or 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 government 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