This is my learning reflection on the first session in the course “Open Content Licensing for Educators”, provided by Open Educational Resources University via WikiEducator.
The course started with brief material clarifying the basic concepts and ideas behind openness in education. Stephen Downes pointed out why sharing is so important factor in education and Desmond Tutu told why it is important to have organized action toward free and open education. I tweeted my own reflections, answered to the survey and contributed to the Google+ discussion about teaching as a vocation or profession by posting my own thought and commenting to others.
I work as an Educational technology specialist in University of Helsinki and I have worked in the field of online learning almost twenty years. I consider having relevant amount of knowledge about the importance of openness in education, as well as having practical skills in searching, producing, re-using, sharing and licensing open educational resources. I have also taught university’s teachers in these topics. However, I need to deepen my practical knowledge about open licensing. I am pretty familiar with licensing new content but I have also found certain difficulties while re-mixing content with different licenses (nc/non-nc, pd, gnu etc).
I am glad to see the growing efforts in opening the education, especially tertiary education. Nevertheless, I have found lots of difficulties in promoting openness in education. I think my primary substantial interest in this course is to develop and share ideas how to enhance openness in education, both globally and locally. How to motivate teachers to develop their attitudes toward more open culture of teaching? How to motivate teachers to share more? How to describe the immediate benefits of sharing to teachers? How to describe the theoretical and ideological framework behind open education? What are the essential practical skills that every teacher should acquire?
I am asking these questions because I see my own role primarily as a promoter and educator, which lead to my second motivation in participating this course. I am planning to lead this kind of course in Finnish later and I am waiting to get (and share!) ideas how to organize this kind of course myself. This model of connectivist MOOC feels very attracting although I could have some blended elements in my course too.
I found your post interesting Antero. I agree, that a key group we have to talk to in this debate are the teachers. This is particularly true in my own college. We have recently merged with two other colleges to form a new regional college, and we have huge amounts of internal resistance to the idea of sharing resources. And yet I would say that in Further/Vocational Education where I work there is less sense of ownership than in Higher Education. So there is a lot of work still to be done.
A very interesting post – and comment. I am interested in your experience of where the obstacles to sharing lie. Do you think individuals are unwilling to share, or do you think they are unsure whether they can share (i.e. what is the institutional policy on this)?
Thank you John for your comment! What do you think are the main sources of resistance? Why do they resist the idea of sharing? Is it the lack of knowledge of the benefits or based more on attitudes or something else?
Thank you Malcolm for your comment! I think there must be different obstacles for different people, some are unwilling to share, some are unsure and many of them just don’t have clear incentives to share their materials.
In many cases, we haven’t (yet) got institutional policies about open licensing. Teachers are usually being paid for their teaching only and they own their materials themselves, unless other is negotiated.
I also found your post interesting Antero – I have been involved in education in the secondary and tertiary sectors for many years and I also wonder how we get teachers to share more freely. Is it general apathy, lack of confidence or a fear that their work will be scrutinized ? There are no doubt many contributing factors.
Karen, I agree that there are several factors and I think we should first identify them in order to succesfully promote OER’s. There’s a lot of existing knowledge we can share in this course too, and probably there could be some scientific studies done on this topic too?