Introduction
Literature review
OER in China
OEP framework for open education
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OER: Teaching materials used within OEP should be openly licenced, and the resources produced during the course (e.g. reports, presentations, videos) should also be released as OER.
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Enabling technology: Teachers should make use of different technologies and tools to build and support a connected learning community where the OEP can flourish. These technologies and tools include OER authoring tools, OER repositories, social networks, and collaborative editing tools.
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Open teaching: Educators should implement teaching methodologies that can help students to construct their own learning pathways (self-regulated) and to actively contribute to knowledge building, both individually and collaboratively.
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Open collaboration: Teachers should build open communities, for instance by using social networks, to help students to work in teams to carry out particular learning tasks (e.g. editing a blog, creating a Wikipedia page) as well as to exchange ideas and discussions related to those specific learning tasks. Other teachers and stakeholders can participate in these discussions as well to further assist learners.
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Open assessment: Teachers should allow learners to evaluate one another (peer assessment). This can emphasise reflective practices and improve learning outcomes.
Definitions | Keywords |
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The Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project defined OEP as ‘practices that involve students in active, constructive engagement with content, tools, and services in the learning process and promote learners’ self-management, creativity, and working in teams’ (Geser, 2007). | tools and services, working in teams |
Conole and Ehlers (2010) defined OEP as ‘the use of OER with the aim to improve [the] quality of educational processes and innovate educational environments’ (p. 3). | OER, educational environment |
Ehlers (2011) considered OEP as a ‘collaborative practice in which resources are shared by making them openly available and pedagogical practices are employed which rely on social interaction, knowledge creation, [peer learning], and shared learning practices’ (p. 6). | collaborative practice, social interaction, knowledge creation, peer learning |
International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE, 2012) defined OEP as “practices which support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational resources (OER)” | Practices, (re) use of OER |
UK OER support and evaluation team (2012) defined OEP as “all activities that open up access to educational opportunity, in a context where freely available online content and services (whether ‘open’, ‘educational’ or not) are taken as the norm” | open services, open content |
open pedagogy | |
Cronin (2017) defined OEP as ‘collaborative practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of OER as well as pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for [the] interaction, [peer learning], knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners’. | collaborative practices, OER, participatory technologies, social networks, peer learning, knowledge creation |
The Ljubljana Action Plan from the Second World OER Congress (UNESCO, 2017) stated, ‘If used effectively and supported by sound pedagogical practices, OER allow for the possibility to dramatically increase access to education through ICT, opening up opportunities to create and share a wider array of educational resources to accommodate a greater diversity of educator and learner needs. Increased online access to OER further promotes individualised study, which, when coupled with social networking and collaborative learning, fosters opportunities for pedagogical innovation and knowledge creation.’ | ICT, social networking, collaborative learning, knowledge creation |
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (2017) defined OEP as “comprising a set of skills in collaboration, curation, curricular design, and leadership around the use of Open Educational Resources. OEP build educator capacity for using OER to improve curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy, and to gain skills in digital resource curation and curriculum creation, and to actively collaborate around and advocate for innovative approaches to open education and OER” | OER use (skills), collaboration, resource and curriculum creation |
Chiappe and Adame (2018) stated that OEP can cover several dimensions, including assessment, teaching, and educational planning. | assessment, teaching, educational planning |
Wiley and Hilton III (2018) considered OEP as an OER-enabled pedagogy and defined it as a ‘set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions that are characteristic of OER’. | teaching and learning practices, OER |
Challenges and guidelines on using OER and OEP during this COVID-19 outbreak
Guidelines for teachers
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Yang (2020) mentioned that copyright is one of the challenges of using online resources. Indeed, during OEP development, teachers should pay attention to the attributed open licence of each OER to ensure its legal use in their context.
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Professor ID-012 from the online seminar mentioned that teachers might not be familiar with the process of choosing the most suitable resources to use in their teaching processes. In this context, Ozdemir and Bonk (2017) pointed out that searching for high-quality OER among the thousands that are published is a difficult task. Therefore, teachers should consider the quality of the OER they would use by referring to well-known national and international OER repositories, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Commonwealth of Learning–OAsis OER and Open Knowledge Repository (all these OER repositories are accessible anywhere). Additionally, assessing and selecting high-quality OER is one of the most challenging tasks while using OER. Therefore, OER can be selected based on several criteria, including licensing, accuracy/quality of the content, interactivity, ease of adaptability, and cultural relevance and sensitivity.
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Professor ID-013 from the online seminar also mentioned that teachers might lack the technical skills to develop their OER. Therefore, to properly create and publish OER, teachers can refer to several national and international authoring tools, such as 101 ppt software and ALESCO Hub, Connexions repository authoring tool or Open Author (all these authoring tools are accessible anywhere), where the learning resources could be simply created via simple clicks and where no specific technical skills are needed.
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During the teaching process, teachers should apply open teaching to engage learners and encourage them to participate in the co-creation of knowledge (Nascimbeni and Burgos 2016). For instance, teachers can ask students to update a given blog related to a specific learning topic using the Baidu encyclopaedia (Wiki pages, for international readers). Additionally, teachers can apply the connectivist learning approach (Goldie 2016) by asking students to write reports as OER on a given topic as well as create new exercises for a specific chapter in an open textbook based on several references and resources. This can help learners gain digital literacy skills (searching, assessing, and identifying online resources) which are fundamental for twenty-first-century literacy. Particularly, teachers can ask students to work on public Tencent documents (Google Docs, for international readers), where they can see one another’s work and progress. This can emphasise peer assessment and reflective practices.
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To facilitate OEP adoption, teachers should select friendly learning tools and technologies that learners are already familiar with. They should also avoid overloading learners by asking them to use too many tools, resulting in inconvenient learning practices for them. Additionally, teachers can refer to open software because by nature it can be modified and adapted to different needs, fulfilling more accessibility requirements than proprietary software (Zhang et al. 2020). For instance, the open source learning management system Moodle was adapted to cover new functionalities, such as detecting at-risk students (Denden et al. 2019).
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Learning is facilitated not only by teachers but also by peers (Hegarty 2015). Therefore, to make the teaching process more interactive, teachers can build open learning communities where the students can openly exchange ideas, create discussions, and collaborate on different tasks. To ensure interactive and open learning communities, teachers should use social networks during the learning process, such as Wechat, QQ, and Sina Weibo (Facebook or Twitter, for international readers). By using these social networks, teachers can share questions related to specific course materials, and students can discuss them to determine specific answers. Consequently, students learn by exchanging ideas and opinions. Furthermore, the jigsaw classroom pedagogy (invented and named in 1971 by Elliot Aronson) can be applied online by dividing the assignment into several tasks and making each team work on a specific task. The teams will use social networks to work together, communicate with one another, and deliver their assignments. This will foster both individual accountability and the achievement of team goals. Additionally, the open learning within social networks can be gamified using Emojis to make the learning process more engaging and interactive. For instance, Saif et al. (2019) used, during the learning process on Facebook, the number of given “likes” on a particular learner’s answer as the score he/she gets for that answer.
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During the learning process using OER and OEP, teachers should act as facilitators of the learning process. For instance, teachers can help their students with their reports by suggesting useful references that they should read. Also, teachers should have an active role in building a trustworthy learning environment by continuously encouraging their students to share their opinions and answers. Hegarty (2015) mentioned that building trust and self-confidence is an important factor in open learning environments so as to achieve excellent learning outcomes.
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Wiley (2013) mentioned that ‘disposable assignments’, meaning assignments which are forgotten right after the course and do not benefit anyone, should be replaced with activities that both teachers and learners can work on and that can benefit others. Therefore, open learning materials delivered by learners (e.g. reports, presentations, videos), under the supervision of teachers, can be collected as open textbooks and uploaded online so that other students and teachers (future generations) can benefit from them. Additionally, learning achievements can be measured within OEP by referring, for instance, to the interaction frequency in open learning discussions as well as the number of finished (uploaded or shared) assignments.
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Professor ID-014 from the online seminar mentioned that traditional paper–based assessments are no longer effective. Therefore, to assess learners in open learning environments, teachers should use project-based assessments based on the OER delivered by learners. In this context, teachers can invite their students to open presentations (where parents and other teachers can attend) of their delivered projects for assessment and grading. This can be achieved via several platforms that support live-video communication, such as Dingtalk and Zoom (Skype and Zoom, for international readers).
Guidelines for learners
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Just like teachers, learners should pay attention to the attributed open licence of each OER to ensure its legal use in their context, as some combination of licenses, for instance, do not allow OER remixing.
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Thousands of OER are published online without knowing the reliability of the authors. Therefore, learners should carefully search for, select, and summarise information while preparing their content (e.g. assignments, presentations, videos, reports) to ensure high-quality OER.
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Learners should remember to attribute open licences to their prepared open learning materials so they can be reused by others as OER.
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To develop their independence and capacity to self-regulate within open learning experiences, learners must develop such skills as behavioural self-regulation and emotional self-regulation. For instance, learners should maintain a positive attitude when facing learning challenges and consider these challenges as new learning opportunities.
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Learners should be collaborative and active in building an open learning community by encouraging their peers and participating in discussions.
Urgent applied initiatives to support open and distance education
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Several open courses and thematic teaching resources focusing on the epidemic have been produced, including patriotic education, epidemic prevention knowledge, psychological knowledge, and other resources of different disciplines. For example, two schools in Wuhan, the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak, have created a variety of educational resources around the epidemic. Additionally, the SLIBNU, in collaboration with the Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) and the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR), has created a series of open resources about COVID-19 protection (see http://sli.bnu.edu.cn/en/Courses/Webinars/Coronavirus_Prevention) in eleven languages: Chinese, English, Arabic, Spanish, Persian, Korean, German, French, Japanese, Urdu, and Bengali.
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The Department of National Textbooks under the MoE has released open versions of teaching books and textbooks for the spring semester of 2020 as well as relevant teaching resources provided by 67 textbook publishers across China, which can be downloaded and used for free by teachers and students all over the country. Additionally, under the unified arrangement of the MoE, the digital teaching resources of the People’s Education Press and its affiliate, Renjiao Digital Publishing Co. Ltd., will be open on the Renjiao Diandu app to primary and secondary school students nationwide. The state has compiled textbooks of three subjects and digital textbooks of the People’s Education Press as well as thousands of video and audio micro-courses synchronised with the textbooks, all contained in the application. The number of users increased by more than 2.3 million, and the number of page views reached 250 million after the app became free for 72 h. According to the statistics of the People’s Education Press, 30 million downloads of elementary- and middle-school textbooks have been observed every day. Similarly, several universities have released several massive open online courses (MOOCs) for learners.
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To increase internet reliability, several Chinese companies – including China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom as well as Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei – focused on enhancing the provided connectivity services and increasing the internet bandwidth to ensure that 50 million learners can access the cloud learning platform simultaneously and acquire new information without any interruptions.
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To ensure accessible learning experiences, four channels of China Education Television started the open broadcasting of primary- and middle-school classes across the nation, covering 75 lessons on air to provide learning experiences for those in remote areas without internet or without cable TV.