Case Studies KEEP Toolkit Case Studies Promoting Effective Use of Open Educational Technology | KEEP Case Studies: Open Educational Technology |
Promoting Effective Use of Open Educational Technology
Open Source Portfolio
The Open and Share movement in education has potential for revolutionizing the way that educational tools and resources are shared across classrooms, institutions, and regional boundaries to collectively advance teaching and learning. However, one of the major impediments in promoting Open Education is the lack of a support structure for sharing ideas, experiences, and challenges to build collective educational knowledge around these open tools and resources. Although this is a non-trivial task, there are many possibilities for this work to further promote effective use of open educational tools and resources as well as continuously improve their quality. In other words, the success of Open Education depends not only on the availability and usefulness of these new tools and resources themselves but also on whether “locally acquired knowledge” can be shared globally through attempts to utilize these tools and resources in various contexts and for multiple purposes. In response to this challenge, a group of institutions (IUPUI, Portland State University, University of California Berkeley, University of Minnesota, and Virginia Tech) which participate in the Open Source Portfolio Initiative, a prominent cross-institutional open source educational technology development project, attempted to share the essence of their ongoing local efforts in implementing the Open Source Portfolio (OSP). The project started with the Knowledge Media Laboratory staff helping to develop a template that consist of a set of framing elements and prompts to guide each institution in succinctly documenting and reflecting on its local OSP implementation work. These elements included:
Each institution then created a case study snapshot using the KEEP Toolkit. In order to exhibit these case studies, an online gallery was created. The OSP Case Studies Gallery, which is part of the Open Source Portfolio website, enables other institutions to develop their own case study snapshots by using the template and adding them to the collections in the “Call for Cases” section. At the Sakai/OSP conference in December 2005, the authors of these case studies organized a panel session on this pilot project. The panel addressed the significance of documenting and sharing institutions', faculty members', and students' knowledge and experience in implementing and using open educational technologies (such as the Open Source Portfolio and the Sakai tools) to promote innovative and effective use. The experiences and insights gained from this pilot project were shared with the audience through the institutions’ perspectives and the perspective of a commercial vendor who helps institutions effectively plan and implement these technologies. A few major issues discussed in this session included:
During the session, the authors of the case studies shared their experience in going through the documentation and reflection process and also read to learn from each others' case study. Sharon Hamilton, Associate Dean of the Faculties and Director of Indiana University Faculty Colloquium for Excellence in Teaching at IUPUI, initiated a discussion by stating “[what was most helpful was] the template which enables a common conceptual framework, very tight, very focused, for each of us in our individual institutions to put in our separate stories. The IUPUI snapshot is rich in contextual, programmatic, and pedagogical issues. What that means is that readers can come to this and make decisions based on what they’re seeing because they can see the common conceptual framework but different stories and different enactments and different contexts.” Wende Morgaine and Nate Angell, who lead electronic portfolio development and implementation efforts at Portland State University, explained how reading others’ case studies actually helped them with implementing the OSP software on their campus and influenced the writing of their own case study. As Morgaine offered, “When we were looking at implementing on our campus, we actually read the case studies to figure out some of the lessons that we could learn from those. And we were sort of desperate for information about how this should be done, and when we encountered problems, we were like “I wonder if Virginia Tech has encountered this? Or IUPUI has done this for a long time, I wonder…” So we actually used the case studies as we implemented, and so then it was interesting to be writing our own case study. But I think that that really sort of radically changed how I wrote my case study because I was a very recent reader of case studies and so I wrote the case study that I wanted to read.” A few panelists also mentioned how helpful and encouraging it was to learn from not just others’ successes but also from challenges and issues. “There was a lot of norming that went on,” said Paul Treuer, Director of the Knowledge Management Center at the University of Minnesota Duluth. “I went, ‘I’m not alone... in calling these problems.’ And that was very significant. The critical things that I want to see in the use cases would be ‘really honest responses’ to the questions because we are often encountering similar problems.” John Moore, Director of Educational Technologies and the Faculty Development Institute at Virginia Tech, asserted that the challenges and issues sections in the case studies become most informative particularly when comparing them across institutions. “I really believe where the really rich ideas are going to come is from the person that does the comparative analysis of many of these case studies and find out where are some commonalities and what are the outlies as well.” Chris Coppola, President of The rSmart Group, stressed the significance of sustaining the effort of sharing the knowledge about what works and why, and how valuable it is not just to a vendor but to the community at large. |
