Degrees of social inclusion: Perspectives from the ROER4D project
Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams & Henry Trotter
2nd World OER Congress, 19 September 2017, Slovenia
Plant propagation: Sexual and Asexual propapagation.pptx
Degrees of social inclusion: Perspectives from the ROER4D project
1. Degrees of social inclusion:
Perspectives from the ROER4D project
Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams & Henry Trotter
2nd World OER Congress, 19 September 2017, Slovenia
www.slideshare.net/ROER4D/
3. Human potential EMPOWERMENT
Postcolonial theories
Pedagogies of hope
Social justice
Partnership theory
Critical pedagogy
Feminist theories
Neoliberalism ACCESS
Human capital theory
Social capital theory
Free-market economics
Key issue: What is “Social inclusion”?
(Adapted from Gidley, Hampson, Wheeler and Bereded-Samuel 2010, p. 2)
PARTICIPATION
4. Conceptual caveat
One of the key challenges in the
research studies undertaken as part of
the ROER4D project, was clarity on
what respondents considered as “Open
Educational Resources”
Most viewed OER as digital materials
freely available on the internet and
were generally not aware of copyright
regulations or alternative open
licensing options.
All data presented therefore need to be
treated with some caution.
6. To what extent is OER use widening access of
materials to educators in the Global South?
Overall the cross-regional, nine-country study suggests that 51% of the 295
randomly selected educators surveyed reported having used OER at least once
(de Oliveira Neto, Pete, Daryono & Cartmill 2017)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Malaysia
Indonesia
India
South Africa
Kenya
Ghana
Colombia
Chile
Brazil
S&SEAsia
SubSaharan
AfricaSouthAmerica
Yes, have used OER Not sure if used OER Never used OER
7. To what extent is OER use widening access of
materials to students in the Global South?
The cross-regional, nine-country study suggests that 39% of the 4784 randomly
selected learners surveyed reported having used OER at least once (de Oliveira
Neto, Pete, Daryono & Cartmill, ROER4D Sub Project 2 data set)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Malaysia
Indonesia
India
South Africa
Kenya
Ghana
Colombia
Chile
Brazil
S&SEAsia
Sub
Saharan
Africa
South
America
Yes, have used OER Not sure if used OER Never used OER
8. Which factors influence the adoption of OER
to widen access to educational materials?
1. OER awareness
2. Technical capacity
3. Infrastructural access
4. Availability of suitable OER
5. Socio-economic status
9. Example of good practice: Darakht-e Danesh
Library in Afghanistan
https://www.darakhtdanesh.org/en
(Oates, Goger, Hashimi & Farahmand 2017)
11. To what extent is participation in education being
encouraged through adaptation (revising or
remixing) of OER by educators in the Global South?
The cross-regional, nine-country study suggests that 18% of the 295 randomly
selected educators surveyed reported having adapted OER at least once (de
Oliveira Neto, Pete, Daryono & Cartmill, ROER4D Sub Project 2 data set)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
India
Indonesia
Malaysia
Ghana
Kenya
South Africa
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
S&SEAsia
Sub
Saharan
Africa
South
America
Modified OER Not Modified OER
12. To what extent is participation in education being
encouraged through the adaptation (revision &
remixing) of OER by students in the Global South?
The cross-regional, nine-country study suggests that 6% of the 4784 randomly
selected learners surveyed reported having adapted OER at least once
(de Oliveira Neto, Pete, Daryono & Cartmill, ROER4D Sub Project 2 data set)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
India
Indonesia
Malaysia
Ghana
Kenya
South Africa
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
S&SEAsia
Sub
Saharan
Africa
South
America
Modified OER Not modified OER
13. Which factors encourage participation in the
adaptation of OER?
1. Pedagogical practices
2. Institutional support mechanisms
3. Institutional policies
4. Disciplinary norms
5. Collaboration (including communities of practice)
14. Example of good practice: Pre-service teacher education
programme of the Open University of Sri Lanka
Karunanayaka & Naidu (2016:105) Image CC BY-SA
16. To what extent is OER creation contributing towards
empowering educators in the Global South?
Overall the cross-regional, nine-country study suggests that 23% of the 295
randomly selected educators surveyed reported having created OER according to
comparison with educators selection of licence type and creation of educational
resources (de Oliveira Neto, Pete, Daryono & Cartmill, 2017)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Malaysia
Indonesia
India
South Africa
Kenya
Ghana
Colombia
Chile
Brazil
S&SEAsia
Sub
Saharan
Africa
South
America
Created OER Not created OER
17. To what extent is OER creation contributing towards
empowering students in the Global South?
The cross-regional, nine-country study suggests that 9 % of the 4784 randomly
selected learners surveyed reported having created OER (de Oliveira Neto, Pete,
Daryono & Cartmill)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
India
Indonesia
Malaysia
Ghana
Kenya
South Africa
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
S&SEAsia
Sub
Saharan
Africa
South
America
Created OER Not created OER
18. Which factors lead to greater empowerment
through the creation of OER?
1. Motivation (reputation enhancement)
2. Personal fulfilment and confidence
3. Participation in funded implementation and
research projects
4. Co-creation with students
19. Example of good practice: CoKrea for teachers
in Colombia
https://karisma.org.co/cokrea/ Sáenz, Hernández & Hernández (2017)
20. Example of good practice: Teacher Professional
Learning Communities, Karnataka, India
http://karnatakaeducation.org.in/KOER/
Kasinathan & Ranganathan (in press)
22. EMPOWERMENT
PARTICIPATION
ACCESS
Degrees of social inclusion
• Motivation (reputation enhancement)
• Personal fulfilment and confidence
• Participation in funded projects
• Co-creation with students
• Pedagogical practices
• Institutional support
• Institutional policies
• Disciplinary norms
• Collaboration
• OER awareness
• Technical capacity
• Infrastructural access
• Availability of OER
• Socio-economic status
Educators = 51%
Students = 39%
Educators = 18%
Students = 6%
Educators = 23%
Students = 9%
24. References
de Oliveira Neto, J. D., Pete, J., Daryono & Cartmill, T. (2017). OER use in the Global South: A baseline survey of
higher education instructors. In C. A. Hodgkinson-Williams & P. B. Arinto (Eds.), Adoption and impact of
OER in the Global South. Chapter 3 advance publication. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.154559
Gidley, J., Hampson, G., Wheeler, L. & Bereded-Samuel, E. (2010). Social inclusion: Context, theory and practice.
The Australasian Journal of University-Community Engagement, 5(1), 6-36.
https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:4909
Karunanayaka, S. & Naidu, S (2016). Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices. Open University of Sri Lanka.
http://www.ou.ac.lk/home/images/OUSL/publications/Dreamweaving%20Open%20Educational%20Practic
es.pdf
Kasinathan, G. & Ranganathan, R. (in press). Teacher Professional Learning Communities: a collaborative OER
adoption approach in Karnataka, India. In C. A. Hodgkinson-Williams & P. B. Arinto (Eds.) Adoption and
Impact of OER in the Global South.
Oates, L., Goger, L. K., Hashimi, J. & Farahmand, M. (2017). An early stage impact study of OER in Afghanistan. In
C. A. Hodgkinson-Williams & P. B. Arinto (Eds.), Adoption and impact of OER in the Global South. Chapter
15 advance publication. DOI: http://dx.soi.org/10.5281/zenodo.161288
Sáenz, M. P., Hernández, U. & Hernández, Y. M. (2017). Co-creation of OER by teachers and teacher educators in
Colombia. In C. A. Hodgkinson-Williams & P. B. Arinto (Eds.), Adoption and impact of OER in the Global
South. Chapter 5 advance publication. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.161271
25. Citation and attribution
Hodgkinson-Williams, C.A. & Trotter, H. (2017). Degrees of social
inclusion: Perspectives from the ROER4D project. Presentation at
the 2nd World OER Congress, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Retrieved from:
http://www.slideshare.net/ROER4D/
Notas do Editor
Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) in the Global South project, focuses on OEP and OER activities in three regions: South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. ROER4D consists of 18 sub-projects with more than 100 participating researchers and research associates in Afghanistan, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Uruguay, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
What do we mean by social inclusion?
“ … can be understood as pertaining to a nested schema regarding degrees of inclusion. The narrowest interpretation pertains to the neoliberal notion of social inclusion as access; a broader interpretation regards the social justice idea of social inclusion as participation; whilst the widest interpretation involves the human potential lens of social inclusion as empowerment”. (Gidley, Hampson, Wheeler and Bereded-Samuel 2010, p. 2)
So when we speak about equitable access, we need to be aware that mere access to and use of existing OER should be the starting point and that participation through adaptation could ultimately lead to empowerment through the creation of OER.
One of the key challenges in the research studies undertaken as part of the ROER4D project, was clarity on what respondents considered as “Open Educational Practices”. Most viewed OER as digital materials freely available on the internet and were generally not aware of copyright regulations or alternative open licensing options.
All data presented therefore need to be treated with some caution.
The ROER4D cross-regional study by de Oliveira Neto, Pete, Daryono and Cartmill was based on a survey of 295 randomly selected educators at 28 higher education institutions (HEIs) in nine countries across the three ROER4D regions.
Just over half (51%) of the educators surveyed stated that they had used OER at least once; one quarter of them (25%) had never used OER; and almost another quarter (24%) were not sure whether they had used OER. This shows that, while a small majority have used OER and have some familiarity with it, a sizeable minority have never done so and/or are not aware of the concept. In addition, the level of OER use appears to be slightly differentiated by region: 50% in South America, 46% in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 56% in South and Southeast Asia.
However, the percentage of OER users (51%) was more than twice as high as the percentage of OER creators (23%). This is not surprising, given the relatively low barriers to OER use compared to OER creation.
From the coding of the qualitative data, 5 factors emerged as influencing whether and how educators and students adopted OER. Listed in order of frequency, these shape potential adopters’ level of access to OER, the foundational basis of social inclusion.
First is OER Awareness, which simply means: to what extent, if at all, are educators and students aware of OER as a concept? We found that respondents exhibited variable levels of awareness based on a widespread confusion about which materials are “free” or “open” to use on the internet. This was due, in part, to their perceptions of abiding “fair use” legal provisions and common educational practices, but it was also exacerbated by the ease with which online materials may be downloaded free of charge, regardless of licence.
Second is Technical capacity, which concerns educators and students level of technical competence to search for, identify, use, adapt, share, license, retain and upload OER. We found that the slightly specialised competence demanded for OER activity reduced levels of OER adoption in a general sense, but also made it more likely that, of those who did adopt OER, they used OER “as is” rather than creating and sharing their own. Use of OER “as is” comprises the most basic form of OER adoption with the lowest barriers to such activity, thus it is the OEP that we associate with this access level of social inclusion.
Third is infrastructural access, which pertains to the speed, stability and cost of one’s internet connection; the types devices that one has access to; and the reliability of one’s electricity provision. We found that most educators in the higher education sector had good levels of infrastructural access, though this was much more variable for students in that sector, as well as for educators and students in the K-12 sector, especially in rural areas.
The fourth is Availability of suitable OER, which concerns not only the sheer number of OER available on the internet, but their appropriateness for an educator’s or student’s specific anticipated use. The numbers of OER available in general are growing, though they compete with other online materials which may be copyright-protected. As we found, educators and students use online materials based on their perceived relevance rather than on their “open” licensing conditions.
Lastly, the socio-economic status of a country in which educators and students live appears to have a variable relationship with OER adoption. Our research found no direct link between levels of OER adoption and levels of broader national economic development (as expressed by GDP per capita). What it did show was that educators and students required a certain minimum level of infrastructural access - which is an indicator of socio-economic status - to be able to adopt OER at a broader level. This condition was largely met at HEIs, but not always in the K-12 sector, or rural areas - no matter what the national GDP numbers were.
A non-governmental organisation – Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan) – established the digital Darakht-e Danesh Library (DDL) of open resources in 2014 on the premise that increased access to a growing collection of OER will improve teachers’ subject-matter knowledge as well as their teaching practice. According to Oates et al. the DDL is Afghanistan’s first OER initiative.
The DDL provides a service in the three languages used in Afghanistan’s public school system (Dari, Pashto and English), including advice on open licensing to teachers choosing to submit materials as OER. To make the DDL accessible to educators in Afghanistan – the overwhelming majority of whom do not have access to the internet to discover and use the DDL independently – the DDL can be downloaded as an application that is usable offline on a feature phone, smartphone or tablet, or be installed in a networked computer allowing the library to be accessed offline.
If access is satisfactorily achieved, educators and learners can move on to the more profound social inclusion component of participation with OER, which is linked to social and educational justice. Listed in order of frequency, these shape potential adopters’ level of access to OER, the foundational basis of social inclusion.
The first factor of participation concerns pedagogical practices, evident in the incipient shifts of teachers’ and lecturers’ towards greater sharing of educational materials, including (but not exclusively) OER. While the use of the textbook as the core source of information was still the norm within the schooling sector, many teachers seemed keen to use OER as a supplement in a localised or summarised form. Despite infrastructural challenges, they appeared willing to also share materials with each other, if in a more informal manner (such as emailing each other) rather than uploading their materials to a public repository.
Second, educators appreciate any institutional support that they can get for adopting OER. This support might be in the form of OER creation grants, legal support personnel for copyright management and licensing, an institutional OER platform, and an on-campus unit with OER specialists who are available to help staff. Our research found this type of support to be rare, but at one South African university where all of this support exists, it has been instrumental in increasing the proportion of educators involved in not only using, but creating and sharing OER, including in OER-based MOOCs.
Third, institutional policies can have a massive influence on whether, or to what extent, educators and students may engage with OER. Most of the institutions we researched did not have OER-specific policies, meaning that any potential OER activity was governed by national copyright legislation and institutional IP policies, which are largely antithetical to OER activity. However, some institutions - especially at the university level - have drafted pro-OER policies or strategies that either grant copyright of teaching materials to the educator who created them (allowing them to share their materials as OER) or commit the institution to managing and sharing the teaching materials of its educators under an institutional banner (similar to MIT).
Fourth, disciplinary norms can often influence the pedagogical decisions that educators make, especially when assessing a new educational innovation such as OEP and OER. If OEP is common in their field, then they have to decide for themselves whether to participate in such practice. If it is not common, then it may not even require a conscious decision, either because they remain unaware of OEP and OER or because they see OEP as a niche or optional activity.
Fifth, if we consider OEP as consisting of a “spectrum” of activities, from individually-based to group-based, then we can focus on the maximal form of OEP as advanced by the open community, which is that of sustained collaboration, or the development of communities of practice. For OER advocates, this represents the fulfilment at a developmental and practice level of the open ethic, in which educators collaborate with each other as a norm, building identities or communities around those collaborations. In our research, while collaboration in general was quite common, collaboration in the making of OER was quite rare, limited usually to experimental contexts, such as the launching of a MOOC initiative at one South African university, and the development of an OER library by an NGO in Afghanistan.
[This text here is good, but I didn’t know where to put it with the 5 categories. Perhaps it could be a coda, spoken by you, after going through the 5 factors. Or we just leave it out for the presentation:] Because current OER repositories host mostly English materials, lack of OER in languages relevant in the Global South remains a challenge. It forms a barrier to full access and participation. However, as we saw, some educators from India, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan have started contributing materials in local languages to various local platforms with the help of government or foreign donor funding. The ongoing support for these existing and new communities of collaborative OER developers may be a strategy for surmounting the need for linguistically appropriate materials.
Open University of Sri Lanka’s (OUSL) Faculty of Education implemented a OER initiative among their Postgraduate Diploma in Education students, from nine OUSL Centres, representing every Province in Sri Lanka. In the most northern region, Jaffna, still recovering from the war, researchers found that teachers were initially “not ready to come out of the cocoon of fear framed around the by civil war” (K & Naidu, 2017). However they gradually starting finding and sharing English OER and translating them into Tamil. From the teachers reports it evident that teachers frequently re-used some materials as is, e.g. animations and video but gradually started re-labeling diagrams and photographs in Tamil. Due to poor internet connectivity teachers were not able to share their materials on the OUSL’s LMS.
The ROER4D cross-regional study by de Oliveira Neto, Pete, Daryono and Cartmill was based on a survey of 295 randomly selected educators at 28 higher education institutions (HEIs) in nine countries across the three ROER4D regions.
According to the multi-region survey, 23% of the 295 educators stated that they had openly licensed (i.e., shared) their teaching materials in some fashion (de Oliveira Neto et al., in press). This is just less than half the percentage who stated that they had “used” OER before. That there are fewer OER creators than users can be expected, given that there are lower barriers to OER use than to OER creation. But there is also a discernible relationship between users and creators, in that virtually all creators have used OER at some point as well (ibid.). Their familiarity with OER through use may have helped make OER creation an imaginable activity for themselves. Thus the power of an OER use experience cannot be discounted for inspiring educators to contribute their own work as well.
Data source: SP2 cleansed data from Dutra - instructors with license numbers (2)
Source: Dutra - Students selected data
Lastly, the third tier of the social inclusion concept concerns empowerment, a notion that is ideologically informed by human potential theories. This high-level form of social inclusion through OEP was embryonic within the ROER4D studies. It was emerging in the contribution of original OER to public repositories by educators and the offering of MOOCs by university lecturers in association with their own institutions and hosting platforms. For school teachers, this represented the development of a new level of agency in privileging their own perspectives on what constitutes valuable knowledge, thereby increasing their accountability and influencing their reputation beyond their usual sphere of influence. Likewise for university lecturers, the offering of MOOCs provided an opportunity to assert alternative epistemic perspectives on a global scale involving both personal and institutional reputational risks. By contributing original OER and/or offering MOOCs, teachers and lecturers were offering knowledge to the world in their own unique voices and through their own “theory from the South”, engaging in a dynamic conversation with hegemonic epistemic perspectives while strengthening their sense of self-identity.
The three factors which emerged from our research for increasing the likelihood of OER creation, the most empowering form of OER adoption, were:
First, motivation, especially due to educators’ hope of enhancing their reputations through sharing their teaching materials as OER. In some cases, such as one South African university, educators may receive official recognition for their OER contributions (in this case, an award given at a public ceremony), although in most other instances that recognition comes from feedback from users of the content who share words of praise and gratitude and then share the resource further with their colleagues. According to most Indian university lecturers in one study, sharing educational resources was perceived as improving their professional standing, enhancing their personal reputations, and boosting their institutional reputations. It is hard to overstate the importance of this form of empowerment for the sustainability of the open movement. For while openness is based primarily on an altruistic ethical foundation, it leverages more self-centred personal ambitions for educators as well. The combination of these desires – to enhance one’s reputation while also making a contribution to society – allows for a type of empowerment at multiple levels.
Second concerns personal fulfillment and confidence. Many educators from across the studies revealed that they got a great deal of satisfaction from sharing their materials openly. It addressed a deeply held desire concerning what type of educator they wanted to be, how they wanted to operate in the world, and how they imagined themselves to be at their most effective. Amongst Indian university lecturers, the highest score that they collectively attributed to various attitudinal survey prompts related to the pleasure they felt when adopting or adapting their educational resources. It also enhanced their sense of confidence as it made them feel like they were an important part of a larger community. In addition, they felt that sharing OER was a useful way to disseminate their ideas and to obtain feedback. In many ways, this is quite personal, as ROER4D researchers also met many educators who said that they would currently not get the same sense of fulfilment out of openly sharing their materials because they were concerned about their quality and the potentially critical assessment they might receive from colleagues. It would “expose” them. For those able to get their materials into a state that they believed not only reflected well upon them as educators but would also be of real value to others, the act of sharing their materials openly was a gratifying one.
Third relates to participation in funded implementation and research projects. Many educators engaged in the Global South would not have participated in OER creation activities without the intervention of an outside organization that had the capacity to help them develop materials and demonstrate what OEP looks like. This points to the continued relevance of the donor community in creating opportunities for educators, especially teachers, to embark on an OER creation exercise within the safety of a larger group of collaborators, and quality assured by the rigorousness of the process. Such interventions represent not a norm for the future of all OER expansion, but one of a number of activities that helps educators experiment with OER and gradually build up their capacities and confidence.
A school-based teacher support initiative undertaken by the Karisma Foundation in 4 states in South-West Colombia demonstrated how support for groups of teachers in their schools could encourage OER creation. Researchers (Sáenz, Hernández & Hernández (2017) found that teachers did not always support enjoy the support of their school principals and some found it difficult to find the time to create OER and/or found that collaborative creation was quite demanding. Teachers much preferred the specific school-based support in contrast to general workshops.
NGO, IT for Change, developed a collaborative OER adoption programme which included 67 mathematics, science and social science high school teachers and teacher educators in Karnataka state, India. This group was embedded within a larger professional learning community (PLC) of around 12,800 teachers across Karnataka, developed through the Subject Teacher Forum (STF), an in-service teacher education programme in the public school system in Karnataka. The Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) is a collaborative platform maintained by IT for Change KOER began as an initiative to publish all the resources being shared by the teachers in the STF mailing lists. Research undertaken by
So when we speak about equitable access, we need to be aware that mere access to and use of existing OER should be the starting point and that participation through adaptation could ultimately lead to empowerment through the creation of OER.
We have to first ensure that the basic opportunity factors are address, meaning that:
Educators and students are aware of OER
That they have the technical capacity of find and use OER
That they have the requisite connectivity, hardware to find and use OER
Sufficient local OER are available to suit various curricula in various languages
And that educators and students are financially supported (e.g. zero-rating OER sites)
But access is not enough - participation in adapting OER for local conditions, meaning that
TEacher are encouraged to shift their practices to sharing resources with one another
That institutional support exists - technically and/or pedagogically
That institutional policies are supportive of sharing and creation
That disciplinary norms may be encouraging of adaptation of OER
That time and effort is directed at deliberately supporting teacher collaborations
In or to empower educators and student to contribute OER we need to
Tap into what might motivate them to do including reputation enhancement, and personal fulfilment
Provide funding and support for implementation and research projects with local governments
Encourage opportunities for teacher to co-create with their students.
So when we speak about equitable access, we need to be aware that mere access to and use of existing OER should be the starting point and that participation through adaptation could ultimately lead to empowerment through the creation of OER.
We have to first ensure that the basic opportunity factors are address, meaning that:
Educators and students are aware of OER
That they have the technical capacity of find and use OER
That they have the requisite connectivity, hardware to find and use OER
Sufficient local OER are available to suit various curricula in various languages
And that educators and students are financially supported (e.g. zero-rating OER sites)
But access is not enough - participation in adapting OER for local conditions, meaning that
TEacher are encouraged to shift their practices to sharing resources with one another
That institutional support exists - technically and/or pedagogically
That institutional policies are supportive of sharing and creation
That disciplinary norms may be encouraging of adaptation of OER
That time and effort is directed at deliberately supporting teacher collaborations
In or to empower educators and student to contribute OER we need to
Tap into what might motivate them to do including reputation enhancement, and personal fulfilment
Provide funding and support for implementation and research projects with local governments
Encourage opportunities for teacher to co-create with their students.