vernment to fund outcomes, not delivery
- Current New Zealand funding policy for education
- How to shift the focus of front-end quality assurance (coherence, stakeholder acceptability) to an outcomes, output-based model.
- Government funding model: Levels dictate
- Convincing all to move away from ownership model - letting go, when encouraged to do otherwise by policy-makers / leaders.
Technology and infrastructure
- Access to technology especially for online resources namely cost of broadband connectivity and availability in some areas
- Common / shared software systems to enable transferability of: learning information, access to OER, cross-credentialing
- Common / shared software systems to enable access to OER
- New Zealand's "connectivity" is great if you're in a city. Expensive and slow if you are in a small town or region.
- Wiki markup is a barrier to novice WikiEducator users
- Costing models assume campus internet access is covered in fees. Domestic home access is an additional cost, i.e. internet access and bandwidth in New Zealand is costly
Advocacy, awareness and staff capability
- Current low level of awareness (of open practices) among staff and students
- Raise teacher awareness of CC licensing and reuse
- Awareness of what's being done, successes and non-success in other places etc. So much is happening and staff find it hard to keep up.
- Inadequate skill sets of academics
- Conventional wisdom regarding valid learning
Social and cultural
- Institutional learning has two purposes that are potentially jeopardised by some open pedagogy:
- Qualifications / credentials are proxies for skills for those who don't have the experience, CV, confidence to demonstrate skills in other ways - essentially young learners
- Institutional learning has a social capital as well as a human capital function. Can open pedagogies achieve this?
- Cultural and generational challenges
- Risk for young learners
- Government belief / ideology that "investment" in education has the purpose of increasing the material wealth of a nation (or its elite), rather than Commonwealth of Learning objectives.
- Ownership pathology: My knowledge, my students, my course, my resources, my classroom versus our staff, our campus, our timetable
- Quality assurance and acceptability of credentials for learners
- Changing / challenging learner beliefs that learning via OER is as valuable as via institute
Policy issues identified by the symposium delegates have been grouped as follows:
- Funding models
- Funding model which treats study as a package, not separate service components, is still a financial barrier for learners
- Funding "self-learn" learners, eg financial support
- How do we "liberate" publicly funded research and resources from behind paywalls?
- How to get government to fund assessment of qualifications instead of whole qualifications. If funded like this, what would this mean for TEC quality measures?
- How can funding system designed around institutions be shifted to one focused on individuals?
- Cost of investment in developing teaching and learning resources over the long term.
- Funding needed
- Government source funding linked to "courses" equals linking funding to "learning", "learners" and "outcomes"
- Copyright associations / organisations equals generating revenue for authors and creators.
- Free or reduced cost for education / learners.
- Central (government) funding arrangements / implications for institutions need to change from current assumptions.
- How do we tie this in with the Government's desire to generate $50m of export education over the next few years?
- Grants / investment needed for creating OER in resource deficient areas.
- Regulation verus incentives versus rationalisation approach
- Integration of other dimensions of "open" e.g. open access, open source etc.
- Creative Commons policies for all New Zealand Schools
- Intellectual property in secondary schools by default is owned by Board of Trustees. Need license change to default to Creative Commons.
- Intellectual property - How does this impact legal etc.