OER for Teacher Education

Identifying needs, finding OER, selecting OER, adaptation

Aims of the Workshop
• Sharing of practice – awareness of what partners are doing in this
area
• Building networks and friendships that could lead to collaboration
• Focus on teacher learning – what is important? What do we need
from OER?
• Criteria for selecting OER to support new pedagogies in teacher
development
• Familiarity with a range of existing repositories and an awareness
where to find OER that support national policy aspirations
• Willingness to use and support the use of existing OER and to adapt
them for local needs

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Activity
• With the person next to you, share your experience of using OER.
• Think of two questions you have about OER and write them on a
post-it note.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain
or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free
use or re-purposing by others.

Open Educational Resources include full courses, course materials, modules,

textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or
techniques used to support access to knowledge.

OER first defined by UNESCO in 2000.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

 OER
Conditions Freedom to
Attribution Access
Share-Alike Copy
Non-commercial Modify
No-modify Redistribute
OER origins
First major project: MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) Project.

In 2000 MIT faculty and administrators asked:

“How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university
going to do about it?”

MIT faculty answer was:

“Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses.
We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and
other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.”

2002: Proof of concept with 50 courses

2014 : Materials from 2150 courses and 125 million
visitors www.ocw.mit.edu

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

OER: a global movement
• China, materials from 750 courses made available by 222 university members of the China
Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium. (www.core.org.cn/en/).

• Japan: resources from more than 400 courses from the 19 member universities of the
Japanese OCW Consortium. (www.jocw.jp/).

• France: 800 educational resources from around 100 teaching units at 11 member universities
of the ParisTech OCW project. (graduateschool.paristech.org/).

• UK: Open University has released distance learning materials via the OpenLearn project
(openlearn.open.ac.uk/); over 80 UKOER projects have released many resources.

• Africa: OER Africa (www.oerafrica.org) developing and disseminating OER for higher education
institution faculties of Health, Teacher Education and Agriculture.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Activity
Understanding OER

• Read the questions provided, discuss with your neighbour and

indicate your response to each one.

• Join with another pair and compare your answers. Discuss any
differences.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

OER: the issues
Cost

Meeting Culture
needs Quality
change

Licenses

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Cost
• Free to the user
• Author is not paid
• Not free to produce! – time, quality assurance,
editing, production…..

How will the creation of OER be funded?

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Quality

• Who decides?
• Who checks?
• What mechanisms can be used to ensure that OER
published by an organisation meet quality standards?

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Licenses
• What are the options?
• What conditions are attached to each option?
• Which license will meet my needs?

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Selection
• What are our needs? New pedagogy, integrating ICT,
improving teacher learning…
• Do the OER we have found meet our needs? What pedagogy
to they embrace? Is the level and language appropriate for
our learners?
• Do we need to adapt them?
• Who decides? Individuals, Heads of Department? Deans?
Heads of Institution? Government Ministers?

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Change of culture
• Universal accessibility
• Less control from the top
• More democratic
• More autonomy for individuals
• More trust, more collaboration

Different ways of working are required in order to derive the

full benefits from OER, starting with institutional policies.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

The OER adoption pyramid (H.Trotter, G.Cox)
http://conference.oeconsortium.org/2016/presentation/the-oer-adoption-pyramid/

Individuals Volition Institutions

Availability
Capacity (technical skills
to find, use, adapt and create)
Awareness (of OER, the
concept)
Permission (to use (via Licence) or
create (via institutional policy))
Access (to infrastructure)
UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016
OER Adoption – Key questions
ADOPTION Questions for OER Questions for OER
FACTORS users creators
Pedagogical values, Do you want to use OER? Do you want to get
Volition institutional culture, involved in OER creation?
social context
Are the resources that Have you found OER to Do you have teaching
Availability we need available as materials of sufficient
meet your learning
OER? needs? quality? Copyright?

Necessary skills, Do you know where to look Do you have the skills to
Capacity capabilities? for OER? develop and upload OER?
What are OER? How are Do you understand OER Do you understand the OER
Awareness they different from licenses, restrictions and licenses?
other resources? opportunities?
Licensing and Do you have permission from Who possess copyright over
Permission institutional factors the institution? License? teaching materials you use?
Electricity, devices? How will you access OER? How will you access OER?
Access
OER Potential

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

 The OER cycle
From: Enhancing
teacher Education
through OER (A MOOC
written by The Open
University UK and
available on
www.EdX.org

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Activity
What does learner-centred mean?
• Write down your ideas on post-it notes – one idea per post-
it.

• What would you expect to see in a learner-centred

classroom

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Using OER to support teacher educstion
• The main challenge in teacher education is how to make teaching
both in schools and in teacher training institutions more interactive.
• Teachers and teacher educators need to be able to select OER which
support teacher learning and learner-centred education.
• The next 2 slides highlight the key aspects of teacher learning and
learner-centred education. After them there is an activity to help you
identify the criteria for choosing OER that are likely to be helpful

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

What does learner-centred mean?
‘Learner-centred’ is a set of attitudes and values
• Taking account of the needs of all learners – inclusive teaching
• Valuing the skills and cultural experiences that learners bring to the
classroom
• Building on prior knowledge
• Believing that all learners can learn
• Setting engaging tasks that challenge as appropriate
• Allowing students to talk about their ideas
• Skilful questioning to elicit knowledge and understanding

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

 Teacher learning – what is important?
Experience of good
teaching, modelling

Vision

Relevant, authentic
activities Motivation Reflection Understanding
SK, PCK, TPCK,
Educational
studies

Practice
Shulman, L. and Shulman, J. (2007) Journal of
Curriculum Studies 36 (2) 257-271

Teaching practice,
UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016 micro-teaching
Activity 3
Imagine you are looking for OER to support teacher learning. Taking
account of ideas about learner-centreness and teacher learning,
brainstorm the sorts of things that you will take into consideration
when recommending OER to teachers and teacher educators.

Sort your ideas into a set of criteria that could be used to judge an OER
in the field of teacher education

Use your criteria to assess the OER provided.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Groups: divide the participants into groups
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4

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Looking at OER repositories
• Example: T-TEL Ghana
• http://www.t-tel.org/

• TESSA, TESS-India, African Storybook project, ACE Maths, OER Africa

(including African teacher education network), African Virtual
University (AVU)

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Reviewing OER repositories
• Group 1 - OER Africa/Teacher Education network
http://www.oerafrica.org/teachered
• Group 2 – TESSA - www.tessafrica.net
• Group 3 – African Storybook project
http://www.africanstorybook.org/
• Group 4 - AVU OER repository - http://oer.avu.org/

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Activity 4 – part 1
• In your group, complete the review of an OER website.

• Each person will need to be able to share the group’s comments with
others in the part 2.

• Number yourselves 1-5

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Activity 4 – part 2
• Move groups – find people with the same number
• Each person has 10 minutes to share their report with a group of
colleagues.

• After 10 mins a buzzer will sound.

• Return to home group and share thoughts on what you have heard.

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016

Plenary
• What have you learnt about OER and how to work
with them?

• How will you take this forward in your work to support

teachers and teacher educators?

UNESCO/IA – Nairobi Sept 2016