Three Days of Focus on Curricular Alignment, the Reusability Paradox, and Offline OER

@jamalex

Big thanks for your clarification, and ongoing commitment to keep things as open as possible.

I will let Fiji know how to dig deeper to find the respective licences for KA videos and point them to your platform.

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I really appreciate your comment with regards to Learning to share, and wanted to propose the following:

In my experience in South America, teachers “naturally” have a tendency to share with peers, especially younger peers. The mediated sharing that Information and Communication Technologies make possible, however, is something they find much harder to do. Though it might be about the technology, my informal observation is that the formality of proposing materials for others’ consideration creates a significant mental barrier. “My materials are not good enough” is the leitmotiv. The reference is the textbooks that have big (although unknown) names on their covers, the gloss of having editors pouring over, and a pinch of impostor syndrome work against the desire to share.

It was interesting for me to hear Hans De Four, creator of KlasCement, echo this observation in some measure: in Belgium, his platform is dedicated to teachers sharing classroom resources and it took a few years of learning to develop strategies to incentivize teachers to share with other teachers resources they had created that “might be useful”.

In summary, i think educational systems have to consciously think of and implement strategies to foster teacher-to-teacher sharing (including making sure teachers know of CC licenses, for instance). Of course, this might demand relinquishing some of the control and the top-down approach to resources sharing and adopting more of an experimental mindset… How many educational institutions do we know that would fit that description?

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Hello @paulstacey , regards and thank you and the OEG crew to support these necessary conversations.

Let me hang on to this idea of value, because its emerged in the curriculum alignment work and why I went back to the Reusability Paradox. I was amazed with the possibility to create these offline OER channels, bundling and sequencing OER at ease to meet the official learning outcomes, creating robust and extensive solutions, in our K-12 chilean-aligned channel ended aligning 2000 OER. But as I tried to see how this set could be used … many questions emerged: are there too many?, should we balance the number of OER per objective?, to what depth can we treat a learning objective?, this is more relevant to learners or teachers? So basically went back to the paradox and rethink the tradeoff: how can effective and quality OER also have impact in different contexts.

I totally agree that openness provides the end users the possibility of the 5R’s with OER or the collection of them to fit the best way possible their specific needs and context, so they can be effective. But also, the other side of the paradox, those looking to reuse to scale and create “cars” that can be effective and have positive impact.

And openness is also a great answer, as you could also modify, extend, curate, improve, etc. these larger sets of aligned OER. But to do that, and many more open practices, not only requires expertise and skills from users, but also needs
a flexible and trusting infrastructure to support, replicate, expand, design for remix, etc.

In this days of discussion we’ve talked about collaborative and participatory platforms (like the Kolibri Studio), digital content, open licensing schema, interoperable technical standards … all components to a (open) infrastructure to support the power of open in K-12. How can countries/communities count on such infrastructure? But maybe more important and difficult, how can this infrastructure be sustainable over time? Any thoughts you can share on that for the K-12 context? Thanks again!!

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I’m missing something basic about Kolibri.
I hope to install it on a community intranet offering wifi connectivity (the Nimble mentioned here) for users without internet connectivity.
Does the learner/end user need to download a mobile app to use it on a smartphone, or does Kolibri run in a browser?
If it requires a dedicated app, can the server be configured to allow downloading the app via the intranet, or does it have to come from the App/Play store - which requires an internet connection?

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Looks like it’s browser based, from its web site

To facilitate broad, low-cost adoption, the Kolibri Learning Platform is designed to run on as many devices and operating systems as possible, leveraging existing legacy hardware or low-cost off-the-shelf devices. This includes Windows, Linux and macOS. We’re also building the Kolibri Learning Platform to run standalone as an Android app.

I’m accessing the demo on my mobile device web browser

https://kolibri-demo.learningequality.org/

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@WayUpNorth Precisely as @cogdog said: in a wifi network, the devices (smartphone, tablet, some kind of computer) only need a browser to connect to the local Kolibri server (a legacy laptop, an old desktop, or a Raspberry Pi, for example).

The Kolibri installation can also be duplicated locally without an internet connection: this could be useful to share the app via a USB drive or directly from device to device, for example.

@Mackiwg - I stumbled upon your challenge WRT learning to share at the same time as I was installing KolIbri, the offline OER sharing platform. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the proposed curriculum alignment hub, and it’s potential usefulness in assisting with sharing capacity development. See https://blog.learningequality.org/curriculum-alignment-hub-cc975433d6a1

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Hi @Weblearning

That’s a very good question, and very timely as I’m working to assist the Pacific Small Island Developing States in the school sector to improve collaborative OER development combined with national OER repositories aligned with the curriculum. Hubs or authentic “Communities of Practice” are part of the solution but I don’t have authentic experience about how these will work in practice, at least in our context.

Currently I’m considering an open source approach of trying to find that “itch-to-scratch” - What are the itches teachers are scratching in their classrooms, and how does OER fit into that space as a potential solution. Building thriving OER communities in the K-12 area is a systemic challenge. For example, the elephant in the room is copyright. In many jurisdictions, the copyright of instructional materials produced by teachers belongs to the employer (School Board of Trustees, or Ministry) and teachers do not have the legal authority to apply open licenses!

The power of open source applications lies in the low barriers (an low risks) to try different solutions. If it doesn’t work, not much is lost because we can try other open solutions. At this stage, we are going to try a variety of approaches and see what sticks in a given context.

National curricula are valuable frameworks to organize OER initiatives. I also think that what is produced should be shared across multiple “repositories” and applications. In other words, thinking about the Internet as the repository with different hubs, applications etc working as nodes in the ecosystem.

Derek - what do you think? How do we grow authentic and active OER educators that are passionate about sharing. That is when the idea of sharing is bigger than the effort to do it.

Learning as we plod along in the open trenches :joy:.

Bula @Mackiwg! You have raised an interesting point. Below I have extracted Fiji’s Copyright Act 1999, subsection on 'Exemption from copyright infringement, which says that “the school supplies no more than one copy of the copied material to any student or staff member of that school”.

What implication does this have on copying and distributing “closed” educational resources by schools? My interpretation is that schools can copy “closed” resources and share one copy with students and staff. Suppose KA materials were not CC’ed, could we in Fiji copy and share KA videos in schools without infringing copyright?

Confused! Happy to learn your take on this.

Chhers.


Division 2 - Education
Exemption from copyright infringement

43.-(1) Copying by a school referred to in subsection (2) for the purposes of research or private study by an individual does not infringe copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, unless there is a collective licence available of which the school is or should be aware under which the copying can be done.

(2) A school referred to in subsection (1) includes-

  1. (a) a kindergarten;
  2. (b) a primary school;
  3. (c) an intermediate school;
  4. (d) a secondary school;
  5. (e) a special school.

(3) For the purposes of subsection (1) copying for purposes of research or private study means-

  1. (a) the whole or part of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is copied for supply to any student or staff member of the school;
  2. (b) the school supplies no more than one copy of the copied material to any student or staff member of that school; and
  3. (c) if any student or staff member is required to pay for a copy, the payment required is no higher than the cost of production of the copy together with a reasonable contribution to the general expenses of the school.

Bula @deepakvprasad!

Fiji has liberal copyright exemptions for education at the school level. It’s a pity that legislators did not extend these provisions to post-secondary education :sunglasses:.

I’m no lawyer, but the list of protections under the Copyright Licensing Agreements is where I imagine commercial publishing interests are regulated. The other area of potential confusion in a digital era, is what constitutes a single copy made by an individual. If a rich media object is hosted on a server - what counts as a single copy? Each time a student accesses the resource, does that add to the count? Not sure.

In my view, education exceptions should be used to the fullest extent possible under the law, and it may well be worth getting legal advice on what this means in a digital world. Fiji is definitely closer to the original intent of copyright, specifically an “Act for the Encouragement of Learning” under the Statute of Anne.

Thanks for sharing and look forward to increasing OER adoption in the Pacific.

Hi @Mackiwg,

Many thanks for your response. Yes, I agree; things become a little complicated when it comes to digital copying. I shared similar sentiments some 13 years ago in an article titled, Copyright law, the internet, and education: does Fijian copyright law work in the web environment? Since then, our Copyright Act has undergone some minor tweaks; clarification over digital copying would be helpful. I wish I were a lawyer. I may seek clarification from my AG’s Office.

I am looking forward to learning new things on this journey.

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Excellent post. Every word resonates. I train educators for creating MOOCs, Online courses etc etc and I have experienced the things @opencontent has spoken about. It is absolutely true that content experts do not have training in instructional design - that is where things begin to start going topsy turvy. Also, the mention of paradox of localization left me smiling due to its reality. I was just wondering- some loud thinking here- whether having a template would help people to follow the instructional design to develop OER? At least initially, before they get hold of the whole process and its working. The template could also point towards areas where localization could be included and where it should not.

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It looks like there was some effort to align OER to curriculum in India (@AjitaD pointed me here) via the National Repository of Open Educational Resources

https://nroer.gov.in/home/topics/

but last activity looks like 2015.

No! Resources get added into this every day. HUGE work done during the pandemic. See this. The resources are not arranged ‘latest first’ order, hence the confusion I guess. This is by the apex body for school education in India.
https://nroer.gov.in/home/e-library/

After the pandemic hit, an alternative academic calendar was launched within a month and subsequently in terms of weekly calendar in order to guide the teachers to mix off line activities with online teaching and resources. There is also a guideline called PRAGYATA to guide teachers regarding effective digital education and addresses the digital divide. Refer here under “important documents”.
https://ncert.nic.in/
These are my personal favorites.

And then there is DIKSHA App (ongoing) mapping the OERs to the curriculum across the country. Check here: https://diksha.gov.in/

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Thanks Ajita, yes the e-library has very active and a large amount of OER contributions, almost 20,000 items.

I was looking at just a specific part of the collection that was listed as OERs mapped to the national curriculum, as that was the approach that @wernerio shared in his work in Chile. I was anxious to see that this had been done elsewhere. I could only find dates by exploring the different categories, and it seems like this work was organized in 2015-2016.

curriculum

This was just from a quick exploration within the site.

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Hi, I wonder why it appears that way. Bcz that is not how it is. :expressionless: :unamused: