9 Invitation e‐mail including a “warm‐up survey” 9 Invitation news included in the EDEN Newsflash May 2013 (1200 contacts)
Aim of the event The theme "Open education for all ‐ the role of ICT" was aimed to be presented from a broader perspective, beyond the often used OER context: about openness of education from the perspective of making education "... open to people, places, methods and ideas" ‐ by the example of the most successful European initiative of the OU UK. VISIR aims to emphasize the role of bottom‐up, innovative and successful cases in the shaping of the educational landscape. Therefore, two selected grass‐root innovators presented their ideas and cases about recent successful practices.
Agenda Introduction and Chair: András Szűcs, European Distance and E‐Learning Network, United Kingdom (10 minutes) Keynote speech: Open and closed: the battle of ideas (20 minutes) Alan Tait, The Open University, United Kingdom Small Ideas – Big Impact: 20 e‐learning micro‐innovations from around Europe (15 minutes) Anthony Camilleri, EFQUEL, Belgium Women Technology Entrepreneurs (10 minutes) Rita Misiuliene, Northern Lithuania College RoboBraille in Education (10 minutes) Michael Goldrick, Learning Development & Disability Services, National College of Ireland Group discussion (25 minutes)
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Introduction about the topic Andras Szucs (EDEN) in his introduction raised that the generic title of the seminar – „Open Education for All” offers the possibility to re‐visit and put in a wider context the issue of openness in education. There is nowadays a spectacularly developing field of open educational resources, MOOCs and alike. Whilst we live together with a proliferating jungle of related and not always consequently used openness terms, scenarios and approaches, it is worth of starting the presentation of the theme with recalling the original idea of open learning and their flagship institutions: the Open Universities, their socio‐economic environment, together with the present demands in the information society.
Opening Keynote Alan Tait, Professor of Distance Education and Development, The Open University presented the opening speech with the title “Open and closed: the battle of ideas” He explained what openness has been meaning in the past decades from societal and educational perspectives, highlighting that openness has been an attack on the notion that quality means exclusion, and that openness has been an element in the democratisation of society since the mid 19th century in Europe ‐ leading via several steps to the establishment of Open Universities from 1971 onwards. This has meant meanwhile the rethinking of curriculum and pedagogy, introducing more student‐centeredness and flexibility. The Open University UK is open to people, places, methods and ideas. It promotes educational opportunity and social justice by providing high quality university education to all who wish to realize their ambitions and fulfill their potential. Through academic research, pedagogic innovation and collaborative partnership it seeks to be a world leader in the design, content and delivery of supported open and distance learning. In the meantime, the ‘closed’ approach also continues in the ‘elite’ research‐led universities and the neo‐liberal approach to higher education as commodity and private good. Alan Tait recalled that in the USA the tuition fee debt is 1 billion $USD and that recently, in England tuition fees increased to £8,600 per year. At the same time we see strong signs that openness really starts to take off. The OER’s are known since 2003 and MOOCs moved in focus from 2009 . The power of the new opportunities was explained with the example of iTunes‐U, currently averaging over 470,000 downloads a week, with 90 % of visitors from outside the UK and 1 in 28 downloaders going on to visit the OU website The other example presented was OpenLearn: the free learning system from The Open University. OpenLearn aims to break the barriers to education by reaching millions of learners around the world, providing free educational resources and inviting all to sample courses that registered students take – for free! OpenLearn averages 400,000 unique visitors a month. 7,000 hours of learning materials taken from our undergraduate and postgraduate modules, 595 active study units, plus educational interactives, topical videos, academic blogs are accessible, together with access to OU podcasts and free printed materials. In a world first, the OU launched a 'fact of the day' iGoogle Gadget that links to OpenLearn via their iGoogle homepage. 5 D4.2: Open Education for All, 13 June 2013 Oslo, Norway
The FutureLearn initiative of the OU was also introduced which is aiming to increase access to higher education, offer online courses across multiple platforms from some of the world’s best universities for free, enabling everyone, everywhere to enjoy learning. Partnering with the British Library, the British Council, the British Museum, 21 top UK universities, and international Partners, the first courses will be launched later this year. FutureLearn (a private company owned by the Open University), building on the OU’s unparalleled expertise in delivering distance and open learning to hundreds of thousands of people and combining this with online and mobile technology and the best of the social web to reinvent the learning experience. The initiative may inspire people to continue to learn throughout their lives. Regarding the MOOCs, Professor Tait summarized by stating that they have created for the first time radical and scaled conversations in conventional research‐led universities about online learning. They highlighted better than many previous developments in the field the potential for ICT in education. Recent debates are rather about the business model feasibility: there is evidence of resistance to price in USA and UK. MOOCs have been playing in the meantime by raising awareness and passion for learning on huge scale. Professor Tait concluded by saying: “La lutte continue” – The struggle continues in the open education field. Openness is at heart of battle and higher education is the most contested domain now. The question whether it should be considered as private or public good, a commodity or a tax supported/free issue, to be looked at as locus for private for profit investment or tax supported public service remains open. The basic dilemma is a wider one: are we in a market society or in a society with a market?
Presentation of cases Micro‐innovations Anthony Camillieri from EFQUEL (European Foundation for the Quality in E‐Learning) presented the results of the research from 120 innovative, bottom‐up and high impact micro‐innovation cases collected by the VISIR Consortium. The cases are intended to reflect the trends in the world of ICT supported education. As a result of an evaluation process, 20 outstanding cases were selected and introduced in the Oslo event. The presentation pointed out the following aspects: ‐
Technology enabling interaction
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Technology enabling employability
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Technology giving rise to new learning experiences
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Technology enabling new ways to learn
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Technology increasing access
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Technology supporting learning
As a conclusion, following trends and observations were highlighted by the presenter, Mr. Camilleri: ‐
Innovators are not replicating current approaches
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Innovators are prizing interactive approaches
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Technology works as an enabler… it is a means to an end 6 D4.2: Open Education for All, 13 June 2013 Oslo, Norway
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Public‐Private partnerships encourage innovation
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Many innovations arise from integration
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The lone inventor is alive and well
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All approaches increase The Joy of Learning
Women Technology Entrepreneurs Women Technology Entrepreneurs was presented by Rita Misiuliene from the Northern Lithuanian College, Lithuania. It is an online programme that brings together core elements of entrepreneurship training sprinkled with key aspects of technology curricula, focused on the needs of nascent and early start female entrepreneurs. The development of the technology and entrepreneurial potential encouraging course contributes to economic growth and new jobs. E‐working provides the potential for self‐employment & the development of local economies.
RoboBraille in Education The presentation “RoboBraille in Education” from Michael Goldrick, National College of Ireland, demonstrated the need for free assistive technologies, text‐to‐speech engines and the importance of inclusive learning and teaching practices. The presentation highlighted the results of a recent European Project, RoboBraille in Education, where good practices in using RoboBraille (which automates the translation of text documents into Braille and natural sounding speech in several languages) were captured in six different countries.
Controversial questions: group discussion and online debate General comments from the participants The discussion following Alan Tait’s presentation was focusing on the economic model of OER, especially the MOOCs. Questions were raised about how the MOOCs phenomena will be sustainable. The main points of the respondents were: 9 MOOCs offer marketing possibilities: The first MOOCs were released by the most prestigious universities. The reason for this is that they see a huge marketing potential as with MOOCs they can reach a far wider audience, millions of potential students, than with their traditional type of courses. MOOCs also enhances competitiveness of the universities. It gives insights for the outsiders into the lectures, it opens up the university. Professors are motivated to go public with their lectures. This kind of publicity can be used as a boost for their reputation. 9 Business model of MOOCs: There were a lot of questions in connection with how MOOCs are sustainable: how is it possible to offer free but very valuable courses for thousands or even millions of students in a long term and 7 D4.2: Open Education for All, 13 June 2013 Oslo, Norway
how will this change the sustainability of the institutions themselves. According to the respondents, two main ways seem to be working now: one is that multinational companies are seriously sponsoring certain types of courses that prepare their workforce. The other one is that instead of selling a whole online course, certain types of related services are tend to be priced, e.g.: students don’t have to pay for attending the course but do have to pay for connecting to the related network (e.g.: Skype group), for getting the credit/certificate at the end of the course, for receiving tutoring, etc. At the end of the discussion, the example of the music industry was raised: one can see how much it has been changed in the last 10 years due to the development of the new ICT tools. Presentations of micro cases were welcomed by the audience with great interest. Related questions were raised in connection with the IPR. The conclusion of the answers is that IPR varies a lot nationally and always needs to be handled locally.
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Discussion on controversial questions: results An online survey was run between 07 and 13 June, as a “warm‐up” and attention raising exercise. The results (Surveymonkey) are shown below. They have been presented at the seminar and confirmed with agreement by the audience.
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Based on the inputs from the survey, what we can see is that the significance of Open Educational Resources and their potential impact is acknowledged as high, the expectations are considerable. No doubt, there are many problematic and open questions around its development and implementation, which include socio‐economic, methodological ones as well, in particular the issue of the business model and the legal/copyright problems. The movement character of OERs and MOOCs is acknowledged which may lead to the long awaited progress in the transformation of learning systems, based on the ICT‐supported learning and the related new pedagogies. The OER movement and in particular the MOOCs are more prevailing in the US and other continents but their growing impact is strongly expected in Europe as well.
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Link with main network event The theme of the EDEN Annual Conference 2013 was: Enhancing Learning Experience Improving Learning Quality E‐learning, open and distance education have been increasingly important fields of intellectual excitement and innovative development. The challenges posed by the new technologies are permanent, and students constantly keep teachers under pressure to develop. The human elements are moving to the forefront, employing creative methods and smart solutions. In Europe, despite economic and social pressures, there is a collective drive towards realising the creative potential. Standards and accountability have also been emphasized but personalization of learning, individual and collective motivation, enhancement of the learning experience, and an overall improvement of learning quality are gaining ever‐increasing traction. Learning is becoming more and more individualized and self‐managed. Personalization helps foster motivation and engagement, and supports awareness and motivation. Personal learning environments and personalized assessment (including learning analytics) offer resources to monitor and assess the process. How can we do our best to make learning a thrilling experience for learners, including providing a sense of joy in the virtual classroom? The question is an exciting one and discussion and debate provided a range of innovative theories and approaches, and help to determine the tools necessary to achieve our goals. Should they be about the smart use of ICT tools, new methodologies for enhanced learning experience, content management systems, or about fascinating inter‐disciplinary solutions supported by e.g. game based learning, immersive environments, multimedia, etc. The answers we will find may be dynamic and or even provoking. The EDEN 2013 Conference discovered and presented the latest best practice in this field, shared progressive concepts, inventive solutions, and promoted joint‐thinking and collaboration.
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ANNEXES Annex 1: Slides from the presentations
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ANNEX 2: List of participants List of Participants
Name Vaiva Vismeryte Birinyi Eva Peter Birch Danlite Bacinskiene Egidijus Jaras Marius Sadauskas
Organisation Mikolas Romeris University EACEA – EU EACEA Liedm Assocaicion, VDU VMU
VMU Bergen University Grete Oline Hole College Linnaeus Alastair Creelman University Aslang Grov Stord/Hangesund Almas Univeristy College Peter Müller VUC
Interested in further information e-mail address y y y y y y y y
Claudio Dondi
Scienter-MENON
y y Project partner
Bruce Chaloux Miguel Santamana Angeles SanchezElvira Anthony F. Camilleri
Sloan Consortium
y
UNED (Spain)
y
UNED (Spain)
y Project partner
Barbara Baschiera Juliana Raffaghelli Linda H. Nielsen Airina Volungeviciene Lisa-Marie Blaschke Patricia Arnold Jan Broeken Frans Bleumer Mateja Geder Stefan De Wannemacker Janck Koumi Svava-Peirsdottir Erling Ljosa Sandra Kucina Mike Goldrick
EFQUEL La Foscari University of Venice, Italy University College Lillebaeli Vytautas Magnus University Oldenburg University Munich University Roc West Brabant Roc West Brabant DOBA, Slovenia K.U.Leuven i Muids Educational Media Production University of Iceland
y y y y y y y y y y y y
University of Zagreb y National College of Ireland y 27 D4.2: Open Education for All, 13 June 2013 Oslo, Norway
Irina Smirnova Helen Hughes Eva Suba Petr Sudicky Livia Turzo Ilse Op de Beeck Rita Misuiliene CIR:Peiris Ulf Olsson Miki Kvitz András Szűcs
Miri Schonfeld
MESI Massey University
y y Project EDEN partner Masaryk University y Project EDEN partner Project partner K.U.Leuven Northern Lithuania College y Stockholm Univeristy y Stockholm Univeristy y y Project partner EDEN Kibbutzim College of Education Technology and Art y
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