Call for Papers
Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University
Conference dates are September 26-28, 2007
Submission deadline is May 18, 2007
Conference Themes
For the first several years our field focused on content production and content licensing. Today, there are thousands of full university courses and tens of thousands of learning modules available as open educational resources under open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons. However, our work isn’t finished; we’re simply nearing a checkpoint.
If our open education efforts aren’t supporting learning, we’re failing as a field. Period. And as we are beginning to understand how to produce and license content, we have to turn some of our attention to how this content is used by learners and teachers. How do they change, adapt, and localize it for their specific needs or the needs of their specific students? Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?
OpenEd 2007 will focus on:
* Localizing open educational resources
* Learning from open educational resources
Acceptance announcements will be made by July 31, 2007. If your session was accepted for presentation, we strongly encourage you to submit a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings. Accepted full papers (5-10 pages) are due no later than August 17, 2007.
All submissions (short description, abstract and full papers) and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).
For more info please see the conference website http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/ or
email conference at cosl dot usu dot edu.
I just read your post, and with my new job paying for conferences to which I get papers accepted, I’m thinking about Open Education 2007.
Over the last year, I’ve heard multiple people talk about “checkpoints” and “progress,” etc. in Open Learning, Instructional Design, and Instructional Technology. My opinion, heavily influenced by my realm of expertise, is that both fields are missing fundamental assessment components.
At SITE this year, Curtis Bonk showed a bunch of statistics demonstrating that major universities are moving “learning” online. I took issue with his comment because, without assessment, all you know is that they’re moving people and credits online, not “learning”. (A group of students at BYU let me know clearly that they consider online courses, “the quick and easy way” to a grade.)
Twice in the last year, I’ve heard David Merrill say that we haven’t achieved widespread instruction that is (stop me if you’ve heard this before)” effective, engaging, and efficient,” and then respond to questions of how we will know when we get there with, “That’s a measurement problem.”
The need for assessment to accompany OER is latent in your post:
“If our open education efforts aren’t supporting learning, we’re failing as a field.”
-How do you know that/if learning is taking place?
“Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?”
-We know they “support” learning differently because everything about them, from the social and psychological theories that underpin them to their underlying delivery mechanisms, is different. What we don’t know is if OER results in the same outcome as traditional education.
-Regarding OER assessment, it had better be different from traditional assessment. The validity issues associated with free and open assessments, digital or otherwise, are much more complex than those typically faced by test developers.
The only problem I see is deciding whether this issue fits into your second focus for Open Education 2007, “Learning from open educational resources,” because it isn’t a localization issue.
Let me know what you think.