Tonight we watched a pair of ten-minute Open Ed 2021 talks. The first one was entitled “Building and Sustaining a Culture of Open Education: Strategies and Advocacy in Nigeria” and presented by Adenekan Fauziyah Nihinlolawa. They described the education status of Nigeria and the promise of Open Education. The study they described examined the strategies to examine challenges and practices of open education in Nigeria. I thought it was important that they clarified that open education is not in competition or an alternative to traditional higher education. Open Education caters to “a different category of students” in many cases those who are not financially able to use traditional resources. They cited the UNESCO 2002 meeting and goal of promoting OER. The methodology they used for the research examined research and focused on addressing the challenges that hinder the effectiveness and sustainability of maintaining a culture of open education. Their conclusions and recommendations encouraged the use of OER and helping sustain their development, though limited new recommendations were provided.
The second session was entitled “Impact of Social Media on K-12 OER and the Need for More Bilateral Content Sharing Synergy” by Iwona Sokalska. They surveyed and interviewed 15 K-12 and 15 post-secondary instructors focusing on how teachers think about licensing, content creation, and sharing. The age of students is a difference and how they engage students differs. The K-12 teachers interviewed share and connect with other K-12 teachers in groups. While they use YouTube, content creation is variable. K-12 teachers in the US are 3-times more likely to have a Pintrest account, mentioned Sokalska. Engaging younger teachers requires some artistic skills, and teachers seek inspiration from their networks, including social media, to troubleshoot and get ideas for content. K-12 systems historically purchase the content, but don’t get funding for conferences. The drivers Sokalska identified were the age of students the teacher’s role, and the system. I honestly had not considered these differences. For example, Sokalska mentioned that K-12 teachers use and download content and in contrast, post-secondary teachers create & upload content and rely of students to find supplemental content. Interestingly, most K-12 teachers interviewed by Sokalska did not know details about OER. Bilateral Content Synergy was defined as a bilateral exchange between content creator and user. The example Sokalska ended with was Elementari to write and code interactive books with content that was donated and in return, the creators receive feedback. This session was not what I expected from the title and provided some thought-provoking comparisons and ideas about how content is created, shared, and improved. In essence, K-12 teachers interviewed were following some (most?) of the Rs of OER.
