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<center>''see also the [[Hack_Day#Project_ideas]] ideas''</center>
<center>''see also [[Hack_Day#Project_ideas]]''</center>


= Macro =
= Macro =

Latest revision as of 19:12, 12 April 2012

see also Hack_Day#Project_ideas

Macro

Incentivize OER Organizational Partnerships with Project-based Collaborative Funding

To begin to scale all the best OER, funding could incentivize collaborative projects between organizations that would reduce the total number of unique projects in the OER community - resulting in fewer, larger and stronger projects. This intervention would focus on creating an enhanced model for OER partnership between complementary educational organizations. These partnerships would require commitment from both organizations to co-create *and* co-adopt OER and OER supports from existing practices or resources, such as common curriculum, technology platforms, and policy reform. With this intervention, the Hewlett Foundation would deliberately fund partnerships and consortiums. This funding would also support an "OER Collaboration Core" to facilitate these partnerships, identify and share only best practices, and evaluate the impacts of the program. Incentive funding for specific partnerships should also be included.

required_innovations
This intervention would require a partial (or fundamental) shift in funding strategy to encourage collaboration among organizations rather than individual organizations or institutions.

This could involve a reallocation of current funds or the creation of a new fund to promote collaborative projects.

Open Curriculum Pathways

Design your own self-guided course set.

This project bridges the gap between online courses and matriculation. Learners can find information online, but often do not know how this would fit in a curriculum leading to a degree. We suggest to develop an online curriculum pathways system. The pathways are open. They will be set by the credentialing institution. Students can take learning elements from different sources to complete their pathways. The support infrastructure (tutoring, credentialing, materials, etc.) will come from existing educational providers or new players in the market. `it should be built like a wiki.

Use OCW Consortium, and UK OpenLearn/LabSpace


Working in the Margins

"There is a crack, a crack in everything That is how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen We need to look for the broken parts of our education system where people are being let down and marginalised. That is where new solutions are needed and where open and free can help innovation. This could help give a motivation and purpose to the OER movement that is not in conflict with existing systems.

required_innovations
Framing for materials and tasks that brings out the way it helps people Support for individualised paths and reflection of personal outcomes Ways to wrap material so it can work for people outside of the system Recognition for the subsequent path into eg other forms of learning Identify the pain points in the education ecosystem

Common Core State Standards (CCSS)

State Open Content Collaborative

Writ large, the notion is that states collaborate to assemble and/or develop the full scope of sequence of CCSS curricula (ELA and math) under an open license and institute an ongoing mechanism for continuous improvement and sustainability, including teacher development. The net result will be affordable and more effective instructional materials and better teaching and learning. Three broad stages: (1) Recruiting states (initial target states are likely Common Core adopting, open territory states like NY, ME, MD and VT) and co-developing a plan to implement and sustain. Plan would be 'endorsed' by all participating states, which commit to implement. A critical mass of states does not need to be larger than 3 or 4. More is better, though management/coordination becomes more complex. (2) Initial assembly and/or development of the full scope of sequence of CCSS curricula (ELA and math) under an open license - in a digital format. States that have adopted CCSS have already committed to develop and/or adopt new curricula. The notion is that states would identify what they are already doing; commit to sharing with other states in the collaborative via an open license; develop a mechanism to identify existing and emerging CCSS-aligned resources that could be assembled; and commit via a joint RFP process to develop only what does not already exist or is already under development. Standards for quality would be agreed to in advance by participating states. Goal is full assembly of scope and sequence of CCSS. (3) Deployment. States would offer full scope and sequence of CCSS materials to their teachers for free under an open license. Could be deployed over multiple platforms (or even in print), so long as interoperability and data analytics/feedback mechanism are considered up front. (3) Ongoing management. In order to ensure that materials are maximally implemented, effective and sustained, each summer participating states would offer professional development activities to teachers that would entail the review, revision and enhancement of the open CCSS materials by the teachers themselves. The benefit is that PD is already being delivered, so this could be re-purposed and at the same time the CCSS curricula would benefit from constant review and revision. If built on a digital platform, learning effectiveness of the curricular items would be a major factor in prioritizing targets for curricular revision/enhancements. Other states could use the developed materials, too - as could educators around the world.

required innovations
Requires process innovation: (1) states collaborating around joint content development and teacher support; (2) how individual states participate in local instructional materials adoption processes; and (3) how individual states support teacher engagement/development and enhancement of instructional materials.

If staged, risks are quite manageable and able to mitigated. NOTE: Form is not allowing us to answer and save some of the answers to the above question.


Promote OER with Disciplinary Organizations

Promote OER through existing teacher professional development operations within disciplinary organizations. For example, contact the Modern Language Association and offer to promote OER and OEP.

required_innovations
Acknowledgement within OER community of sustained effort to work within teacher professional development networks inside disciplinary organizations. Coordination of effort. Facilitation of communication.

Open Virtual Science Labs in Every U.S. High School

This intervention envisions the deployment of virtual science laboratory capacity in every U.S. high school and the requisite training, development of networks of teachers, national competitions among students to demonstrate best uses of virtual labs, networks of people who can update materials. To do this, we need to engage NGOs, governments, businesses and educators from across the U.S. to support this effort. Open virtue science labs already exist, thus not requiring new development. This should enhance deeper learning of science materials, and will be seen by advocates of STEM as a way of engaging kids in authentic science.

required innovations
Networks among teachers and networks of professional scientists and educators are required. There will be opportunities for students to create innovations in the uses of the instrument(s).

A Global OER Graduate Network

Although we have witnessed relevant research efforts in the field of OER in recent years, the research is still rather scattered while many research questions remain unaddressed or unanswered. There is a clear need of a substantial expansion of the OER research base in order to: - develop and explore new knowledge in the broad OER field linked to a variety of disciplines - provide a solid fundament for the introduction and implementation of OER innovations - monitor and evaluate the outcomes of institutional, national and international OER initiatives - increase evidence and guidance for OER in practice. Special attention should be paid to the contextual dependence related, for example, to the variety of societies (developed, emerging, and developing economies; with the cultural diversity manifest around the globe). More in general, the OER field has a strong international dimension which carries specific implications for the research agenda. In summary the goals of the Global OER Graduate Network are to: 1. substantially expand the OER research base as indicated above 2. achieve this expansion mainly through good quality PhD trajectories 3. find these PhD trajectories distributed among universities in a variety of societies in the different continents around the world (global balance) 4. connect the research projects and researchers through a global learning network 5. provide free and easy access to the generated knowledge through papers, conference presentations, dissertations, as well as reports and publications for a broader audience.

A more detailed description can be obtained from Prof. Dr. Fred Mulder, Open Universiteit Nederland, chairholder of the UNESCO OER chair and primary responsible for this intervention. fred.mulder@ou.nl Several universities have already committed to join in, among which OU-UK, UOC (Madrid)

OER Vision and Policy Advocacy

Create an environment that is safe and permissible for teachers and educators to adopt, adapt, re-use and distribute OER materials.

required_innovations
1- Targeting relevant stakeholders: curricula decision making bodies - school boards, state education boards, teacher unions and associations. (The goal is to narrow the number of targets to maximize the effectiveness of the programme in order to provide a model that can be scaled.)


OER Information Accuracy Effort

A concerted effort by a broad group of people in the OER world to accurately portray a neutral, factual information about OER. Leverage the global, international traffic to Wikipedia to find information on OER and related topics, including links to best practices and a comprehensive source of OER information. Must be neutral and show all sides. Better quality and quantity of information on Wikipedia on this information would promote conversation and support dispersed efforts at OER adoption. Although this information may separately be used to support advocacy efforts, this project is not itself advocacy -- must be neutral and factual.

required innovations
Design workshops (online and offline) to train and support community forming and peer support.

This is an expression of the Open Education Collaborative Documentation Project: already a proposed project, with phase 1 underway and phase 2 in the proposal phase with Hewlett.


Meso

Shared Identifiers for OER Learning Objects

Create a standardized protocol for relating URLs of OER learning objects online. Individual videos, textbooks, and other curricular materials (level of atomization is up for discussion) could be compared against each other in relationships of "same," "similar," or "close enough." This would make it easier to de-duplicate URLs to common resources, track OER usage, and to evaluate a collection of materials against common core standards. Ideally, this initiative would be undertaken by a highly reputable but non-stakeholder institution like Harvard University. The result would be a protocol that allows for OER users to "de-duplicate" their own resource URLs (or update their URL scheme) and share that information, perhaps via customized search engines or through the USDOE Learning Registry.

required_innovations
Protocol itself, and data updating procedures of relevant institutions


OER.org

If I'm the education minister for Uganda, or the superintendent in a school district in New Mexico, when someone says "check out OER, it can revolutionize education in your domain", how do I go from there to actually utilizing OER? Currently, your best bet is probably to call one of the people at this conference and ask for advice. We need better resources for how to utilize OER in different contexts--in particular, oer.org doesn't exist. Concrete idea: website + organization with OER consultants that helps students, parents, teachers, adminstrators, etc incorporate OER given their position, resources, political capital, prevailing culture, etc. Emphasis on ease of use of website and realistic expectations about what's feasible in different domains.

required_innovations Before being able to direct others in using OER, need to figure out what adoption mechanisms make the most sense to promote in each domain, and what support needs to be provided. Then need to experiment with the site to figure out what actually makes sense to the different target audiences, and what translates into real-world impact.

Gathering feedback on teacher PD in rural India: mobile phones, SMS and crowdmapping

Conduct a pilot with 10 schools in rural India. Teachers will be given a phone number and asked to send SMS messages evaluating and commenting on their experiences with ICT professional development. If successful, the project could be scaled to multiple countries and the responses visualized in a Crowdmap.

required_innovations
Mobile phones are widely distributed throughout even most of the developing world, and SMS is the world's most distributed communication platform. We do not anticipate any major innovations required, as we desire to reach those in low resource environments through tools they possess and use already.

We believe it is important to flip the equation and put the "End Users" first. Particularly in low resource environments, where OER would be the most useful, it is incredibly difficult to deliver/find. Often, teachers themselves have no access to Internet, do not possess computers or smartphones, and may even have difficulty reading and writing. We intend to reach these teachers on devices they own and attempt to collect their feedback on the educational resources they have and the educational resources they wish they had. By putting the User first, we will learn how best to structure our projects and deployments around their needs.

Creating a Mechanism to Foster Trust in OER

One of the challenges is that potential users are not always comfortable using OERs because they do not trust their provenance. We need a system accepted by the OER community that provides validation from trusted sources that the quality is good to excellent.

required_innovations
Development of standards: Technology+ Content+Design+Usefulness+Engagement=Trust it to do what it says it will do, a five star system Development of an interoperable "widget/badge" to display quality score Creation of a cooperative community for development and branding--major repositories--recognize that reviewers may charge for the time spent reviewing and organization has a charge for arranging reviews--sustainability option Pilot and development of best practice documents Feedback from users for continuous improvement of product

Prior to development of this intervention, an audit of systems in other arenas would be a good idea


Micro

Learning materials for self-directed learners

Most OER are focused on teacher-run classroom activities. As systems abound for credentialing self-learning (badges, competency-based degrees -- state of Maine, Western Governors University), there is a greater need for a wide variety of good quality learning materials mapped to competencies. Learners are different (prior knowledge, learning styles, etc.) and coaches need to be able to refer learners to resources that work for them.

Supporting entrepreneurship and sustainability

Watch innovation cycles like edmodo and bring them in to give back to the "common" and learn from them. Allow revenue opportunities to be able to give services on top of OER (as long as they give back to common) to start building sustainable solutions.

required innovations
To understand ways that all OER content can be accessed through a "common" place. Build a new way of approaching States on how to allocate their budgets.

Collaborative Professional Learning

redirected to group H

A collaboration between the P2PU School of Ed, NROC, and other organizations to develop a peer learning experience for teachers that looks at Developmental English, using OER and ed tech in general, pedagogy, and other related issues. This would be a springboard to other professional learning offerings, including a possible f2f session that would then transition into more extensive online follow-up.

required_innovations
collaboration across various partners; self-directed learning and peer interaction of participants

Planning to launch first group in June, 2012 Will evaluate further development based on initial experiences (P2PU as a "lab"; testing the effectiveness of peer collaboration among both organizations and participating teachers) Will also explore the use of P2PU as a platform for various OER constituents to use for professional development


OER K-12 challenge

Make 2013 the year of the OER. Issue an OER challenge to K12 teachers that would consist of an OER challenge of the week and a live webcast interacting with that resource. Sell it to administrators as an “opportunity to see if OER can save you money and improve your quality." OER providers would be asked to provide a way for every artifact to be tagged with a “standard tag” to allow these resources as they are used enmasse to be curated by this process as teachers “descend” upon each OER tool. (i.e. a way to tag Common Core) Teachers get “social cred” of having completed OER challenge with a badge for different levels of completion. The recordings and challenges would be an open set of resources that could be remixed by others to help them start using the resources. This would result in the building of OER resources about how to use and remix the OER resources themselves recorded via a live audience and the result of a massive set of users descending upon a particular resource each week.

required innovations
We would like to have a "pre" launch of two things: a) 6 months before a visioncasting sort of webinar series designed to promote the use of K12 resources, particularly in relation to Common core to help set the vision for superintendents and principals to want to have their teachers on board. A simple webinar with one or two key people from Berkman center (i.e. Justin Reich) to talk about this vision of how OER can work would be something that could be shared b) We would like a set of best practices local policies - and if possible - an "ideal" policy endorsed by a few important organizations like the Berkman Center so that they would have a local policy to have in place that would allow their teachers to use, link to, and even create OER materials. Just a good sample downloadable policy would be enough of an advance party. This would be very simple advance requirements. Would also want #oerchallenge hashtag. Other notes: REquired innovations: Need advance party with two things: VISION - a webinar or two and some resources demonstrating that OER can add value in a high quality way and that should should harness the power of teachersourcing alignments to integrate OER resources where they fit. POLICY- A set of best practice policies that can be shared and perhaps endorsed by a couple of organizations to help local entities ensure they have policies in place allowing teacheres to use and even create OER resources. OER: Make it so resources can be tagged with standards of the local entity like common core, perhaps so could tag by school or state, or country with the standard Need a common place to meet for the weekly webinars. Need a badge system for the attainment of the challenge. Need a way to congregate or share and connect with other teachers. Each week would have a live recorded interaction with an OER provider or entity and a simple weekly challenge for the teacher. Each week would conclude with teachers completing a survey with what they did using that OER and providing feedback to the OER provider (that can be used in improvement) Benefits would be conferred to the OER entities as their services are used by a mass of K12 teachers at the same time. The result would be an OER repository of live-recorded presentations about how to use OER content itself. (You could further break down by subject matter.)

Each week (or month) would consist of a live webinar interacting with an OER platform or provider and a simple "challenge" that would permit the teacher to use the platform with an outcome that would plug into some sort of "badge" attainment if possible. It could be done with a weekly survey to complete linking to what the teacher did AND providing feedback to the OER entity about how to improve the use of their platform for K12. * We could link up with Steve Hargadon of classroom20 (@hargadon) a network of 20-30K K12 teachers, Global Education collaborative, and our Flat Classroom network (Possibly even K12 online conference). Flat Classroom would be happy to be a cosponsor of this effort and can work with other organizations on the PR effort. * We could talk to Blackboard Collaborate or some other web conferencing organization about hosting the webinars (they are a sponsor of our webinars for Flat Classroom but you may know of another umbrella that wants to sponsor it) -some of the organizations already mentioned might be willing to step forth as a leader or you could create a consortium like we did for the Global Education conference. 52 weeks might be too much - or it could be competely open and create a wiki, let OER's sign up for slots -- it should be simple. It could be Google hangouts that are live streamed. * Would be great to get a Badge attainment from Mozilla for completion of different levels of this. * Allow people to go back to previous webinars and sessions and complete surveys to level up even if they come in late to the process. * It could be possible to give schools or districts the designation of "OER Pioneer" or "Open Education Friendly" district if more than 20% of their teachers go through the challenge. This would be a measure of a willingness to have high quality while minimizing costs and could be "sold" as a great thing to tell your districts and general public that you are willing to be fiscally responsible while maintaining high quality. * This hits to the grassroots movement of teachers moving through Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc. * I would be happy to share and market via Cool Cat Teacher Blog - I'm a supporter of this one - Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher * Could have a live chat on twitter about that week's #oerchallenge - there are a lot of teacher chats on Twitter now. * Storify the week each week to highlight the week and keep momentum like Berkman did with this conference. * Get OER stakeholders involved to like and tweet the events of the week and build momentum.

Mindsports as Rocket Fuel for OER

Gamification of Education

Teaching metacognitive skills via straetgy games.

a curriculum of mindsports from tic tac toe to chess and poker to roll out through libraries, schools, and juvenile prisons to challenge and train analytic skills and competitive character of young and growing people. Teach teacher to play.

required_innovations
mostly changes in attitude toward recognition of game play as a mode of challenging and training analytic skill. the net has profoundly affected how we play games. we have opportunity to build and support tools and environments for intelligent play. Teaching teachers to lead kids in intelligent play has transformative, scalable potential. Project through libraries, schools and prisons. use our network of teachers to learn what are indigenous in each local. work toward the equivalent of flipped classrooms for games. integrate and support with super software

If any one is interested, Charlie Nesson is offering to teach poker to beginners at 6:30pm tonight in Harkness South.


Research

Mapping OER to competency programs

Documenting the process by which OER are being mapped to competencies (degrees, certifications, badges, etc.).

required_innovations
Gather the models of mapping of OER to competencies and make those public and disseminate to the academic and policy community.

Instructables for OER; stOERies.us

Videos and how-tos for [building and] using OER.

stOERies.us is a platform for sharing stories of transformational practice created by students, teachers, developers, and other OER stakeholders to make visible the promise and potential of OER. stOERies is the visual platform for the OER movement. StOERies is a platform for creating, sharing, tagging, and finding stories about the use of OER in a wide variety of settings. Each stOERy can include a video narrative, how-to documentation, and an embedded ask related to how the project could be improved or the OER ecosystem can grow and development. How-To documentation and embedded asks can be "voted up" to allow the most valuable documentation and the most pressing asks to rise to the surface. stOERies has a simple interface that allows a wide variety of stakeholders to upload their story that displays the promise and potential of their project. It borrows, in some of it's design elements, from the workingexamples.org, which is a space for sharing research projects in the DML community. Once the simple infrastructure is developed stOERies.us will be almost instantly populated by the Hewlett Grantee community and others in the OER field as it quikcly becomes the primary face of OER initiatives worldwide. We are trying to create a bottom up movement--Open Source, Open Voice--to allow the stories of OER stakeholders from students through developers to take over the public imagination. For teachers and students, it allows their voice to be heard in the OER community, and for developers and designers it provides feedback on usage and demonstrations of impact. Smart filters allow users to sort projects by a wide variety of categories.

required_innovations
The folks at Hack Day must build 1.0... open source tools exist to make this possible

This is totally awesome. It will be the face of OER to the world. Hewlett will force grantees to participate Ongoing staffing, functional needs: 1) Brand consulting 2) User Interaction designers 3) Content curation


Community Colleges OER Retention Pilot Project

With engagement and input from community college administrators and teachers, create a test group and control group and design a pilot program to implement and assess the efficacy of OER on a diverse community of urban community college students in terms of retention rates and matriculation to senior college rates. Retention is a huge problem for community colleges with a majority of students failing to obtain an associate's degree let alone proceed to senior colleges. This is an at-risk population that also lacks financial resources and cost savings could be a big driver and if it could be shown that OER interventions perform equally or better than traditional approaches, that would be a significant finding that could encourage widespread adoption of OER.

required_innovations
This collaborative project would be carefully designed with input from community college administrators and professors and would require a research and design phase, planning, implementation and assessment.

Policy - One step at a time

Find a big issue blocker that is short term than can be resolved in 1-2 years to allow OER innovations to come through. For example - changing State Education Agencies mind in allowing rigid textbook budgets to be used for all types of educational curriculum.

required_innovations
One innovation: Build a new way of approaching States on how to allocate their budgets.