Reflection: Potentials and Struggles of Open Education

[Royce Kimmons]

In 200-300 words, either reflect on the potentials and struggles of open education as you see it in your context or respond to at least one classmate's reflection to either validate their points or to constructively push their thinking.

[stavishm...@gmail.com]

 The potentials that leap out at me when I first came across the open education idea were: educators sharing ideas, educators sharpening their learning and teaching skills, and appearing cost effective.

I love the idea that teachers do not have to feel obligated to “recreate the wheel” to reach their students and goals.  Using open education can allow educators to share insight, creativity, trial/errors, and methods.  Teachers are benefiting from the experience and work of others. It is almost like direct collaboration with limited time wasted.

By using the works of others in the classroom, teachers can: sharpen their skills, gain new tools, and provide supplemental material without spending a great deal of time-all of which provide students with a more quality education. Can teachers become lazy by using the work of others? You bet. That is why taking a little time to properly train teachers how to cite their sources and how to identify quality ideas is so vital. The more ideas teachers have the better they can weed through them to select the ones that will best suit their specific classroom needs.

Sharing resources can be cheaper. As more and more schools are cutting budgets, teachers are being forced to either pay for materials or do without.  But open education allows more and varied ideas and resources to be brought into the classroom without costing the big bucks. Schools access the creativity of hundreds of teachers and resources available without breaking the bank.

The potentials of open education far outweigh the struggles. Train the teachers to search and cite properly and then allow them to teach. There are so many restrictions on teachers and content that sharing shouldn't be one of them.  

[Royce Kimmons]

Absolutely. I think that sometimes the collaboration and sharing conversation is muted by the cost conversation, but the problem is that teachers not only need to learn how to find and cite resource, but they need to learn how to share their own creations in a way that allows for reuse, etc.

[bawald...@gmail.com]

I took the summer course of this and it was my introduction to the world of open education. I started this school year with a new district and running into road blocks I did not have last year. The more I am learning about open education the more I can see how to apply it. I think you are correct in that open education can help a lot with costs to a school district. I also find the idea of open education making it "ok" to share materials with other teachers, instead of creating some great lesson then keeping it from others who could use help.

[Royce Kimmons]

I agree. Though we talk about copyright and creative commons, the central message and conceptual shift with open education is a shift to sharing. So, we essentially need to help people to begin thinking differently about the way they view intellectual property and to share their expertise with others.

[jr...@fruitlandschools.org]

Coming from a fine arts background before I was an educator, I was always trained to take precautions to be protective of my work.  It’s copyrighted after all (though I wasn’t exactly sure what made that legitimate or if lawyers needed to be involved).  I thought I had to put a c. stamp on everything I posted and painted in the online world.  Now I have an understanding that of the emerging and nuanced licenses, what to look for, how to identify them, and more importantly, I am open to the idea of sharing my lesson plans and artwork in the digital world and with other teachers because it has been so helpful to me in accessing materials for my own remix.  Just like learning anything new, it takes deliberate effort at first to remain ethical/legal with your materials, but once the language has been developed and practice ensues, it becomes easier and easier over time.  Collaboration might just begin locally or within a building or forum, but as the language and practices grow, adoption becomes more accessible.  The cultural shift will happen not just in education, but globally, as this issue affects new technologies, business, and social networking.  I’d say we have a great head start upon completion of this course!

[Royce Kimmons]

That's great to hear, and we all have to go through that process! I like what you said about needing to develop language in order to grow and more readily adopt the innovation. As you say, we need to understand and embrace nuances of copyright but also make our nuanced interests clear to our audience in order to facilitate reuse and remixing. Great post!

[Andrea...@sd273.com]

Open education has the potential to change how I teach in a positive way.  I no longer think of my lessons and resources as being from a single source. I am instead  always on the lookout for new and reliable sources to obtain information to present to my students.  It is a challenge to narrow down the large number of resources available to me and to also guarantee the quality of a resource but it sounds like those challenges are being addressed by the State Dept of Ed, for example.  I recently made an assignment for my classes that directed them to a math website and had them work out five example problems that applied to the learning objective of the lesson.  It was time consuming for me to make the assignment and present it in such a way that they understood what was being asked of them.  I feel that the lesson was successful but it showed me that I could improve upon the process a lot for the next assignment I will give them.  I also think that it will take time for the students to become comfortable with the type of lesson that they do using the computer resource.  Teaching this this type of lesson shows me that open education can become a valuable part of my curriculum.

[psh...@fruitlandschools.org]

I absolutely believe in the strong potential of open education.  There are so many thousands of teachers in the world today who are attempting to be innovative on a daily basis, sharing of those good ideas whenever we have them is essential to retain sanity in our profession.  In addition, the cost of resources has often been a strong limiting factor in the quality of an education.  Open resources are "leveling the playing field" between those schools that have and have not, which is a highly valuable goal.

The struggles I have heard seem to boil down to a "what if" scenario.  "What if" everyone shared their resources and all education was free?  What would happen then?  Would all of the quality resources dissolve since no one is paying for them?  This is a classic example of the difficulties between education and business that all schools and education companies deal with and I don't know the answer.  What I do know is that EVERY ONE of the open education resources I use (Khan Academy, OpenStax texts, even Wikipedia) consist of higher quality content than the corresponding content I previously had available in a paid resource.  I see it as being highly positive for the foundations that have money to be using it to fund HIGH QUALITY educational resources.

[psh...@fruitlandschools.org]

You are so correct, my favorite teacher mentor told me from the beginning that all the best teachers are thieves because they are constantly stealing the best ideas from other teachers.

[pcro...@sd282.org]

I am a business education teacher in a small school, which means I split my time about 1/3 teaching traditional business classes like accounting and economics and the other 2/3 teaching a wide array of technology classes.  In the technology classes I work against a constantly moving target.  In some classes, I feel pretty good if I am learning the material a day ahead of the students.  The reality is that often I am learning simultaneously.  I long ago abandoned textbooks as I quickly learned that the second they are printed, they become out of date.  Without knowing it, I have been a consumer of open education concepts for a long time.  Granted, many of the materials and lessons I have used to either teach myself or my students weren't necessarily published under the open education umbrella, the concept of spreading the wealth of knowledge still drove the sharing of the content.  From a Youtube video published by some 14-year-old who just learned a new After Effects concept to a corporation integrating advertisements into their lessons in exchange for the content, I have long relied on digital resources in my classroom.

Obviously, to me the advantages of open education are tremendous and just short of necessary.  Since I strictly rely on either developing my own pedagogical content or obtain them from free digital resources, the open education movement is a great step in the right direction.  However, this also leads me to one of the greatest challenges I see in the open education movement.  Obviously, there are the issues of fair use, copyright, and all of the challenges we have discussed in this course, but from a business standpoint, I see revenue as a great challenge.  It seems like now, the open education movement is focused around people sharing their content with the hope and intention they will be repaid by using others' shared content.  This is a great concept, but I wonder where good old fashioned American business fits into this model.  At what point do corporations find a way to capitalize on open education resources?  I see this as similar to the Linux operating system movement in the early 2000's.  Open source software is a great concept, but truly open also tends to lend itself to being open for business as well.  I think the open education movement will see significant challenges from the educational content industry.  This could end up being a positive for us all as the industry looks to compete with a mass of people providing free resources.

[pho...@d401.k12.id.us]

Open education is the future of education.  It readily provides resources for teachers to draw upon and often "remix" for their own educational purposes.  It also provides students the abilities to use digital resources to learn, which is what this generation of students are familiar with.  Open education makes teachers more effective because they can "steal" awesome lessons from other teachers and focus on the material rather than trying to just create material to present to students. I coach high school girls basketball and it takes up a lot of my planning time, I often feel like I am 1/2 second ahead of the students.  Open educational resources alleviates so much time and effort for teachers to provide great lessons.  

One of the struggles I have found in my school district is that many websites are blocked.  I wasn't able to use a number of the resources that were listed in module 8.  This is an example of the cultural shift that needs to happen to make open education truly efficient and effective for teachers to use.  I had a number of ideas of lessons to use in Module 11 but was unable to use the materials because they were blocked by our school district; it made the assignment very time consuming and inefficient to use in the classroom.  I created a very awesome lesson but it took me 3 hours, mainly because I was presented with road blocks on the digital highway so to speak.  

Over all however, I am very excited about the websites I was able to use and have already found a ton of teaching materials that I am going to use in the classroom.  Boundless.com is a very useful site that is breaking down the cultural barriers that are hindering the growth of open education.  

[cful...@ririe252.org]

This class has helped me make a shift to being more open and willing to share my resources. I think teachers are so busy, and overwhelmed trying to select the best materials out of a mountain of options, that many take more from what is available than they contribute. This is certainly true for me. It is easy to think there is already enough out there, but there is room for more targeted materials that are properly labeled. 
One aspect of open education that I haven't noticed being mentioned is how to determine the quality of open source materials based on research. Our educational system is wrapped up in determining the quality of materials based on research. These days there are so many free materials available, but very little if any research to validate their effectiveness. On one hand we don't want to underestimate the value of quality research. On the other we don't want to minimize the potential benefits of open materials just because they have not been proven yet. (For instance free educational apps)

[bawald...@gmail.com]

I took the summer course at UI and this same idea was brought up. We know textbooks have gone though some sort of review from both teachers and scholars on the subject of the text, but how do you know someone's open sources are valid? I like the idea and the potential of open education but I think the lack of peer review may be one reason why it is taking awhile for open education to catch on.