[Open-education] OER Quality?

Fri Sep 25 18:39:43 UTC 2015

Paul:

S?ren and Alex have raised an interesting issue - but one with a sectoral and indeed a transatlantic divide.
Quite likely. Got similar interactions between France and Quebec, for instance. (More on the Quebec case, below.)

Something might be said about contexts which allow for (or even give value to) "roughness" and those in which the highest standards of quality are essential. Still, one could argue, both types of contexts can be found in diverse locations and sectors.

The following is too rough and ready, and probably controversial, to be a blog posting, but it could become one if felt useful.
Yes, please!

I, and I suspect many others, including in quality agencies, would say that it is reasonable to apply similar approaches to OER used within non-accredited programmes (like open MOOCs) ? if only because one might want to derive an accredited course from it later, or to accredit (via prior learning) the learning outcomes of the course, at a later stage. But this is more arguable and not mandatory.
We may be touching something, here. Without being fans of strict boundaries, we may want to divide up "education" (or, at least, learning) between more "informal" and more "formal" dimensions. MOOC hype has a lot to do with making that massive courses part of the most formal of programmes. Yet, interacting with Downes gets one to realise how much he cares about learning beyond programmes. So do Cormier and Siemens.

Something similar happens with Open Badges.
http://www.vteducation.org/en/laboratories/open-badges-education

Again, cutting a long second story short, the ENQA Standards and Guidelines encourage national quality agencies to focus on the quality of the PROCESS that institutions use to ensure high quality courses, not on CONTENT  - thus in these courses quality of content is one aspect, but usually just a small one.
Which can allow for a lot of freedom, but may still get us to "hit a wall", in the end.

More specifically, we could imagine using all sorts of material with learners, especially in Higher Education. If learners' critical thinking skills are sufficiently developed, it may even be easier to start from questionable content that we take apart with them. There's some deep pedagogy happening when we do this type of work.
Nothing prevents this from being part of a high quality process. Yet if assessment of process quality presupposes a narrow model ("can write a five-paragraph essay"), it may be difficult to fit the most creative process in a tight box. (Quebec's system has both some very narrow boxes and some very loose ways to go around them.)

We have yet to say much about learning happening outside of courses. Which is among the major trends affecting pedagogy, isn't it?

In networking courses at MSc level we encourage students to explore standards sites and vendor and trade association sites, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia entries.
Isn't some of this happening much earlier in a learner's educational career, in some contexts? Some elementary school projects can be described in the same way, at least in Quebec.

The situation in the US is somewhat different, despite the regional accrediting bodies, but I am not an expert in these.
This might help:
http://asn.jesandco.org/

In Canada, it is very different, since universities appear in reality to be self-accrediting.
To an extent. In Canada, we don't use an accreditation system as they do in the US. But there are many other controls involved, from provincial programmes (as in Quebec's CEGEP system, where I work) to the complex world of "Prior Learning Assessment".
http://capla.ca/

In other education sectors (like K-12) the above discussion does not apply ? things re quality are on the whole completely different, and in my view usually pretty disorganised and/or very traditional (e.g. ignoring OER and MOOCs altogether).
Yet it could be a neat way to bring them back.

Despite fears of regimentation, UNESCO reports make it clear that in most advanced countries (though not all) institutions and even individual teachers within them have considerable autonomy in what they use for teaching resources and how they use them, even if there is (or is supposed to be) a national curriculum.
Good to know. Might it come from a move to more "bottom-up" structures? Or attention to emerging standards?

Or am I off?

- - -
P.S.

To provide a bit of context (almost a disclaimer). I work as a technopedagogue for a non-profit in Quebec's "CEGEP" system. (The acronym stands for "colleges for general and professional education", roughly translated.)

This system distinguishes Quebec from the rest of North America because colleges are post-secondary education for both pre-university and vocational programmes. In addition, Quebec's educational system from elementary schooling to CEGEP has been competency-based for nearly twenty years. CEGEP programmes and competencies are set by the ministry of education (until recently, the ministry of "superior teaching", i.e. higher education).

Prior to my work in the CEGEP system, I've taught at the university level in Indiana, Massachusetts, Texas, New Brunswick, and Quebec.

A significant portion of my current work has to do with Ceres, a collective catalogue for OERs (and other "learning and teaching resources") relevant to this context.
http://ceres.vteducation.org/?lang=en

This catalogue's resources are indexed through Normetic, an application profile based on the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. Because of the particularities of Quebec's CEGEP system, it has been necessary to find ways to associate ressources with specific reference models which make sense in this very context. For instance, some college disciplines only afford rough equivalencies with existing programmes elsewhere. One of the main innovations in Ceres is that an inference engine allows the catalogue to return related resources indexed through another classification, such as Dewey.

It might not be surprising but our work has a lot to do with international and province-specific standards. We work closely with a standards workgroup, headed by our coordinator (who also heads a steering committee for ISO Canada).
http://www.gtn-quebec.org/

So, we work in exactly the kind of world in which international standards for quality assurance are extremely meaningful. The very existence of Ceres comes from a need to ensure that resources themselves may respond to certain criteria, in specific contexts. For instance, we're exploring accessibility in many ways, including WCAG.

Yet, my own personal approach is much more informal, organic, freeflowing, iterative, and collaborative. Trained as an ethnographer (and inspired by cognitive anthropology), I get fascinated by local classifications, including "folksonomies". On occasion, some informal labels can stabilise enough to become part of full taxonomies. Neat process, allowing for much agency and the type of "culture of consensus" we discuss in African Studies.

The process, to me, relates to two things which have more to do with the rest of Canada than with Quebec: common law and language use. Quebec has its civil code but common law dominates other jurisdictions on the continent. Quebec also has its centralised French-language body (OQLF) but is surrounded by Anglophones for whom language rules come from usage. Quebec also has strict guidelines coming from its capital, but I may be more in tune with what happens outside of silos.

All this to say (!), I may understand the value of standards but I hope that they can emerge through our work instead of being dictated from above.

The case of/for HTML5 is a different yet very-neat example.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/group-rules-web

— Alex

--
Alex Enkerli, Learning Technology Advisor
Vitrine technologie-éducation http://www.vteducation.org/en
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