Future Trends Forum: What's next with open learning? With David Wiley

OE Events
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Bryan Alexander is hosting a very relevant Future Trend Forum this week featuring @opencontent on the progress of the OER movement, including, but not limited to, the implications of Artificial Intelligence.

It’s always illuminating to hear David’s perspective, and we hope OEG Connect people tune in and share back here some highlights.

When: (your local time) 2023-05-25T18:00:00Z→2023-05-25T19:00:00Z
Where: Shindig! Join/RSVP https://shindig.com/login/event/oer2023

This week we’re returning to the topic of open education in the company of a leading practitioner and thinker. On Thursday, May 25th, from 2-3 pm EDT, we’ll be joined by Dr. David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning.

David is also President of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, Education Fellow at Creative Commons, adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University’s graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where he was previously a tenured Associate Professor, and Entrepreneur in Residence at Marshall University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation.

David has received several recognitions for his work, including an National Science Foundation CAREER grant, appointments as a Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a Peery Social Entrepreneurship Research Fellow in the BYU Marriott School of Business, and a Shuttleworth Fellow. As a social entrepreneur, he has founded or co-founded numerous entities including Lumen Learning, Degreed, and Mountain Heights Academy. In 2009, Fast Company named him one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.

He most recently taught IPT 693, Introduction to Open Education at BYU and MKT 485, Startup Academy at Marshall.

I plan on asking David how he sees open learning evolving. When will the majority of class resources exist in open form? How do open resources connect with other technologies, such as AI?

More importantly, you will have the chance to ask your own questions. After all, the way the Forum works is that all attendees can ask our guests questions, engage and collaborate with other leaders in education technology, and also invite friends and colleagues to join.

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That was quite useful!
(Only watched the recording today.)
Particularly enjoyed David “5R” Wiley’s strong agreement to the notion that we have a problem as a movement when OERs become an end in themselves.
What is happening with open learning? - YouTube

By the by, for the non-USers in here… what’s “CTR”? Or did I misunderstand what he said was the “gold standard” for assessment in the US?

The part which connected most directly back to his earlier work on OER permissions (aforementioned 5Rs, completed 9 years ago) is the part about the approach associated with Linus Torvalds:

Don’t ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.

That’s music to my ears as someone who’s been working in “LXD” (Learning Experience Design). Unlike the Instructional Design frameworks and models decried by Wiley, LXD is a practice which directly validates material (and activities!) empirically. And, yes, that work can help us actively target the following three dimensions instead of conceiving of them as “confounding factors”:

the teacher, the support that teachers may receive when they adopt OER, and instructional design.
On the Relationship Between Adopting OER and Improving Student Outcomes – improving learning (memex.social)

As for tackling systemic issues (including the whole way that formal education has been at the centre of social inequities for decades if not centuries…), there’s room for the Epistemic Justice part of Open Education. Decolonizing knowledge itself may sound like a separate process from “providing educational access” and “decreasing achievement gaps among students”. Through systems thinking, it’s fairly easy to notice that it’s part of the same movement and it can help make the system more appropriate for a “just world”.

It’s no Jedi mind trick. It’s an approach to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.