OER for K12 learning in times of Pandemia

By Werner Westermann, 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Context

Printed textbooks, printed resources developed to support learning and teaching processes, have shown with empirical evidence, over decades, that their use has a positive impact in improving learning outcomes and academic performance for K-12 school education along with facilitating and making the teacher’s work more productive and transforming it.

The educational interruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemia have closed all schools to prevent face-to-face interaction, the primary mean of infection. Governments have been using and promoting distance or connected learning solutions and coping with the complexity of delivering distance education. In this context, providing and delivering appropiate digital content and resources is key to support digital distance learning, as well as, autonomous-self driven learning.

In this unprecedented context, Open Educational Resources (OER) represent a crucial means to support the continuation of learning in both formal and informal settings. OER provide a promising solution to not only access, create and share knowledge and resources, but also to help meet the needs of individual learners, including those with disabilities and individuals coming from marginalized or disadvantaged groups, and effectively promote gender equality as well as incentivize innovative pedagogical, didactical and methodological approaches.

Infrastructure

In order to asure every child has access to relevant learning resources, we can build digital Open Textbooks, a collection of OER that have been organized in a planned sequence, that can look like a traditional textbook in order to ease the understanding and adoption process of learners and teachers.

You can find and access OER, relevant to different K-12 subjects and levels, in existing web platforms like Khan Academy, OER Commons and CK-12 Foundation. In these websites you can create a profile where you will have access to numerous content (videos) and resources (simulations, interactive activities, assessments) you can collect and organize through dashboards.

But a more holistic, sustainable and standarized model can be developed to harness the potential of OER as a flexible way to deliver and support learning resources:

Image:  by Werner Westermann,
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Following this model, the strategy is to build a repository where we can store and steward the OER, whether its openly licensed (CC) or belong to the Public Domain (PD). We can nurture the content repository with existing OER selected or new OER created, but also with a wide range of other open content, for example, Open Data, Open Access (scientific publishing: papers, journals) or Open Science artifacts. We can also integrate emerging technologíes that can help achieve learning objectives, such as, Artificial Intelligence.

The OER in the repository can be selected and assembled over a web-based platform. In Higher Education, one fo the platforms that has been successful in the creation and curation of open textbooks has been Pressbooks. Originally aimed at self-publishing authors for creation of books, Pressbooks has shifted its focus to work with universities on academic and textbook publishing. It provides a choice of themes for formating books and allows the export of books in print-ready PDF, mobi, ePub, and many other open formats. Each book resides in a Pressbook, which is an adaptation of the popular open source platform WordPress, which has an impressive number of plug-ins and add-ons, offering wide range of functionalities and interactions with users. The main open textbook projects in the US (Open Textbook Library or the UNIZIN Consortium) and Canada (BCCampus, eOntario) use Pressbooks as infrastructure.

A similar strategy of assemblling open content for printing or a digital book is using wiki infrastructure. Wikis allow collaborative edition and management by its own audience or community directly using a web browser. Wikibooks is a Wikimedia Foundation project designed to collaborately create textbooks, while its contributors maintain the property rights to their contributions, while the CC BY-SA license makes sure that the submitted version and its derivative works will always remain freely distributable and reproducible. As a Wikimedia project, its easy to integrate the incredible heritage of the other sub-projects, first of all, the Wikipedia, but others such as Wikisource, Wikidata, Wikiversity, Wikispecies. The Commons media repository allows easy access to more than 63 million media files: images, icons, video, sound, 2D/3D interactive and editable files.

Community

Access and disponibility of materials and resources do not necessarily asure learning outcomes or teacher appropiation. As any resource, its value relates to the effective use of that resource to pursue an intended purpose.

We define OER as a learning material that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R’s activities, proposed by David Wiley: Retain, Revise, Remix, Reuse and Redistribute. Exercising these 5R’s in each educational community will enhance teaching and learning practices in a more inclusive, diverse and open manner developing open or OER-enabled pedagogies. These pedagogies will foster social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and empowerment of learners.

The 5R’s can be complemented by the 10C’s. The 10C’s is the framework developed by Hodgkinson-Williams (2017) within a more comprehensive set of 10 distinct activities of an Open Education cycle posited to optimise the key value proposition of OER:

This virtuos cycle of OER can be achieved if its fueled and supported by a favourable environment and comlementary activities:

• Learning Communities, networks of practice and expertice, where users can share what works and what does not, consolidating best practices, find technical and pedagogical support in OER use.
• The circular and intensive use/review of resources in the Learning Communities provides a way to implement a quality assurance mecanism of the resources created and collected, in a framework of incremental innovation.
• Permanent research and assessment on accesibility, inclusion, user satisfaction of the resources is needed to further look for evidence-based impact/effectiveness.
• An ethical-stewardship framework is needed to preserve the positive values and attitudes that nurture this optimal cycle supporting the broadest possible use (legaly permitted) and collaborative revision and remix of materials over time. Special concern in the creation of OER collections is related to interoperbility of distinct use of open licenses and the permission of adaptability of the resources.