K12 Open Ed

Reflecting on my year of open – part 1

One of the nice things about doing some organized work on OER and open learning (including some with support from the Hewlett Foundation) is that it prompts me do reflect on my own work and thoughts regularly.

As this year comes to a close, here are some of my major areas of work and conclusions:

This year, we built the K-12 OER Community of Practice.
Results were mixed, and conclusions were many.
Advocacy for OER in K-12 continued with a few significant new thoughts, namely that OER is a very difficult adoption decision for districts (and much easier for states and individual teachers) and that open learning may be more important than OER.
Work on the Kids Open Dictionary continued and made some significant strides forward.

Over the next few days, I’ll write a blog post on each of these.

Demand, district adoption, and silver bullets

A few us have been pondering the question “How can we best advance the adoption of OER in K-12?” both online in this document and f2f at the Open Ed 14 conference.

As I’ve thought about this, a few conclusions I’ve come to are:

The demand problem is more significant than the supply problem.
There is currently a good amount of high quality, standards-aligned OER in K-12 with lots more coming online. For the most part, this supply is not being used as much as it could/should be.
The most challenging point in the adoption decision chain is at the district level.
K-12 adoption is a complicated process with decisions made at the state, district, and classroom teacher level. With regards to OER, many states have approved, recommended, and/or endorsed the use of OER. Similarly, most classroom teachers who know about OER think it is useful for their classrooms. With rare exception, though, districts have not adopted OER over similar commercial curricula.
The reasons for this are many. One is that commercial publishers spend a great deal of resources to support the adoption decision that OER publishers simply cannot match. A commercial purchase generates to significant profits to do things like court the district, make numerous pre-sale presentations, provide professional development, provide ongoing support, etc. This is nearly impossible for OER to do.
OER is not an “easy” decision for districts to make.
This point has been made to be my numerous educational leaders. On the one hand, it is the “no one-ever-got-fired-for-buying-IBM” effect, but there’s more to it than that.
As the below twitter exchange demonstrates, commercial publishers are willing to make silver bullet claims that OER cannot make. Of course, I and many others would maintain that no curriculum can guarantee academic achievement improvements (and in fact, I don’t think instructional resources are even the primary factor in determining achievement), but that is the promise that commercial publishers make. I don’t think OER can or should make this claim (though some in the OER movement seem to be going in that direction), but this is a key reason that it is very difficult for districts to choose OER.

So how do we answer the question “What are the highest leverage points through which K-12 OER use might be advanced?” It seems to me that there are two very different paths that we might take.

The first is to work harder on packaging an OER solution that better matches up to commercially published product. This may involve talking about the complexity of teaching and learning more elegantly as suggested above. It almost certainly needs to include a sales and support process for OER. It may require production of a glitzy line of ancillary products. It is likely an expensive proposition.

The second is to choose to compete less directly with commercial products and instead target those who are already disillusioned with the existing commercial approach to school. Focus more on open pedagogy. Empower teachers and learners more by building agency.

While this second approach is more appealing to me personally, I am not sure it will lead to more “mainstream adoption” in today’s educational environment. I suspect that those who are moving in this direction are already doing so, though OER might provide them with more tools to do so.

I hope that the tide in education turns so that the mainstream supports what many of us believe is a better learning environment.

Open and sharing as a choice

I recently had a short Twitter and blog conversation with someone about OER and the question “Why should all of the time that I spent developing this, be free for others to consume without some form of compensation for my time?”

Here in part is my response:

“The distinction [between OER and all the other free resources], worth noting I think, is that open educational resources are not only free, but are licensed in a way that they can be freely remixed and redistributed by others (with attribution). This is generally done under an open license like those from Creative Commons.

The reason this is important is that the owner/creator still owns the copyright to the materials. That being the case, they can still be compensated through advertising or even selling the material. Some of the ways creators of OER can be compensated for their work is by selling versions of it (especially printed versions or versions with other value added), seeking voluntary donations (this has been very popular in the entertainment industries and sometimes has yielded higher returns that just selling content outright), and selling services related to the materials (for example professional development).

Still the question remains – do you really want to give away stuff you spent a lot of time working on?

That is a question that each individual has to answer. I don’t think any of us who advocate for OER think that everyone should give their stuff away.

Instead, we want to make sure that people who want to give their stuff away know that using an open license is an option. It’s a way to get broader distribution and use of your materials if you were going to give it away anyway. A lot of people who post free stuff intend for people to be able to reuse and redistribute it, but the complexities of copyright and fair use get in the way.

Simply put, if you really want to share freely, putting a Creative Commons license on something is the best way to do that.

Also, many of us think that educational materials that are paid for with public dollars should be openly licensed so that they are freely shareable (but that’s another post!)

On the issue of whether it’s worth freely and openly sharing, I can say that from my personal perspective is YES. (I will say that it took me several years to reach this point.) By freely and openly sharing, I have gained so much, personally, professionally, and yes, even monetarily.

That’s just my perspective, but I thought I’d share it.”

Passion-driven learning

I am very excited to be convening the Passion-Driven Learning strand of the K12 Online Conference this year. This is an approach I believe deeply in.

We have an all-star line up covering vital topics such as genius hour, connected learning, and more. Several of these projects are ones I’ve been proud to be associated with this year.

Here is the schedule for the week. (Links will be added as the sessions air.)

Keynote Passion-Based Learning
Joy Kirr

Connected Learning Through Google Apps
Jennifer Bloomingdale

A Key to Interest-Based Learning
Paul Allison

Grab the MIC (Musical Integration Concept)
Kevin Cornell

Genius Hour Passion Projects
JoAnn Delaney

Connected Learners Need Connect Leaders
Donna Fry and Mark Carbone

Finding Your People
Cheryl Steighner

Trust and Transparency
Bart Miller

Moving From “Some Study I Used to Know” to Inquisitive Learning with Genius Hour & Passion Projects
Michele Haiken

Passion-Driven Learning in #clmooc–Supporting Teacher Agency in Making and Learning
Mallory McNeal and Anna Smith

An Introduction to Webmaker for Educators
Brendan Murphy

Web 2.0 Tools that will increase Creativity and Passion in Your Online Courses
Courtney Kofeldt

As always, all of these K12 Online sessions are open licensed and shareable and will be available indefinitely for you to view, use, remix, and share.

Thank you to everyone who contributed a session to K12 Online this year and for the good work you do all year!

Kids Maker Day 2014

This year’s local kids maker day is over, and it was a great success. The planned program is shown here.

When we hold this annual local event, we never know how many kids will come or what ages they will be. This year we started with about 10 kids. The youngest was 4 months (!….accompanied by a parent and several older siblings) and the oldest was 10. Over the course of the day, some of the younger kids left and others joined in.

We began with making name tags and having the kids introduce themselves to each other and then to the group. The kids typically hate having to do “public” introductions, and this year was no exception. Still, I think that doing this has long term value, and I even think it helped build relationships for the rest of the day. (Several of the kids didn’t know each other before.)

Then we moved on to the Marshmallow Challenge. I’d have to say this was the highlight of the day. Kids just loved it! Several adults even participated, and one of my favorite parts was when a parent has built a tower and as a child approached, she shouted, “Don’t bump it!”

We teamed kids in groups of 2 or 3, trying to mix ages and separate siblings and friends where it made sense. Every team who participated built a successful tower, and we learned lesson about collaboration, play, trying different things, iteration, and design under constraints.

After one round of the building with the formal rules, the kids wanted to do another round with new rules. These are the revised rules we came up with as a group:

Again, each group was successful in building a tower; some were taller than the previous round and some shorter. I think kids could have gone on with this all day, but other activities were calling!

We’d planned to do storytelling next, but altered our plans. At that point in the day, about half of the kids seemed too young to do the activity we’d planned, and several others had said they’d leave if we did storytelling. I hate to give in to demands and really wanted to do storytelling, but also wanted to have a successful day. I put it aside for the moment and hoped we’d return to it later (which we didn’t…this was one of the “failures” of the day. Comments? Advice?)

Instead, we went to the Cardboard Challenge. I’d planned for this to be one of the optional activities in the afternoon, but in looking at the group, I knew that everyone would want to do it. We have very little guidance other than “build something with cardboard,” and all the kids immediately came up with something they wanted to build. We ended up with a monster mask, a cat play house, a puppy house, an egg money collection box, a storage box, a ship, and a giant turtle.

After lunch, a few middle school students came in to teach us how to make duct tape wallets. What fun! The main instructor for this was a natural teacher/mentor. He gave just enough instructions and was so patient with even the littlest kids. He was flexible and acknowledged when someone came up with a good alternative way to do something. Just what you want in a teacher! Everyone ended up with wallets to take home.

Next up was jewelry making. While there were several options, the kids gravitated to the rainbow loom work with colored rubber bands. We didn’t buy the actual plastic loom, because we’d found these instructions for weaving with your fingers. This was a great activity. I think it worked particularly well with smaller kids (down to 4) and with kids who sometimes had a hard time focusing or persisting otherwise. There are some lessons there, I think.

We wrapped the day up with cooking. I’ve always wanted to do this, and when our facility added a kitchen this year, I was thrilled. We had a six year old teach us how to make biscuits, and he was awesome! So were the biscuits. It was fun for me to just hang back in the background and watch (and worry about the oven…nothing bad happened, of course). Afterwards, we ate biscuits with homemade jam and shared the leftovers with the adults. (There was a parallel adult-focused event taking place in the same building.)

Overall, it was a great day. Here are some observations and thoughts for next year:

Making is great.
Less structure and more flexibility is better.
Youth-led activities are awesome. (We brainstormed more of these for next year.)
I need to think more about how to bring in more storytelling and/or writing next year. (We’ve done DS106 Daily Create-style photo challenges in the past, and those were very popular, but I wanted to try something different.)