We finished the first week of classes! Tonight we watched the Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Entering Mainstream Adoption: How TUDelft and UTwente Collaboratively Embrace OER Through Grasple” presented by Pim Bellinga, co-founder of Gasple, and Pim Stuurman, mathematics content expert at Grasple. They spoke about how TU Delft and University of Twente moved from copyright publishers to creating and sharing OER. Bellinga was an educator at a university and described some of the challenges of teaching blended courses and how to find content. Bellinga became very interested in open education and along with Thijs decided to “make education more open and more personal for everyone.” They founded Grasple, derived from grapple for struggle and grasp to understand. The first case study Bellinga described was the Dutch Technical University TU Delft with 24,000 students and the goal of offering a campus-wide math curriculum to 15,000 students. Their vision, according to Bellinga, was to:
- push for open
- be able to customize
- prevent vendor lock-in
- easy-to-use and reliable at scale
They chose to combine open collaboration and do it yourself (DIY). They chose Grasple as the software to create resources and collaborate to create courses. The system is integrated into the LMS and provides feedback and analytics. TU Delft curated 535 exercises publicly! They received an OER Collections Award from OE Global for this. They are now curating 600+ exercises and interactive online lessons and videos.
The second case study was from the University of Twente with 12,000 students and the goal of creating math curricula. Bellinga mentioned that their motivation was to:
- innovate in practice and assessment
- flexibility to revise resources
- educational control
- open community approach
- user-friendly software
They used Grasple as a “temporary matchmaker” to help University of Twente to adapt and use TU Delft resources. Now both universities have revised, remixed, and redistributed resources that are helping create a continuously growing collection. Bellinga mentioned that to foster mainstream OER adoption, OER must be modular, creating a tailored package is helpful, and supporting instructors with an external content team. To enable sustainable success, Bellinga noted that keeping track becomes a challenge and a content manager is important. For this, version control systems like Github for OERs is a new goal they have. Grasple has drafted a set of requirements for OER software. I enjoyed this session, and I am now curious about what Grasple actually looks like functionally. I spent some time on the website and learned about the lessons and exercises they have available. The Grasple site has several publicly available statistics and algebra lessons, and they are working on a research methods section. You do not need to log in to practice and use some of the resources. The feedback is immediate and detailed depending on your response. I wonder if we could use some of these resources once available for teaching hypothesis testing and distributions!? They even have a graph analysis and visualization lesson with exercises. I will have to remember Grasple and return to the website to check for the release of their research methods lessons.
