I would think that having materials focused on exactly what the course is about might help students do better on standardized tests. This is more likely with OER in that there is more instructor choice than with a textbook. On the other hand, I've learned a lot through browsing all the extraneous stuff that most textbooks offer, as I do looking around the Internet. As a learner, I like being immersed in a rich information field as long as there is clear guidance about the intended course outcomes.

For deeper learning, it’s the extent to which the learners become actively involved with the concepts, tools, and products that relate to the topic—learning by doing. OER offer much more in that respect. Not only instructors, but learners also can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the materials, which has a huge potential for deep, transferable learning.

In the end, your mantra of “It ain't what you do, it’s the way that you do it” always holds true, which makes strong educational research evidence so elusive. Maybe we need to look more closely at the “how” than the “what”.

Thanks Mary - I agree entirely. It's an excellent idea to involve students in building OERs. There are some risks, I think, because it can be a bit intimidating for those that are not confident about their work to contribute to a public project, though (on the bright side) it is a great way of building confidence, so (if we can support students to get over the hump) it could be very empowering. I feel a bit guilty about defaulting student-generated wikis that follow this pattern in my own courses to have permissions set to the closed group, precisely because of this concern. The Landing makes it possible for them to share more widely if they wish, but that can make for an incohesive whole if some is hidden and some is not. Maybe I should be braver in the next revision, or at least build in a publication process so the good stuff can, with students' permission, be shared.

And, yes, there is a big risk that greater efficiency could take away some of the richness of the experience, if not handled with sensitivity. Very much a case of 'how' mattering more than 'what' although one simple way to prevent it would be to avoid giving those standardized tests :-) Conversely, at least for the kinds of thing I teach, there tend to be lots of OERs available, which opens up the potential for exploring different ways of learning similar things, or at least seeing things in different ways. Without the cost constraints, OERs can support expansive as well as constrictive ways of learning.

Hi Jon,

Considering that we are in an age where the pace of change is outpacing traditional learning structures, I would embrace any open distance learning university that would have the courage to implement your ideas.

Best regards,

Mike

Jon, what does this mean :

"Meanwhile, thanks to our traditional course model, with its lack of feedback loops, we have till now mainly designed our teaching around quality assurance, not quality control: courses can take years to prepare and tend to be pretty well written but, for the majority, their success is measured by meaningless proxies that tell us little or nothing about their true impact and effectiveness."

in the context of....

...a quality assurance process that’s known as assurance of learning, i.e. design learning objective, test students on said objective, measure efficacy of test at meeting learning objective, intervention (adaptation of curriculum), then test again and periodically review learning objectives, and so forth. As a theoretical anchor, assurance of learning (a) does not interfere with academic freedom (b) systematically promotes ongoing reflection, (c) can be  informed by both learning analytics and IPAS, (d) presents a framework to encourage progress towards universal design, (e) inspires collaboration at the institution (system) level by sharing best practices.

As an administrative framework, assurance of learning relies on policy and compliance. But as a part of the fabric of the ecosystem it can be a highly adaptive, principled process...but is it too contrived???

Kelly

Thanks Kelly

I'm thinking of the old-fashioned and rather crude distinction between QA and QC, the former being about trying to make good stuff, the latter with ensuring it remains that way. QA gives good design, QC gives good adaptation. Both matter. Your description sounds like it heads in the right direction, inasmuch as it includes a bit of a QC process, as I understand it. I especially like the mention of reflection and inspiration for collaboration and sharing, though I worry greatly about "design learning objective, test students on said objective, measure efficacy of test at meeting learning objective, intervention (adaptation of curriculum), then test again and periodically review learning objectives, and so forth." It's not that it's always wrong but, even when it makes sense, it is nothing like enough, and it comes with incredibly high risks of missing the wood for the trees. More on that below.

While we do have a few checks and balances in place at AU, what we have traditionally done, and continue to do, is to rely far more on planned design than on adaptation. When it comes to make changes we use the crudest of indirect signals to guide us, especally in our self-paced courses - course evaluations (with sampling biases that make them worse than useless), submission frequency, marks, logins, key presses, page visits, test results, email/discussion exchanges, interactions captured in CRM tools, etc. 

The first and most obvious problem is that we don't normally feed it directly into adapting as we go, especially in self-paced courses. Despite having made a radical change to our course development policy that does allow for and positively valorizes adaptation on the fly, most courses go for 3 years or more without change. Compare that with the most dull-witted of traditional co-located courses, where professors can (if they are even half-good) adapt to student and subject needs minute by minute, and certainly tend to do so week by week. More than that, we do not have things like obligatory moderation of assignments and marking, or formal teaching observation processes, so the process is not very visible and not talked about enough, except when big changes come around. A few of us make it happen, but it is not the norm.

The deeper problem that worries me is that objectives-based targets and measures of the sort you describe are just a small part of the process rather than its major outcome, and can easily blind us to the bigger picture. There’s a risk (seen in schools and increasingly in universities the world over) that we might come to think that they are the goal, whereas they are at best signals along the way that we might be heading towards it. The expansive, life-changing, deeply interconnected nature of education has almost nothing to do with meeting objectives: it's about changing how we think, not just what we think about, and that is not easily captured by most of the metrics we use. I really like your mention of reflection and collaboration/cooperation because that is exactly what we need most. In traditional universities, that is the subtext beneath all the weirdly formal course boards and exam boards and is embedded in the routine teaching process. They can get away with (mostly) bad pedagogies and methods, like lectures, because quality control comes for free. All of which means we need to design the learning experience to make all of that more visible, and to use the strengths of online systems not to replicate the surface features (courses, assessments, objectives, etc), but to reveal the depths of traditional education.

One of the ideas behind how I design my courses - with reflection deeply and inextricably embedded - is to make more of the learning process visible, which not only helps students to connect and sustain their learning but also helps me to get a richer sense of what they are really learning (beyond the simple objectives) and how they are struggling. Better than that, it also helps them to do the same. There are certainly better ways but, given the constraints of the course format, it’s a start.

What we really need to do, though, is to let go of the whole concept of us making them do stuff, which is what courses, objectives, and associated accreditation are made to do. We should instead be thinking of ways to help people to achieve what they want to achieve. Ways of caring, ways of inspiring, ways of connecting, ways of providing goals. Above all, we need ways of guiding when guidance is needed, not because that is how we designed it. To do that we, quite literally, have to think outside the box. The box (the classroom, and all that follows from it, like course, objectives, assessments, teacher control, etc) is just one solution to the problem of education. It is probably the best compromise when faced with the constraints of physics we used to suffer, but it makes little sense for an online and distance institution.

Jon

Preach!

Pretty harmless, but preying on people with religion can have terrifying consequences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg (Youtube Link to John Oliver video).

The thing I like about badges/achievements is that they reward more than just a "winner." They can still make the recipients purr, but don't necessarily exclude others. However care must be taken not to cheapen them by offering them for trivial accomplishments.

Congratulations on your awards! Go ahead and purr.

Jim