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Hewlett Grantees Meeting 2012 Meeting: April 10-12, 2012 Hack Day: April 13, 2012 Harvard University
Problem Statement
Open Educational Resources (OER) [1] are becoming an increasingly rich and promising source of teaching and learning materials, with rapid global growth [2] across widely varied learning environments, communities, and contexts. While more important work remains to be done on all fronts, the OER movement has matured from innovative upstart to an important driver in the field of education. At this point, teachers, administrators, advocates, funders, and policymakers are looking for ways to strategically leverage the impact of existing and future open resources — including content, tools, and implementing resources — on education. Against this backdrop, the 2012 Hewlett Foundation Grantees meeting will explore the following questions: As the quantity and diversity of open resources proliferate and different OER models emerge, what concrete actions can be taken to further strengthen and leverage their impact on teaching and learning as facilitators of innovation and quality? How do we confront questions around accessibility, equity, and impact? The meeting will bring together key stakeholders to address these questions, from different perspectives, describe the current state of OER from a field perspective, and work together towards a roadmap for action.
Meeting Concept and Goals
The 2012 Hewlett Foundation Grantees meeting will be hosted at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Its thematic focus is Education— the “E” within OER—with the overarching objective of developing an action-oriented roadmap for strengthening OER by increasing its impact across different educational contexts, from classrooms to informal learning settings. Three (sometimes overlapping, but analytically distinct) stakeholder perspectives will form the central pillars of the inquiry: learners (“demand side”), facilitators (“interfaces”), and builders (“supply side”). Evidence, narratives, and the role of supporting infrastructure will be considered throughout the sessions.
The meeting will start with a segment on the current state of play within the OER landscape, with a focus on utilizing a field perspective to identify trends regarding the production, dissemination, use, and impact of OER resources across different educational contexts. With these field-wide objectives in mind, this segment will also outline Hewlett’s strategic OER goals for 2012, and present an opportunity for cross comparison and evaluation of areas of the OER ecosystem that are ripe for investment and growth.
Based on this mapping, the second segment of the event will feature a series of case studies highlighting OER practices across different learning and teaching environments. In this segment, grantees will have the opportunity to present and evaluate their projects through the thematic lens of the meeting (focus on “E”), develop and exchange narratives, data, and experiences regarding the challenges and opportunities for growth of OER, and identify specific points of connection, leverage, collaboration, and intervention to increase its impact across different educational settings. A facilitated discussion will ground the third segment of the meeting and center on the core infrastructure that needs to be strengthened or created in order to increase the impact of OER in diverse contexts on a global scale. Accessibility, interoperability, enabling (public) policies, implementable standards, and core methodologies to measure impact and progress will be debated and explored.
The overarching goals of the 2012 meeting are to:
Deepen understanding of the OER ecosystem, with a particular focus on the various factors that influence the production, ubiquity, and accessibility of open resources for education, and identify ways to increase OER’s impact across different cultures, communities, and settings of (formal and informal) learning and teaching; Identify, communicate, and discuss field-wide goals for 2012, against the backdrop of Hewlett’s OER strategic goals and a description of the current state of OER from a field perspective; Increase visibility/awareness of OER projects among grantees, identify powerful narratives and best practices, highlight areas of collaboration and future intervention; Facilitate a community of practice through conversation and identifying opportunities for collaboration Develop an action-oriented roadmap to leverage OER’s impact on education that reflects these objectives and takes into account our collective mapping of the core threats and opportunities in 2012.
[1] What do we mean by this term? We would seek to use Hewlett’s definition of this in addition to other ways educators, organizers, and institutions have described it http://wiki.creativecommons.org/What_is_…)