Global Learning Portal Guest

It seems self-evident that the potential for professional networking and collaboration to find and create new teaching materials is huge. A teacher of mathematics, who, a few years ago, might have been mostly limited to contact with half a dozen people working in his specific area now has the whole profession a mouse-click away. Very simple tools can be used to create, adapt, mix existing materials and fit them in to specific teaching situations.

Against this backdrop of vast new possibilities, a number of repositories have emerged, facilitating open access to teaching and learning materials, courses, learning objects and tools to create them. Many of these are known to GLP users and referenced on this site. The excitement is there; the desire on the part of a number of non-profit providers and governments to facilitate teacher professional development and networking is strong.

But, in spite of the buzz, and the logic of the approach, the supply and the demand are still not quite matched. Numbers of teachers using sites offering learning resources are still not high compared to the numbers of practicing teachers; teacher professional networking is relatively modest and certainly has not crossed borders to the extent some visionaries hope.

The Study

With this in mind a group of a group of like-minded partners, GLP, Education.au, The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), and Mindset Network, collaborated in 2008 and 2009 on a small study to look at what constitutes quality and versatility in open education resources. In other words, what makes materials easy to use in a variety of contexts, and how can one make them available in such a form as to increase uptake?

Each partner reached out to teachers in its constituency and asked them to upload materials they felt could “travel well”. With this store of some 150 learning materials, the group then brought 27 of the original participating teachers from eight countries together for a seminar to examine the materials, discuss their features, and try to propose some simple criteria that they would apply when assessing the usability of materials. They were also asked about how they search, how they decide what to use, how they use materials found on line, and how they collaborate.

Teachers and Open Educational Resources

The results are not entirely surprising. Teachers, like other Internet users, make very quick judgments about the value of resources they locate. When they do locate a trusted source, or a trusted group, they are loyal. Those who establish professional collaboration on-line stick with it, and are pleased with the results. They welcome guidance and tools that can help them develop their materials.

On the whole they prefer technologies and software that have several purposes and that do not require extensive learning or updating of new skills. All agreed that they know there are rich stores of material available and insufficiently tapped, but there were no simple answers to what makes learning objects “travel well”. Reassuringly, language and intellectual property rights barriers did not seem to be the greatest obstacles. Many creative learning tools are heavily visual and almost independent of language; as for intellectual property rights, more and more materials are available wholly or partially for use and reproduction by teachers.

Project partners felt a need to find support to continue the working relationships at international level between OER repository builders, metadata experts and researchers. All participants agreed that regular consultation of teachers, perhaps through an international network, would provide invaluable bottom-up feedback to the growing number of OER repositories.

Read the Progress Report

Other findings can be read in the project's progress report. A next stage will be the development of guidelines and possibly a resource kit for teacher trainers, to help teachers be better armed to use the vast array of resources and tools available.