OEGlobal 2024

This session presents a reflective narrative of my experience in a post-graduate diploma program in education conducted in online mode, utilizing Microsoft Teams as the primary platform. As a teacher and administrator, we were assigned to facilitate a group of 40 students in nine different subject classes from 6.00 PM to 9:30 PM for a semester of 6 days a week. The experience of this one session has also emphasized the potential of effective teaching in Nepal's open education among digital capabilities and problems and challenges to reduce the digital divide.

In a developing country like Nepal, limited access to digital infrastructure has created significant challenges to implementing open education effectively. But using free available (only for education institutions) Microsoft Teams, we navigated these challenges to create an engaging and inclusive learning environment for our students. When using various methods of teaching and learning, such as synchronous lectures, and asynchronous discussions, it was observed that students should be informed about the condition of the equipment and use the appropriate software tools according to learner devices.

Our approach was committed to enhancing digital literacy among students and enhancing subject knowledge. We incorporate curriculum content and digital skills development, empowering students to search for, archive, authenticate online resources, and critically evaluate digital content. Given the nature of the subject, organizational complexities emerged and resources were generally attempted, but in the absence of digital skills and teachers and learners, the need for careful planning and coordination emerged.

Through the use of instant messaging apps such as What’s app, Facebook Messenger, and Viber as well as the use of MS Teams communication channels to coordinate the management of online classes, we were in regular contact with the students, providing timely feedback and support to facilitate their learning journey. In the absence of digital skills, we used data analysis tools instead of traditional methods to track student progress, identify areas for improvement, and provide instruction accordingly.

Despite the challenges posed by digital skills, better internet, tools, and the digital divide, the flexibility of both teachers and students emphasized digital skills development and curriculum adaptability. By embracing digital technologies and developing digital competence, we can overcome barriers to educational access and equity, empowering learners to thrive in the digital age. Therefore, we must commit to advocating for policies and initiatives that prioritize digital inclusion and equal access to education through open and distance learning. By fostering collaboration between academic institutions, the private sector, government agencies, and academia, we can bridge the digital divide and unlock the full potential of open education to transform lives and communities in Nepal and beyond.



Included in [Session 10B]: Digital Capability

Author Keywords
OER, Digital divide, Digital skills, Open education, PGDE, Teacher Education

Learning design is the development and creation of learning and teaching experiences based on pedagogical theory and practice. This process might include resource generation, collaboration and sharing between colleagues and the use of participatory technologies (Conole, 2015). It requires learning designers (LDs) to act as well as performing as change agents in higher educational institutions (Bond, Lockee & Blevins, 2023). These attributes are also central to Open Educational Practices (OEP) (Hegarty, 2015), suggesting that effective learning design could be invaluable in advancing Open Education movement. Discussions about learning design often overlook the identity of the LD (Heggart, 2021).

In their position at the nexus of subject areas, institutional priorities and student experience, LDs have been characterised as the connectors between different fields of knowledge and working practices (Roberts, et al., 2023) and problem solvers and change agents (Pollard & Kumar, 2022). OEP and open pedagogy hold the promise of advancing ethical and inclusive education, fostering learner equity. LDs are positioned strategically to facilitate the realisation of making OEP everyone’s business for higher educational institutions. However, this position between fields of knowledge, sometimes labelled the ‘third space’, can put LDs on the margins of education. Their role as change agents can seem peripheral or is not a priority in advancing OEP for their institution.

In a study of LDs and OEP in education institutions, Morgan (2019) found that LDs consider themselves advocates of open education and seek out opportunities to engage in OEP. However, the LDs in the study experienced restrictions on this advocacy; limitations included lack of time, space, and support from leadership. There was a disparity between the intentional and operational agency of the LDs. In the Australian context, there has been little exploration of this relationship between LDs and OEP.

In this presentation, we report on preliminary findings from an initial literature review aimed at understanding the role of LDs in advocating for OEP. Early insights, combined with reflections on our practice, indicate that while libraries and librarians often take the lead in discussions about OER, LDs are not as engaged when the conversation shifts to learning and teaching. Initial feedback from stakeholders highlights the importance of cross-pollination between LDs and other teams, including librarians, faculties and senior management. We believe that everyone has a specific role to play in advancing OEP.

Our focus will be on the core practices of learning design, emphasising that catering to the student learning journey through the constructive alignment of the curriculum is fundamental to effective learning design and central to OEP. UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 calls for effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. By cultivating an understanding of LD agency in OEP, higher education institutions, and all institutions that employ LDs, can ensure their strategy includes the professional development and capacity building needed to move LDs from the periphery to the centre of OEP advocacy.



Included in [Session 10B]: Digital Capability

References
Bond, A., Lockee, B., & Blevins, S. (2023, October 31). Instructional Designers as Institutional Change Agents. EDUCAUSE Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2023/10/instructional-designers-as-institutional-change-agents Conole, G. (2015). The 7Cs of learning design. In J. Dalziel (Ed.), Learning Design: Conceptualizing a framework for teaching and learning online (pp. 117-145). Routledge. Heggart, K. (2021). Formulated Professional Identity of Learning Designers and the Role of Open Education in Maintaining that Identity. In A. Marcus-Quinn & T. Hourigan (Eds.), Handbook for online learning contexts: Digital, mobile and open: policy and practice (pp. 21-34). Springer International Publishing AG. Morgan, T. (2019). Instructional Designers and Open Education Practices: Negotiating the Gap Between Intentional and Operational Agency. Open Praxis, 11(4), 369-380. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.11.4.1011 Pollard, R. & Kumar, S. (2022). Instructional Designers in Higher Education: Roles, Challenges, and Supports. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 11(1). https://dx.doi.org/10.59668/354.5896

Author Keywords
Open educational practices, Learning design, Agency

The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) [1] is an international network of doctoral researchers and alumni who work in the field of open education. The network currently has 179 doctoral researcher and alumni members, an increase of 54% since 2020. Our members’ institutions are based in 28 different countries around the world and approximately 30% of our membership is based in the Global South. The GO-GN network also includes a wider community of several hundred experts, supervisors, mentors and other interested parties who connect to form a community of practice. Open is GO-GN's business!

GO-GN supports and connects our members, raises the profile of member research and actively promotes and explores openness as a form and function of research. Central to our mission are equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). We achieve these aims in a range of ways, including holding regular online events (such as member research specials, guest speaker events and edit-a-thons), face-to-face workshops, collaborative publication opportunities (e.g. our Open Research Handbook) [2] sprints (e.g. on OEP and AIED) and 1:2:1 sessions. This increased diversity of our offer reflects both our response to the Covid-19 pandemic and our community of care approach [3].

Hosting events to support and connect our doctoral researchers prior to major international open educational conferences are a priority for GO-GN. Last year we celebrated our 10th anniversary in Edmonton, Canada prior to the Open Education Global 2023 conference [4]. Prior to OE Global 2024 we will be holding a two-day symposium and workshop to enable networking, the sharing of research and collaboration. Our symposium on day one will comprise networking and research sharing activities. The focus of day two’s workshop, which will be open for participation from the wider open education community, will be to progress our EDI work, particularly in the Asia and Pacific regions.

We are proposing a presentation session at OE Global 2024 to showcase and amplify the voices and research of our doctoral researcher and alumni members who will be participating in our workshop and this year’s OE Global conference. This session will facilitate and support networking through the sharing of research between GO-GN and the wider OE Global community. The presentation will begin with a very brief overview of GO-GN, followed by a series of short interactive lightening talks from GO-GN members on their research. These lightening talks will provide insights into the diversity of current doctoral research into open education. There will be plenty of opportunity for questions, interaction and feedback in this fast-paced session!



Included in [Session 10B]: Digital Capability

References
[1] http://go-gn.net [2] https://go-gn.net/gogn_outputs/open-research-handbook/ [3] e.g. Weller, M. (21 July 2020) GO-GN community in a time of crisis (https://blog.edtechie.net/go-gn/go-gn-community-in-a-time-of-crisis/) and Weller, M., Farrow, R., Pitt, R. & Iniesto, P. (2021) Care and Community in the GO-GN network. OERXDomains 2021 Conference (https://open.library.okstate.edu/oerxdomain2021guide/chapter/care-community-in-the-go-gn-network/) [4] https://go-gn.net/category/10th-anniversary-workshop/

Author Keywords
Open Research, Open Educational Practices, Open Education, Doctoral Research, Community of Practice, Community of Care, Co-creation, Collaboration, Equity Diversity and Inclusion

When we started setting up a portal for Open Educational Resources at universities in Lower Saxony in 2019, now known as twillo.de, we were not the first in Germany to embark on such a project. At the same time, state-wide repositories in the higher education sector were also set up and disseminated in other federal states. A centralised platform could have saved resources here, but the approach of distributed repositories offers greater potential for innovation through the possibility of testing different approaches and lightweight further development. It was clear from the outset that the repositories still needed to be merged so that teachers and students would not end up having to search numerous sources in parallel. For this reason, we started building a central OER search index for distributed and heterogeneous OER repositories in 2020, which has since then been publicly available at oersi.org.

As it turned out that searching through a much larger amount of materials in OERSI was much more convenient and performant than searching in our own repository itself, we decided to develop a plugin for WordPress with which we could integrate the search functionality of OERSI into the twillo homepage. OERSI offers the option of submitting queries via an open API and receiving the metadata. This solution has shown that the approach of integrating the search into websites is also becoming increasingly interesting for other providers of OER platforms as well, as the configurability of the plugin also allows specific parts of materials to be preselected. For example, a university of education can limit itself to the subjects of the teacher training programme, a technical university to the selection of engineering and natural sciences subjects or to the restriction of regional offerings or selected languages. Compared to other metasearch engines, this approach offers the possibility of making cross-regional, multilingual and international content available on your own website.

Due to the open design of this overall architecture as an open service and with open source components in combination with compact tutorials on the use and integration of GitHub and GitLab for the provision of OER, complete solutions can be implemented in the shortest possible time using simple means, even for smaller institutions without a large infrastructure, with minimum costs and maximum results. The overall system offers a pragmatic approach to an infrastructure for finding and publishing Open Educational Resources that is already available worldwide today.

Now that the success of this overall approach has been demonstrated in the context of Open Educational Resources, we are currently working on a possible subsequent use of the components for other areas of Open Science, e.g. to make open data or course information from university alliances from distributed sources findable in the same way and, in the case of data, to point out an easy way for sharing and collaboration.



Included in [Session 10B]: Digital Capability

References
OERSI https://oersi.org/ twillo https://www.twillo.de/ Plugin https://gitlab.com/TIBHannover/oer/wordpress-oersi-plugin Tutorials https://oersi.org/resources?search=%22github+oer+tutorial%22 Metadata Form https://oersi.gitlab.io/metadata-form/metadata-generator.html

Author Keywords
Distributed Repositories, Search Index, WordPress Integration, Tutorials, OERSI