Teacher’s Time is Valuable

Colin de la Higuera and Camila Canellas

University of Nantes, France

|| OPEN EDUCATION GLOBAL CONFERENCE 2015 ||

The paper in a nutshell

• Creating quality OER is expensive in teacher’s time

• Failing to address the question can be a cause of failure

• Creating technology to address this issue should be a key challenge: let me show you some we are working on

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So, what’s new?

• This has been analysed with care since the beginning of OER times

• Why bother to write another paper (hear another talk) on this topic?

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• The fact that the question has been solved elsewhere is making the price even higher for the latecomers

• “Why pay the teachers for this? The Americans aren’t

doing it anymore. Surely this must mean that it is not a good idea”

• “This is just a natural evolution of the system: the time saved by not having to do photocopies can be used to prepare OERs”

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• Technology is making us want ever better OERs

• More technology seems to mean

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More quality resources

More time spent by the teachers

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• The enthusiasm of the promoters of OERs can be counter-productive

• “If I am prepared to spend my week-end preparing cool

resources, why can’t you?”

• “Hey, why is it that I have to prepare the OER and you get to publish a paper on it?”

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So, what’s well documented?

• A framework of issues proposed by Stacey & Rominger (2006)

• “Time” mentioned as the most significant barrier for not adopting OER (Hylén, 2005)

• The question of effort is a crucial one on the perception of OER production: teachers do not perceive OER as a means to save time (Masterman et al., 2011)

• A range of incentives have been identified by West & Daly (2014)

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Some possible consequences of opening your lectures

Material is made public

You may be filmed

Material should be impeccable

You have to solve copyright

issues

You are asked to enrich the

content

You are asked to sign agreements

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The usual solutions (when the problem is understood)

extra funding,

direct rewards

promotion of teaching

quality

adding support to

the teacher’s tasks

convincing the staff

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Two misconceptions

free

=

open

OER

=

technology

=

time saving

&

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About introducing technology

• Many initiatives aiming to produce technology

• For instance, the K4A supported « Opening up Slovenia » effort

• In Nantes, project COCo

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What are we doing wrong?

• Technology is introducing new constraints

• Technology should aim at making our life simpler

(our refers to the teachers)

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Two proposals we make

time-saving technology

crowdsourcing

metadata peer

evaluation

enrichment via quizzes

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Enrichment via quizzes

• The teacher builds a set of simple quizzes

• The learner reaches a quiz and is asked • To answer a question (self assessment)

• To vote for the question

• To propose an alternative question

• The system (by AB testing) runs a match between the teacher’s question and the one proposed by the teacher

• The goal is to end with better questions

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An idea

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The teacher builds a set of simple quizzes • The learner reaches a quiz and is

asked

• To answer a question (self assessment)

• To vote for the question

• To propose an alternative question

• The system (by AB testing) runs a match between the teacher’s question and the one proposed by the teacher

• The goal is to end with better questions

comin-ocw.org

video enrichment

CominOpenCourseware

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A final question

How do we convince the teachers that saving their time thanks to software does not necessarily oblige

to consider replacing them by machines?

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References

Cuban, L. (1996). Techno‐Reformers and Classroom Teachers. Retrieved November 27, 2014, from www.edweek.org/ew/vol ‐16/06cuban.h1

Hylén, J. (2005). Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges. OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. Paris. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/edu/ceri

Masterman, L., Wild, J., White, D., & Manton, M. (2011). The impact of OER on teaching and learning in UK universities: implications for Learning Design. International LAMS and Learning Design Conference, 135–144. Retrieved from lams2011sydney.lamsfoundation.org/docs/RP/Masterman_Wild.pdf

Schuwer, R., Kreijns, K., & Vermeulen, M. (2014). Wikiwijs : An unexpected journey and the lessons learned towards OER. Open Praxis, 6(2), 91–102. Retrieved from openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/116

Stacey, P., & Rominger, R. (2006). A Dialogue on Open Educational Resources and Social Authoring Models. In Open Education 2006 Conference Proceedings (pp. 107–115). Utah State University

West, Q., & Daly, U. (2014). OER Incentive Models Summaries. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from https://cccoer.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/oer ‐faculty‐incentive‐models‐2014.pdf

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