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Thanks for sharing this Richard, it’s a lot to take in but provocative. Can we get more information or perhaps find ways to organize discussion here? Some shared annotation? Organize some discussion sessions ??
Thanks, Alan, for your response. Sorry the paper is so long, but the editors kept asking me to include more examples! I assume that most of this audience would support the notion of making educational resources freely available and are familiar with most of the arguments and examples. My main question is what can be done to create and advocate to make a programme such as Plan E happen. I would also be interested in thoughts about what to make available - should this include assessments, should academic credit be offered and even whether students might find themselves mentors to help them through if they do not enrol in a university course? Could a review system be established to raise the standard of the materials and offer academic credit to those who publish and review materials? There are also a number of practical issues including the development of repositories that might include spaces for teaching and learning such as Open Ed Tech. Hope this helps.
This is such an amazing thought and initiative @Dickh. I also agree with @cogdog 's ask for a discussion. Few things that came in my mind on you paper is, 1. Developing countries and their public funded universities - how to mobilize them, compilation of their resources if available, are they of good quality, are they user friendly
- Local languages - Languages play an important role while learning at the school and also at the higher level. Producing open educational material in local languages can be a game changer.
Thanks again for sharing your paper. Looking forward.
The questions of course are huge! And perhaps it might help to break things down into smaller discussions that we can ask people to join into?
Frankly, I think that this is a discussion activity that just cries out for web annotation! I just added a first welcome, but so many of these questions seem best discussed in the context of your paper.
I have enabled a link that opens this paper with Hypothes.is enabled, so you can log in/create an account, and start annotating there.
Who is game here to add comments/questions attached to Richard’s paper? What is the best way to answer these vast questions?
Join the annotation of Plan EI don’t think nine pages in PDF is that long.
Hi Richard and all,
Thank you for sharing this paper, Richard! I agree that many folks here would support many aspects of this. I wanted to share that BCcampus in British Columbia, Canada has an open collection that includes textbooks and other OER, but also whole course packs that include many aspects of entire courses (which is something mentioned in the article I believe).
One concern, as you also note, is copyright/intellectual property. Where I work, faculty own the copyright in their course materials, and it is very difficult to enact policies that would require them to share those materials (there was an attempt at one a few years ago with a lot of controversy and eventual scaling back of the policy to some degree). So that aspect can be difficult I’m afraid.
Those are a couple of early thoughts I have!
Thank you again to Alan for encouraging responses to the Plan E for Education and for the helpful suggestions from Kundan and Christina and others who have posted. I must admit that I am disappointed that more of the OEG community do not seem to have embraced the notion of trying to find a way for some form of mandated open access to educational resources produced in publicly funded universities, as discussed in the paper. Christina suggests that there would be support for this, but how to put it into action?
Well, Richard, I would not make a leap to disappointment of the OEG community, which are mostly individual practitioners plus some people of midlevel influence in their organizations.
I would guess it’s hard to imagine how this could be “mandated” or who can exert this leverage. It took decades for the UN to get to an OER Recommendation, right? Not to be dashing any hopes here, this is a first time for many to hear of this, and we just started trying to raise some awareness. I’m happy to talk about organizing some more focused discussion, what can individual people do?
Thanks again, Alan, for your comments and support. I was trying to use Plan S where those who fund research require open publication as an example to create a similar environment for educational resources - building on all the wonderful work on OER and OEP to which members of this group will have contributed. I know it is a big ask and would take a long time. But I would value any thoughts about whether this is worth pursuing and if so who might advocate for this and how? The OEG community would be the most informed group anywhere about open education, hence my hope for input - in any case I am most grateful for the opportunity to raise awareness.
Noting this recent, related article by Richard in The Conversation
My plan would require open online sites to host educational materials produced by academics. These would need to be moderated or curated and published under an open access license.
It would include a peer review system for educational materials like the one already used for research publications. Academics could get credit for publishing, updating or reviewing resources and the publication of education output would be included in the university metrics.