How inclusive is the “Openness” of Open Education?

Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B

deakin.edu.au/cradle

How inclusive is the “Openness” of Open

Education?

Sarah Lambert – 5/3/17

[email protected] @SarahLambertOz

CC-BY-SA

mailto:[email protected]


Quick overview19 years in WollongongSouth Coast of NSW, AustraliaNow at Deakin - Regional Unis,Diverse cohorts

Photo by Sarah Lambert CC-BY-SA


• Full time on scholarship with Cradle– Started, moved to Melbourne Feb 2016

• 1 year down, 2 to go• Passed Colloquia Nov 2016 and now

collecting data

Quick PhD overview


PhD Research Question

How can Australian Higher education providers make use of Open Education programs

for Student Equity and Social Inclusion?

Access, progress and success in HE

Lifelong learning, health info, empowerment, personal goals, community development


PhD Research Question

an educational program offered freely to the community with a mixture of resources, activities or assessment, and instructional materials to guide learning and mastery of a particular topic

How can Australian Higher education providers make use of Open Education programs

for Student Equity and Social Inclusion?


The Personal• Motivated by practitioner enlightenment

– 18 yrs ed tech, 3 yrs Open Ed/MOOC practitioner– Are we really reaching the un-reached?– Early MOOC evals: Great for educated white guys

• Dawning realisation– More digital divide?– What if ed-tech is part of the problem?


Critical approach, Realist method• Critical: include the excluded voices and

perspectives, privilege the unprivileged, what is missing?

• Realist: what works for whom in what circumstances; the state of the actual; beyond “promise” or “potential”


2 Phase research project


Your input• Help me find good cases for Phase 2 (in

depth case studies)• Where OE is working for particular

underprivileged groups – for real, in practice


In theory: Free stuff. So what?• Selwyn(2011): advantaged people tend to take-up and

take advantage of the new techs • Rohs & Ganz (2015): MOOCs increasing the digital

divide • Tinto (2008): access to education without support

does not lead to equal opportunity of education


Free is not enough• Warshauer’s major work “Technology for Social

Inclusion” (2003)– providing technology for free on its own rarely

improves the lot of disadvantaged learners– Also required: physical, digital, human and social

forms of support for learning and making meaning of the new techs

– Irish “Information Town Competition” winner ($22M free stuff, failed) vs 1.5M runner up (plan, partner, embed/engage, success)


HEI student Equity lit• Major Australian and English program

reviews of HEI interventions:– Targetted: LSES schools, Indigenous mentoring– Universal: FYE, transition, Inclusive pedagogy,– High-touch, low-tech– Community Partnerships are key, bring more

resources, acknowledge community strengths, avoid colonial discourse and deficit discourse


In practice: Inclusion Forum• FiF Forum Nov 2016: revealed more interest in

online technologies (as compared to journals)– Syncronous techs: keep F2F flavour– Virtual techs: keep sense of place or campus– Digital storytelling: privilege FiF/LSES/Indigenous

student experience in their own words


Virtual student mentoring

Synchronous+

Virtual sense of place


New thinking• Universal and targeted

– Universal social inclusion programs for normalising cohorts, sharing common ground?

– Targeted social inclusion programs for valuing cultural difference and strengths?

• Both needed, complementary– Will Open Education programs of both types also

exist and be mutually supportive and helpful?


New thinking• Many social inclusion projects run over

many years, build and enhance relationships– Part of the ‘How” question needs to look at “Where”

and “When” to locate/embed the digital– If there is interest in synchronous techs, will Open

Education programs remain mostly asynchronous?


Method: Systematic ReviewWho is putting OE to use for inclusion?What contexts? What interventions? What supports and resources?


Title/abstract screening• 91 citations imported

– 49 from Google Scholar, 44 from Scopus– 59 judged as suitable, useful, in scope

• Observations from 59 abstracts– MOOCs + study groups– MOOCs about inclusion, MOOCs for inclusion programs– Piloting techs for remediating knowledge gaps (new supports)– Different types of inclusion partnerships (new contexts)

Thanks to Marc Singer,

my 2nd reviewer


Sample set of data: 17 of 59• Completed full paper review and data extraction from

the first batch of 17 papers• Hooray, papers from diverse global authors and

settings: – America (6), England (4), Spain (3)– Switzerland, China, Scotland, Australia, Ecuador, El Salvador,

Chile, Italy and the Netherlands.• Half conference papers, 35% journals, the rest reports


4 staff accounts• Staff accounts of designing OE: 4 papers

– technical accounts, innovations in auto-generating support for students (Miranda, Mangione, Orciuoli, Gaeta, & Loia, 2013; Muñoz-Merino, Rodríguez, & Kloos, 2014);

– MOOCs and embedded support in classrooms (de Waard, Anckaert, Vandewaetere, & Demeulenaere, 2016);

– assessment design perspectives (Hills & Hughes, 2016).


1 national policy paper• synthesised a broad range of national data

and successful interventions to improve the skills of low-skilled Americans

• explicitly referencing multiple types of OERs and open technologies (Strawn, 2015).


11 student evaluated OE projects• majority (11) completed projects, run with - and

evaluated by - students

Outcomes exceeded

Outcomes met or largely met

Mixed outcomes

Unclear/Other Totals

Universal interventions

1 3 3 1 8

Targetted interventions

1 1 1 3


Partners and supports No

partners+ technology partner

+ community partner

+ community and technology partner

Totals

Single Higher Education Institution

6 3 1 1 11

Multiple Higher Education Institutions

3 1 0 1 6

Total 9 4 1 2 16

Cases with a community partner provided a set of physical spaces and technologies, and human/personalised one on one and group support (de Waard et al., 2016).

Project sponsored by Samsung had both education, technology and community organisation partner support (McDougall et al., 2016.)


ExamplesIdentifier Study setting/institution Types of open technologies, author/s reference

U (#71) 8 week introductory computer science MOOC on edX platform

The "Recommender” tool helps students who get stuck prior to doing a quiz, was deployed as an "XBlock" into the edX MOOC platform, uses staff and student crowdsourced resources (Li & Mitros, 2015)

S (#34) Design of auto-generated multiple choice quiz questions for MOOCs and a process of academic quality checking at the University of Salerno

"Adaptive Remedial Work Environment (ARWE) based on adaptation and personalization features provided by the IWT platform. The resulting MOOC platform is released in beta version as MOMAMOOC." (Miranda et al., 2013)

U (#24) MOOC used as flipped classroom resource for a campus cohort of engineering foundation students at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Students had the option of a voluntary peer study group, were provided with technology and spaces to learn together - by watching MOOC videos and solve quizzes collaboratively each week, for a 5 week period (N. Li et al., 2014)

U (#45) Coursera Human Trafficking (HT) MOOC aiming for attitudinal change

Coursera MOOC The MOOC was designed for both attitudinal (cognitive) and behavioural change in mind. Students were not only exposed to powerful "undercover" videos and first hand accounts of trafficking, but were encouraged to develop their own form of activism by developing a Public Service Announcement (PSA) as an assignment." (Watson et al., 2016)


ExamplesT (#12) "The Hands-On ICT (HANDSON) MOOC included seven teams of facilitators

to manage forums in 7 different languages: English, French, Greek, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Catalan and Spanish."

The MOOC was developed and delivered in the Canvas platform, combined with weekly Google hangouts (Colas, Sloep, & Garreta-Domingo, 2016)

S (#15) Belgian upper secondary students follow an English or French MOOC of their own choosing. Prep for university, language and digital skills.

Multiple MOOCs were used as classroom learning resources, firstly in groups, then individually. (de Waard et al., 2016)

T (#61)

Spanish speaking learners, including a cohort from the University of El Salvador, learning in the edX MOOC "MIT 6.002x Circuits and Electronics"

On campus informal study groups. Guidelines developed which cover use of "three platform components: a learning management system (LMS), a content management system (CMS), and an adaptive content engine (ACE)." (Sanchez-Gordon & Luján-Mora, 2016)

S (#37) Design of MOOCs and organisational change at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Khan Academy technologies for Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) plus Moodle for communications tools (Muñoz-Merino et al., 2014)


OpenEd programs: how inclusive? • So far, not bad for STEM, NNS/ESL, college prep

equity cohorts• Not yet seeing focus on other equity groups (but there

are 32 left to look at)• A number of technical and pedagogical designs that

could be put to more targeted use for equity needs


My wish• More interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations

• some common aspirations yet different strengths, skills and knowledges

social inclusion/widening participation

Ed tech/IT/analytics


Comments and questions• Email [email protected]• Twitter @SarahLambertOz

With thanks to supervisors Prof. David Boud, Assoc. Prof Phillip Dawson, and Dr Nadine Zacharias

mailto:[email protected]