Posts by Martijn Ouwehand
Open Education Awards for excellence 2018
Today the Open Education Consortium announced the winners of the 2018 Open Education Awards for Excellence, in the categories of open resources, tools & practices. I’m very excited in general about all of this years winners. So congrats to all! Most of all I am very proud to be able to share that with todays announcement TU Delft received its second Open Education Award of 2018, for our efforts in integrating openness in the TU Delft Strategic framework 2018-2024.
Open Education Award for Open Policies
This award illustrates our commitment as a university towards openness, not only in education but in the broad range of activities we aim to achieve in the coming 6 years.
Open Aspects TU Delft Strategic Framework 2018-2024, CC BY TU Delft
During the Open Education Week 2018, we organised a succesful Open Education Seminar, where all TU Delft participants actively discussed what next steps could be to continue bringing openness to everyday practice even more.
For me, this award also reflects how openness has grown towards a stronger maturity in the last 10 years. In 2007 TU Delft started its first steps in open education. Looking at what we achieved in the past almost 11 years https://ocw.tudelft.nl/10-years/ this award and our efforts towards integrating openness in all layers of our organisation makes me proud.
Educator Award for Felienne Hermans
And earlier this year the individual award winners were announced. Felienne Hermans will recieve the Educator award for her efforts in opening up access to programming education. To be honoust, this almost needs no introduction. The Open Education Consortium press release says enough. Congrats Felienne!
OE Global 24-26 April
With just about a month to go, we are excited to get closer and closer to the OE Global conference, which we may host this year. Looking forward to a great conference, where amongst others the awards will be handed over to the rightful owners.
OE Global 2018: call for proposals opened
As you might have seen or heard, the Open Education Consortium and TU Delft will host OE Global 2018 conference at TU Delft Netherlands between 24 and 26 April 2018. We are exited to announce that the theme will be Transforming Education through Open Approaches. The website is now live and the call for proposals is now open.
“The Open Education Global Conference is where the world meets to discuss how opening education helps achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world.”
Call for proposals
The call for proposals enables you to submit proposals to offer ‘presentations‘, ‘panel sessions‘, ‘action labs‘ and ‘poster sessions‘, and there is a journal publication opportunity in the open access journal ‘Open Praxis’. Proposals need to fit tracks mentioned below. Learn more at http://conference.oeconsortium.org/2018/call-for-proposals/
Conference tracks:
- Open Connections
Connecting different worlds of Open, such as open access, open science, open source software; strengthening our reach and increasing impact through collaboration. - Open Education Research
Research on practices to mainstream openness in education; evidence of impact, studies of educational transformation using open modalities. - Innovation through opening traditional practices
MOOCs as an accelerator for open & online education, opening teaching practices through open textbooks, openly licensed student work as OER. - Policies & strategies for Open Education
Setting priorities and conditions for mainstreaming Open Education, designing effective policies and strategies, connecting open education policies to larger policy movements such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Open Government Partnership. - Institutionalizing Open Education
Intellectual property arrangements at schools and universities; reward and recognition systems; institutional conventions; disciplinary norms; types of in-service training for Open Education; impact on hiring practices; challenges and barriers for mainstreaming openness; openness as a tool for community outreach, enhancing leadership in open education. - Tools & Technologies for Open Education
Supporting the development and use of tools for OER production, hosting, use and remix, authoring OER, conventions for tagging OER, hosting derivative works, citation conventions for derivative works, standards for remixable formats. - Open Educational Practices/Open Pedagogy
New approaches to teaching and learning based on openness, personalization of education, OER-enhanced teaching, facilitating informal learning with open resources, course redesign with a focus on open. - Connecting Open Education to formal education
Accelerating adoption of open education, recognition and rewards for open education adoption, alignment of open education values to institutional mission, accreditation of open education, recognition of learning through open means. - Student perspectives
Student-led initiatives to advance open education and research, impact of open for students, student perceptions of open education, students as open education leaders.
Impressions OE Global 2017
The last day of the Open Education Global Conference has just gone past. So it is time to reflect on what I’ve learned those days. To start off, the conference took place in an amazing venue and the organization was very well done. Compliments to the organizers!
2017 is the year in which the Capetown Declaration of OER celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. For me, running towards the conference, this raised high expectations, expecting to see what the Open Education movement has accomplished since 2007 and to discuss what the future holds. And this did take part in the closing panel discussion on the last day of the conference, where many interesting new directions were discussed.
2 years ago, at the Open Education Global Conference in Banff, David Wiley made a plea for rethinking the movement. Back then, as I recall, he pointed out that the first period of the open movement was heavily aimed at creating and sharing OER. But although this ambition has been and still is very important, this should not be the end goal. In the end OER and Open Education are means to work towards actually transforming education, making it more accessible, more global, more effective (not only from the cost perspective) and more open. Thus, I remember him pleaing for thinking about the next step in the open education movement.
Moving from OER to Open Education in all its aspects, including MOOCs, has been an answer we saw happening already back then, two years ago.
But now, I think this year the community showed that we have listened. This year, both in the keynotes, in the research tracks, education tracks and policy presentations, such as Cable Green’s vision on next steps for Creative Commons, it struck me that Open Educational Practices and Pedagogy were central to many of the talks and discussions I participated in, or would liked to have participated in. Although definitions on these terms are still developing and so far hard to dot down – where David Wiley and Bronswyn Hegarty have already provided interesting (but not the only) viewpoints – the common ground of applying open aspects to education was clearly visible.
This provides an interesting starting point for the upcoming year. And with the current Year of Open promoting openness in all its facets, I have gotten quite excited about what is to come. Hopefully in the next year we will see not only a broader application of Open Educational Practices and Open Pedagogies, but also an expansion of our open values to collaborations with all other open fields, suchs as research, data, software, policy, etc.
It appearently proved hard to get to that point this year. Perhaps 2017 was just a bit to early and the Year of Open still needs some traction. The joint approach from open practices and pedagogy and broader cross collaborations on openness, might just hold the key to actually mainstreaming Openness in the fields we work for.
Let’s see where the movement is going. And let’s discuss more about this at the next Open Education global Conference, where we are incredibly honored to welcome you at Delft University of technology.
TU Delft Year of Open
“The world is facing challenges that our university of technology alone cannot meet.” With these words, Rector Magnificus Karel Luyben announced the TU Delft Open Science programme at the Dies Natalis 2016. Now, in 2017, the year that the Open Education Consortium has declared ‘The Year of Open’, we are taking another step forward. The aim is to raise awareness among scientists, lecturers, administrators, and students about the importance of open science.
In 2016, the focus on open science – that is, making scientific knowledge accessible online to all levels of society free of charge – led to the formulation of the open access policy and the creation of a data framework policy (in other words, policy for research data management). Events like the Open Education Week, the Open Access Week, and the launch of the open science course, helped the ideas behind open science to become more firmly established and integrated.
This year, there will be another full open science programme that you too can take part in. Examples include the Open Education Week in March, the launch of the open science course in June, the ten-year anniversary of OpenCourseWare, and the Open Access Week in October.
So keep your eyes and ears open and regularly check the website for all the great things that will be happening as part of The Year of Open.
A global perspective
The Year of Open is a global focus on open processes, systems, and tools, created through collaborative approaches, that enhance our education, businesses, governments, and organisations, organised by the Open Education Consortium. At its core, open is a mindset about the way we should meet collective needs and address challenges.
Communities around the world are bringing open practices to many different fields, such as open source software, open government, open data, and of course open education. Open represents freedom, transparency, equity and participation. When something is openly created and released, the intent is for others to use it, contribute to its development and make it better for everyone, whether that’s adding more features or information, or finding errors and fixing them (source). Learn more about the global Year of Open
Toolkit Workshop Implementing Open Education
Last year Robert Schuwer and me developed a workshop to stimulate teachers to think about how to implement elements of open education in their daily educational practice. Based on the workshop we created a toolkit including all the documents we used, enabling you and others to build on and offer the workshop in your own context. We encourage you to use, adapt the toolkit and offer the workshop. And obviously we would love to hear your input!
We will present our experiences during Open Education Global in March 2017 and hope to see you there!
Below you’ll find Robert’s blog providing a bit more context (CC BY Robert Schuwer):
“Open educational resources, open online courses (eventually “massive”) and open tools like blog, twitter and open forums offer a potentially rich source to use in education. It enables active learning and a more tailor-made approach of education. When teachers are aware of the opportunities open online education can offer, they are able to make an informed choice to use them optimal when designing a course. To enable this, basic knowledge of the many manifestations of openness in education is needed. In the end, their range of teaching methods is enlarged.
To realize this, together with Martijn Ouwehand (Delft University of Technology) under the umbrella of the SURF SIG Open Education, we have developed a workshop targeted at teachers who are interested in applying forms of openness into their lectures.
The objectives of the workshop are to raise awareness of the opportunities of openness and how to integrate them to achieve the optimal learning experience for the students. Open educational practices offers a base to connect openness to the daily practice of a teacher; this workshop tries to give the ideas more flesh and blood.
The workshop offers two approaches of how to use forms of openness in course design:
- Reuse of open learning materials or open courses. This reuse can range from just reusing the idea behind a specific OER (not all 5R rights are necessary for this aim) to reusing reworked and remixed OER (all 5R rights are necessary)
- Expand openness to open tools and open platforms, using an open pedagogy. For this workshop we have adopted a revised version of the definition of open pedagogy by Hegarty.
This workshop was organized twice in 2016 under the umbrella of SURFacademy. Feedback from the participants was used to improve the resources of the workshop. This has resulted in a toolkit. The toolkit can be used by those interested in organizing this workshop in their own institution.
The toolkit consists of the following resources:
- A script. This contains all information needed to organize the workshop (available as .pdf, .docx and .odt)
- A course manual “Basics of open”. This manual is intended for self-study a basic course on openness in education (available as .pdf, .docx and .odt)
- Slides “Workshop Implementing open education”. These slides can be used in the workshop (available as .pptx)
- Two inspirational models.
All resources are published under a CC BY license. The toolkit is available in both Dutch and English and can be downloaded from here.
We intend to regularly update the toolkit, based on feedback of users. Feedback can be provided using this form.
We hope this workshop will add to widening adoption of forms of open online education by teachers.
Blog text CC BY SA Robert Schuwer: http://robertschuwer.nl/blog/?p=1435
Open Onderwijs: Stimuleringsregeling en workshop
Vandaag zijn zowel de stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs als een workshop rondom de inzet van open leermiddelen in onderwijs gelanceerd.
Stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs
Vandaag heeft het Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap een nieuwe ronde binnen de Stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs gelanceerd. Het is goed om te lezen dat er deze keer meer aandacht lijkt te bestaan voor projecten waarin bestaande leermiddelen worden hergebruikt met als doel de kwaliteit en doelmatigheid van onderwijs te verhogen. Hiermee wordt het m.i. mogelijk de ware kracht van Open Onderwijs te laten zien. Projecten kunnen tot 15 december worden ingediend. Ben je geïnteresseerd in de mogelijkheden op dit gebied, lees dan nog even verder…
Workshop Open onderwijsvormen toepassen voor docenten en onderwijsondersteuners (22 augustus & 13 oktober)
Daarnaast organiseren Robert Schuwer (Fontys Hogeschool) en ik namens de Special Interest Group Open Education na het zomerreces een workshop, waarin we docenten willen ondersteunen om de kansen die open onderwijs biedt te benutten in het (campus)onderwijs, zoals (her)gebruik en aanpassing van bestaande leermiddelen en studenten in contact brengen met een open community middels activerende werkvormen. In de workshop informeren we de deelnemers over deze kansen en dagen we hen uit om deze kennis toe te passen in een eigen lesontwerp (met zogenaamde Open Educational Practices als resultaat). De workshop duurt maximaal 1 dag en wordt 2 keer aangeboden, namelijk op 22 augustus en 13 oktober, maar kent een maximum van 20 deelnemers per keer.
Deze workshop richt zich in eerste instantie op docenten die meer willen bereiken met het onderwijs dat zij verzorgen. Onderwijsondersteuners zijn natuurlijk ook welkom. Daarnaast zorgen we er ook voor dat de opzet en de materialen van de workshop beschikbaar komen, zodat onderwijsondersteuners de workshop zelf kunnen toepassen binnen de eigen instelling.
De workshop kan erg interessant zijn om je te oriënteren op de mogelijkheden van (her)gebruik van bestaande open leermiddelen, bijvoorbeeld in voorbereiding op de stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs. Schrijf je dus snel in. het aantal plekken is beperkt.
Open Education Week 2016: Where to go?
During the Open Education Week (March 7 – 11), we will organise several workshops and an Open Education Seminar at Delft University of Technology, where you will learn more about the basics of Open Education, how to connect and/or integrate Open Education in formal education and how you could use open education to increase the learning experience for your campus students.
I can imagine that you do not have time to visit all the events. So, to help you make a better choice in what events to visit, here is a short overview:
Learn about the basics of Open Education
Would you like to know more about what Open Education is and what sets it apart from online education? Then we’d recommend to register for:
- Action Lab: getting started with Open Education – Monday, March 7th, 14:00 – 16:00h
- Open Cinema – Wednesday, March 9th, 10:00 – 11:00 / 12:00 – 13:00 or 15:00 – 16:00h
Learn more about connecting and integrating Open Education in formal education
Would you like to learn how you could use open education to increase the quality of your course, how to enhance the learning experience of your students or what plans the university has in this area, we’d recommend to register for:
- Action Lab: Create your own course design – Tuesday, March 8th, 14:00 – 16:00h
- Open Education Seminar & Debate – Thursday, March 10th, 14:00 – 17:00h
Learn more about options to make your own recordings
- Visit the New Media Center – Monday, March 7th or Tuesday March 8th, 10:30 – 12:00h
We hope to see you there!
Trend Report Open & Online Education 2015
This week we the Dutch Special Interest Group Open Education published a new Trend Report on Open & Online Education. It was launched during the annual SURF Education Days conference (Netherlands). This year I (co)wrote 2 articles and participated in the editorial board.
In ‘Opportunities to embed open & online education in campus education‘ Judith van Hooijdonk (Zuyd University of Applied Science) and me describe which trend we see in Dutch Higher education concerning reuse of OE(R), and more importantly we describe a number of barriers teachers (seem to) experience preventing them from reusing OER in formal education.
During a master class centred around the trend report (during the Education days), we started the discussion how we could overcome these barriers to stimulate the reuse of OE(R) in formal education, and at TU Delft we will continue to work on this challenge.
Also, with Robert Schuwer (Fontys University of Applied Science) and Nicolai van der Woerdt (Radbout University Medical Center) I participated in an article on ‘Connecting different forms of openness: seeking a stronger value proposition‘. In this article we explore different forms of openness, such as open research and open source software. We believe that openness only has a shot if we implement openness in different ways towards an open ecosystem where one strengthens the other.
It was great working on the trend report again and hopefully it provides useful insights to you and others.
Open Education global 2015
Two weeks ago, April 22-24, I attended the annual Open Education Global Conference in Banff, Alberta. I went there for a couple of reasons. It was a great opportunity to share out experiences at TU Delft Online Learning on Open & Online Education with the Open Education community, but also to experience the current status of Open Education Worldwide.
The things I did…
We started the conference on Tuesday, where Willem van Valkenburg and me offered a big part of the Pre Conference Workshop ‘Getting Started with Open Education – a crash course on starting an open education project’. It is always great to help other institutions get their projects going, based on our own experiences. I noticed that, in contrast to the same workshop we organised last year, the participants were a lot further in the process of starting up an open education project.
On Wednesday I shared our experience in how we handle(d) sublicensing our DelftX MOOCs while at the same time sharing our MOOC contents under an Open License. It was a tough nut to crack, but we managed. And I got quite some responses on my presentation as well, like:
“Though Provoking work fr @gouwehand in tension beta. revenue generation & Creative commons license i#MOOCs #oeglobal” – @fieldingGrasty
“Great Presentation from @Gouwehand on breaking down the open and non-open components that make up MOOCs #oeglobal” – @sunnywidmann
Lastly, I took part in the Action Lab on MOOCs, Where Willem shared our experiences with MOOCs.
And oh yeah, we we have been awarded no less then 3 Open Education Awards for Excellence, which make us proud! Unfortunately not all winners were able to attend the Award ceremony, but we will make sure that the awards will reach them – and give them (Alexander de Haan, Jaap Daalhuizen and David Abbink and their course teams) all the credit they deserve.
My key take aways
At first I found it hard to put my finger on what was the current state of affairs around Open Education. But now that the conference is over and there has been some time to reflect, I came up with four take aways from this year’s conference:
- As I mentioned last year, the Open Education movement seems to have reached a steady level of maturity. I’ve attended quite some presentations where the more advanced issues were tackled, like how to deal with self learners who want to earn college credits for open education achievements. There were not a lot of start up project presentations that I’ve seen. This is a good thing to notice, but does raise the question what’s next.
- ‘MOOC’ is no longer a dirty word to use in the Open Education Community. Last year the OpenCourseWare Consortium changed its name to Open Education Consortium, since the scope has changed worldwide. MOOCs back then were considered different, but now seem to have been embraced as one of the ways to empower learners to learn. Which is a good thing! Still, the ‘O’ which should stand for ‘Open’ is still a thing… ‘Open MOOCs’ seemed to be a normal term, which is odd. Still, the ‘O’ of Open is not easy, considering my presentation.
- There is a need for Open Education practices. I think during his keynote speech Dirk van Damme nailed the message, which is supported by David Wiley in his blog: Why do we want everyone to share there educational resources? And why do we feel a need to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute educational resources? It was all meant to support and empower learners to learn, learn more and in a better way. Perhaps we miss that part sometimes as we’re all busy in the process of getting to that point. But we shouldn’t forget what we’re doing it all for.
- At TU Delft Online Learning, we’re doing the right things, in the right way. I’m not the bragging type, but TU Delft Online Learning is doing something right. We’ve been awarded for 3 awards, with (after a raw count) brings us to 10 in total during the past 5 years the Open Education awards for Excellence have been issued. We showed that we have a lot of experience to share and that we have an organisation, vision and strategy to really make an impact.
Next year the conference will take place in Krakow, Poland. I wonder if we’ll be able to share or learn from experiences with Open Education Practices.
About the added value of Open Education…
In Open & Online Education we see a constant struggle between ideological perspectives on increasing access and opening up education by lowering boundaries on the one hand and the urge for a sustainable business model on the other. In that sense, I’ve been involved in this discussion for our MOOCs recently and am a firm believer that (passive, singular) content (without added value) cannot be monetised (in most cases) – you must have noticed the nuance ;).
Obviously, the article in Wired got my attention with this title: “Why Free Is Not the Future of Digital Content in Education”. As you might have guessed, I do not agree (and after reading the article I still don’t). But it is good to learn from other points of view.
The article argues that the price asked for content will not go down to zero when digitised, since it will still generate added value (but in other areas than the content itself). I think terms like ‘content’, ‘free’ and ‘added value’ are key here and need more nuance.
Fred Mulder and Ben Janssen (2013, pp. 36-42) developed the 5 Components Open Education model, where content, learning services and teaching effort apposed to learner demands and employability/capabilities development are considered different elements in (open) education. The level of openness on each element provides an open fingerprint, where the levels of openness in different elements can vary.
Another element which plays a part in me disagreeing with the article in Wired is the added value which influences pricing. In my opinion, content as is, has very limited added value, unless it is incredibly good, or unique, etc. I too use Spotify to shuffle through songs, but I also still buy CD’s. Simply because the physical shape, artwork, collection of songs in a certain order, etc have added value to me.
I think the comparison between the music industry and education is in this sense not so very far off. The added value in education does not so much lie in the content, but in the experience, which is the result of a combination of mostly learning services, teaching effort and learner demands. The added value lies in other elements than content – and that’s what is read in the Wired article as well: it’s the experience in the gaming industry which is interesting, not so much the game itself.
So yes, after reading the article on Wired, I still believe content can be offered for free, since the added value is somewhere else. Which might mean that elements in that experience could be monetised. But then we enter a new discussion on open sustainable business models.
This struggle will be part of my presentation at the Open Education Global Conference in April. See you there?