OEGlobal 2024

The advancement of open education and widespread adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) requires more than individual institutional efforts—it demands coordinated action and shared expertise across institutions and regions. This panel explores how collaborative organisations like the Open Education Network (OEN) and the Council of Australian University Librarians' (CAUL) OER Collective serve as crucial enablers in the open education ecosystem, creating economies of scale and fostering communities of practice that accelerate OER adoption.

Through examining these organisations' approaches, we will discuss how centralised support structures and collaborative frameworks amplify local efforts and create sustainable change. The Open Education Network's work in building a community of practice among academic libraries has demonstrated how shared expertise and resources can lower barriers to OER adoption across institutions. Similarly, CAUL's OER Collective showcases how a coordinated, national approach can pool resources effectively to create and adapt high-quality open materials while building capacity across the higher education sector.

The panel will address key questions about the role of networks in advancing open education: How do collaborative organisations effectively balance central coordination with local autonomy? What strategies have proven most successful in building sustainable communities of practice? How can networks leverage their collective power to address common challenges in OER adoption? What metrics and evidence demonstrate the impact of collaborative approaches?

Drawing from practical experiences, panellists will explore how these networks create value through shared infrastructure, professional development, advocacy, and resource creation. The session will offer insights into successful models of collaboration that can be adapted across different contexts while examining future opportunities for scaling open education through networked approaches.

The panel will comprise:

* Dr Danny Kingsley, Deakin University (facilitator)
* David Ernst, Open Education Network
* Karen Lauritsen, Open Education Netowrk
* Dr Kathy Essmiller, Oklahoma State University
* Fiona Salisbury, Western Sydney University and Council of Australian University Librarians
* Dr Kate Tickle, Council of Australian University Librarians
* Ruth Cameron, The University of Newcastle

This panel presentation is an expansion to the research presentation, “Toward a more sustainable open education community: Breaking through barriers to bridge primary, secondary, and tertiary open practices”. We suggest that even though Open Educational Practices (OEP) are supported and implemented differently across these sectors, working together as boundary spanners (Walz & Farley, 2023) can be a productive contribution to OEP sustainability. Addressing this gap is important to providing equitable quality education to all which is a UN Sustainable Development Goal. The panelists in this presentation were strategically selected to represent diverse perspectives across educational sectors (primary/secondary teacher librarian, tertiary/Higher Education librarians, Teacher Education faculty, Professional Staff, and state-level Government Leader). They will discuss commonalities and differences in their OEP work, perceived barriers, and opportunities, and share concrete examples where bridging the gap has positively impacted OEP implementation and advancement in their communities.

Some of the barriers that challenge boundary spanning include a lack of OEP and OER awareness (at all levels), including not understanding the need for OEP and OER in the first place. Copyright fears and gatekeeping around ownership and sharing materials prohibit engagement and, in some regions, primary and secondary teachers are required to obtain permission to openly license and publicly share their work. Where OEP does bridge primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, inequities persist regarding how a contributor is compensated for their work, putting at risk the sustainability of these partnerships. From a governance perspective, stakeholder turnover at the state or provincial level is challenging to move this work forward. Widespread uncertainty regarding budget availability also threatens the sustainability of this work.

This panel, however, is optimistic that by working together, we can impact the sustainability of OEP by empowering multi-level awareness and engagement. Panelists agree that the first step is to work towards policy that permits teachers, especially K-12 teachers, to engage in OEP. Furthermore, understanding and valuing one another's contributions is key; one potential solution is through common language about OEP that honors and recognizes this work, especially at primary and secondary levels. Panelists will also share their observations regarding the “Teacherpreneuer” mindset, where teachers could work as educational leaders and policymakers to incentivize and grow OEP engagement instead of commodifying teaching resources. Where copyright fears and debates around ownership keep educators from engaging, Creative Commons licenses provide a “third space” by shifting the focus from ownership to one of access, equity, and impact. Finally, panelists will discuss opportunities to bridge OEP across sectors through adopting and adapting open curricula and by collaborating in projects that require multi-level engagement.



Included in [Session 4B]: Sustainability

References
Walz, A., & Farley, J. (2023). Making Open Educational Resources with and for PreK12: A Collaboration Toolkit for Higher Education. Virginia Tech Libraries. Retrieved May 1, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.21061/OER_PreK12_highered

Author Keywords
Open educational practices across diverse levels, Policy and governance, Enabling transferability of knowledge and practice, Primary and secondary education policy, Sustainability, Overcoming barriers

AI pervades various facets of society, including education. In the open education domain, the notion of open AI, distinct from the entity OpenAI, is attracting attention. However, the precise connotations of "open" in conjunction with "AI" remain subject to diverse interpretations, reflecting conceptual tensions and longstanding differences around concepts of “open” in respective domains.

In a blog post last year, prominent edtech expert David Wiley wrote, “when people talk about whether or not generative AI should be “open,” they could be talking about whether the foundation models should be open, whether the modified model weights that result from fine-tuning should be open, and/or whether the prompts (which includes templates, embeddings, etc.) should be open” (Wiley, 2023). In a similar direction, focusing on licensing for different aspects of AI technology, the Open Source Initiative are currently developing an “open-source AI” definition (Open Source Initiative, 2024). On the other hand, in broader literature, definitions of open education and open technology encompass a wide range of concepts, where “open” could mean: “ethical” (Holmes et al., 2022), “inclusive” and “innovative” (Bozkurt, 2023), “co-created” and “learner-driven” (Walberg and Thomas, 1972), “non-proprietary” (Berners-Lee, 2023), “decentralised” (Crowston and Howison, 2005), “accessible without barriers” (Knox, 2013), “available to join”, “shared”, “not tightly controlled” (Weller, 2020), “available in the public domain or under an open license” (UNESCO, 2022), “interpretable” and “visible” (Conati, Porayska-Pomsta, and Mavrikis, 2018), and many others.

This indicates that “open AI” and “open-source AI” are overlapping but not identical concepts. “Open-source AI” seems to be about the tangible aspects of systems, whereas “open AI” is broader and potentially includes context of how systems can be used, who can use them, and what for. Rather than trying to resolve these debates into a single taxonomy/typology, we propose a meronomic, holistic account of openness in AI education which explores the relationship between definitions with respect to part-whole relationships. This will facilitate diverse contributions and critical discussion.

In this panel session, participants will have the opportunity to engage in the panel discussion and ask questions regarding the dimensions of openness of AI in education.

The agenda includes:

• 10 minutes: introductions, pre-recorded 1-slide lightning presentations from experts, panel reactions
• 10 minutes: panel interaction and debate
• 15 minutes: Q&A with panel members based on thoughts submitted by the audience (with backup questions prepared by the moderators).
• 5 minutes: closing discussion and synthesis.

Experts who agreed to contribute so far include David Wiley, Anne-Marie Scott, Aras Bozkurt, Chrissi Nerantzi and Leo Havemann. Some of them might join virtually. They will be provided with prompts ahead of time for their initial statements. Robert Farrow, an experienced moderator, will chair the panel discussion. During the discussion, delegates will be able to contribute reflections and questions through a back channel and these will be integrated into the discussion.

Included in [Session 11A]: Artificial Intelligence

References

Berners-Lee, T. (2023). Frequently asked questions by the Press – Tim BL (w3.org). Available at https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html (Accessed: 2 May 2024)

Bozkurt, A. (2023). Generative AI, Synthetic Contents, Open Educational Resources (OER), and Open Educational Practices (OEP): A New Front in the Openness Landscape. Open Praxis, 15(3), pp. 178–184. DOI: https://doi.org/10.55982/openpraxis.15.3.579

Conati, C., Porayska-Pomsta, K. and Mavrikis, M., 2018. AI in Education needs interpretable machine learning: Lessons from Open Learner Modelling. arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.00154

Crowston, K. and Howison, J. (2005). The social structure of Free and Open Source software development. First Monday, Volume 10, Number 2 - 7 February 2005 Available at: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/1207/1127 (Accessed: 2 May 2024)

Holmes, W., Porayska-Pomsta, K., Holstein, K., Sutherland, E., Baker, T., Shum, S.B., Santos, O.C., Rodrigo, M.T., Cukurova, M., Bittencourt, I.I. and Koedinger, K.R. (2022). Ethics of AI in education: Towards a community-wide framework. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, pp.1-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-021-00239-1

Knox, J. (2013). Five critiques of the open educational resources movement. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(8), pp. 821–832. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2013.774354

Open Source Initiative (2024). The Open Source AI Definition – draft v. 0.0.8. Available at: https://opensource.org/deepdive/drafts/the-open-source-ai-definition-draft-v-0-0-8 (Accessed: 2 May 2024)

UNESCO (2022). Understanding Open Science. UNESDOC Digital Library. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54677/UTCD9302

Walberg, H.J. and Thomas, S.C. (1972). Open education: An operational definition and validation in Great Britain and United States. American Educational Research Journal, 9(2), pp.197-208. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312009002197

Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. Athabasca University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01

Wiley, D. (2023). An analogy for understanding what it means for generative AI to be “Open”. Open Content. https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/7289

Author Keywords
Open AI, Open-source AI, Artificial Intelligence, Open data, Open-source technical platforms

The conference closes with a panel discussion and reflection from our conference keynote speakers, Siobhan Leachman, Penny Jane Burke, Martin Dougiamas, and GO-GN Rep.

And join us in celebrating the closing session of OEGlobal 2024.