Week 1 - Activity 4

Activity 4: Identifying priorities for research

"Imagine you are advising a funding organisation that wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.

• Set out the three main priorities they should address, explaining each one and providing a justification for your list. Share this in the Week 1 forum  and compare with priorities of others.

In this activity you are just expected to start thinking about these issues, and to use your own experience and intuition; you are not expected to research them in depth. You will build on this work during next week, and also for the assignment. " (http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/open-education/content-section-1.5)

To help answer this I want to define a scenario and to work with that.

Imagined scenario
The PTG at my school has loads of money and want to promote Open Education in KS3, specifically the teaching of programming.

Main Priorities
These will relate to the key questions provided, which I summerised/grouped as "Learn - Resources - Support". So, I will use these. Although I have more questions on their behalf than I have any answers for.

1. The "Learn" Priority
They will need to know what the pedagogy is for making use of open education (OE) and whether it fits into the school mission plan and school ethos. They will be concerned about assessment, if standards will be maintained or improved with respect to examination results as well as any changes to student social well-being. They will want to know if the Open Pedagogy will support learners of all types and abilities.

To answer these questions I would advise them of case studies in the area of open KS3 education (there must be some out there). In fact, I saw something in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (Anderson is the editor) - http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl or on the http://www.hewlett.org/newsroom/search?program_id=88 site. I would need to locate empirical data that hopefully shows that gains are made in some form or another. The OE "manifesto" (is there one or at least a succinct definition, probably from OLDaily by Stephen Downes. http://www.downes.ca/ and one of his free books) would need to be mapped to the schools mission statement and stated aims. Case studies of pilot KS3 OE groups and their value-added would need to be compared to those with no OE. How do you find an OE free school/student? Schools with no technology use, that do exist. OE supporting all learner types would need to be addressed by case studies and empirical data.

2. The "Resources" Priority
The PTG will question what they will get for their money if everything is free and open anyway. Buggered if I know the answer. Well, you need the technology infrastructure to support the OE learning, this may mean more processing power (servers), plenty of storage and high Internet bandwidth. It may mean buying licenses for software tool use and online storage for all stakeholders (students, teachers and admin). Of course, the biggest expense is the cost to make the time available to implement the innovation in terms of training and support.

3. The "Support" Priority
This means getting everyone onboard and up to speed with the proposed OE activity. Which means giving ownership to all (students, teachers, parents and admin). It means teachers requiring training and time to investigate, to reflect on the changes, to discuss and question an proposed activity (i.e. KS3 OE Programming). Then to plan, implement and review. In a school this would take at least 2 years to get going, a year to do it and a year to review it. A minimum of 4 years, will the PTG keep funding this as teachers leave and new ones arrive (I think not). The funding organization (aka PTG) would need to know that it is a long term venture and not a one off donation/funding.

Conclusion
The funding organization need to understand that promoting activity and research, in the context of a secondary school, is a large endeavor and perhaps it is best to start in a very small way, with a small manageable change that might hopefully be scalable if seen to be successful.