Opportunities, barriers and policy issues
- 1 Opportunities
- 2 Challenges and barriers
- 3 Policy issues
Opportunities identified by the symposium delegates have been grouped as follows:
Teaching and learning for educators and students
- Use OER to develop resourcefulness as a core capability, not only for students but for teachers as well. Align with the notion of teacher as curator.
- Network for learning
- Teacher education via OER
- Increase accessibility of education
- Learn when you want / can
- Learner's customisation of their learning.
- Vehicle for increased collaboration
- Raising quality in resources and assessment.
- Refocus on enhanced teaching/learning, student support and quality assessment
- Qualifications by independent study
- Working with industry and NZQA to determine how relevance and quality might be assured from their perspectives
- Engage students in a non-threatening way in learning areas considered difficult or not normally taken up by their ethnic / gender / socio economic group eg Physics / Calculus and engineering.
Fiscal sustainability and efficiency
- Reduce financial cost of education
- To "save" cash strapped governments here and worldwide
- Access to worldwide quality resources, expertise and knowledge at no cost for learners
- For leadership to be ahead of the game and ensure sustainability of the New Zealand tertiary system
- Bigger market for ITPs -- Chance to innovate
- Lower costs for learners
- Redirection of duplicated effort
- Cost savings for texts / resources
- Offering credential-only services for self-learners -- a different business model
- Efficiency gains -- work less hard but do the same.
Open philanthropy and society
- "Democratisation of education" presents a challenge to our community to think about who is excluded from education / knowledge. Change society? Build peace?
- Foster and promote collaboration
- Re-envisage education worldwide
- Enabling education to be available to anyone, anywhere -- removing barriers of geography, finance etc.
- Crossing subsector and subgrouping boundaries with common good / learner centred focus
- To support the courses offered by top institutions worldwide
- Greater access for learners
- Educators "feel good" about contributing to the education of the world's most disadvantaged
- New Zealand open textbook collaboration
- Collaboration in open textbooks
- Collaborative open textbook creation
- Ability to take / tweak/ reuse materials -- educational materials that are continually developing and changing just like our knowledge and learning
- At course level the opportunity to pick off some courses as "pathfinders"
- Increased diversity and quality of curriculum available to learners
Challenges and barriers
Challenges and barriers identified by the symposium delegates have been grouped as follows:
- Institutionally oriented mindsets
- Restrictive institute intellectual property policies
- Sunk investment in other models eg buildings, infrastructure, people.
- Incorporating collaborative development of OERs into teachers everyday workflow
- Institutional leadership in general has an interest in institutional ownership of resources -- in effect, many leaders are likely to resist the push to open up because they may fear loss of value.
- Changes to assessment practices
- Employee organisation fear that growth of OER threatens future employment; probably valid considering the number of past initiatives and changes that have been used as mechanisms for cost cutting.
- Absence of an enabling policy framework.
- Shifting institutional thinking
- Change or hinder academic staff research activity (could be barrier or opportunity)
- Tightly prescribed graduate profile and qualifications. Lack of flexibility for learner to design own learning pathway / qualification.
- NZGOAL position on open has excluded requirement for open licensing in the tertiary sector.
- Ensuring the correct balance between enabling broader participation without compromising institutional viability
- TEU not even engaged in thinking about open at the moment.
- Convincing go