Leadership – Page 6 – Digital Learning Dispatches

The Open Game Project funded through the Erasmus+ programme is entering an exciting new phase as partners meet this week to plan the development and implementation of the final intellectual outputs.

In 2021, the project team, which includes several NIDL colleagues, will be offering a number of multiplier events and will be piloting and launching an innovative game designed to promote the uptake of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Educational Practices (OEPs). Based on real life cases of the application of open teaching approaches, the game will provide educators with an opportunity to learn how to successfully apply OERs and OEPs in their daily practices.

This Open Game builds on a Handbook of Successful Open Teaching Practices published in 2020 by members of the project team. As illustrated in the above table, the Handbook presents 24 real-life open teaching practices that respond to eight main challenges educators face which can be tackled through open approaches. For each of these challenges, three open teaching practices are described, with commentary on their potential for transferability and the competences needed to put them in place in other educational settings.

It is interesting to note that a recently published US report found that use of OER as required course material during the COVID crisis did not increase (Seaman & Seaman, 2021). This finding meant that based on comparative data, 2020 was the first year that growth in OER awareness among higher educators was not coupled with growth in adoption.

As the figure below illustrates, the exception to this slight fall of uptake by all faculty was at the introductory course level. On a positive note, for the second year running a majority of responding faculty self-report at least some level of awareness of the term OER. This result continues a trend of increasing awareness of OERs over the previous five surveys. Importantly, faculty who are aware of one or more OER initiatives were found to be much more likely to be OER adopters. This finding is a core assumption that underpin our efforts in the Open Game project to help raise the level of awareness of open teaching practices by sharing authentic real-life examples.

Another interesting finding of the US study is that perception of the value of digital materials in 2020 mirror results from the previous report, with only very slight changes. While there was considerable use of digital materials throughout 2020, it appears this has not resulted in an improvement (or decline) in faculty opinions about their effectiveness, as shown in the figure below.

Although speculative, this finding concerning the value of digital resources along with the flat growth in OER uptake provides evidence of the importance of going beyond merely raising awareness. Arguably, the real value is not the digital resource itself but rather how educators choose to embed OERs in their courses and teaching practices.

This point is another important underlying assumption of the Open Game project and why we are placing considerable emphasis on building a stronger community and sharing authentic examples of how other educators are using OERs/OEPs to address real challenges they face. As Alastair Creelman writes in a recent blog post, “Drowning in content but what we need is community”. In this respect, the Open Game project team is endeavouring to shift the focus away from OER awareness per se, to the challenges and real problems that educators may be able to resolve through their adoption, now and in the future.

On Monday, our masterclass on Higher Education 4.0 in partnership with the new ECIU University began with the aim of raising critical awareness, fostering rich discussion and getting participants from around the globe to think about this overarching big question:

What will Higher Education look like by the year 2030?

To set the scene, we invited participants to watch this brief video produced in 2019 by Jisc. The video was framed by the point that we need to be critical about who is defining the future for us.

While we cannot predict the future drawing on the video we asked, will the future of universities be shaped in an inclusive way or left to men already in positions of power and responsibility in established institutions in well-developed countries? This question, which the video illustrates is a very real concern, established our intention in the masterclass from the outset to promote debate, contestation, and reshaping of higher education from a wide variety of critical perspectives.

Future Skills Agenda

Over this first week, our main focus has been on what we have called the future skills agenda set against the backdrop of Industry 4.0. A core challenge facing higher educational institutions is how they respond to major societal developments, including the changing nature of work. We began this discussion by exploring the popular claim that 65% of jobs of the future have yet to be invented? Indeed, The Institute for the Future (2017) goes even further in a report which says

“…that around 85% of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 haven’t been invented yet” (p.14).

Our poll result in response to this question showed a spread of opinions across participants.

Demise of the Ice Traders

To place speculative talk concerning the future of jobs in an historical context, we shared an interesting example on the demise of the ice industry.

Did you know that just over a century ago harvesting and selling ice was a massive industry employing thousands (if not millions) of people?

It involved an extensive supply chain around the world and in the second half of the 19^th Century some people got very rich harvesting and selling ice.

But in a matter of only a few short years, the whole industry collapsed with almost everyone losing their jobs. How come? The invention and widespread uptake of mechanical refrigeration removed the reliance on natural ice, although it did take 30+ years and the widespread availability of electricity for the full impact of the invention of the refrigerator to become apparent.

Changing Nature of Knowledge

This line of discussion gets us thinking about the currency of the day. Drawing on the work of our colleague Prof. Ulf-Daniels Ehler (2020) in his recent online book on future skills, we explored how the nature of knowledge is changing. To quote (Ehler, 2020):

Knowledge is no longer being thought of as something that is developed and stored in the minds of students, experts, represented in books, and classified into disciplines. Instead, it becomes more and more apparent that knowledge is now seen more as a fluent, energy-like system of networks and flows. Knowledge is defined – and valued – not for what it is, but for what it can help to do (p.14).

You can listen to Ulf talking more about how the evolving definition of knowledge and the nature of future skills in this video from a talk given during last year’s EDEN webinar series in Open Education Week.

Traversing the Transversal

An important feature of Week 1 is a focus on transversal skills and competencies (or what some people call soft skills) and we discussed some of the challenges of defining and measuring these skills. The importance of future mindsets rather than narrow skillsets has been a common theme in the discussion posts. However, our example from the opening Jisc video reminds us to be wary of which mindsets are being valued over others and whose voice is missing from efforts to reshape the future. Here we identified the role of indigenous worldview and First Nation perspectives.

One of the activities for participants was trying to metaphorically map these future skills, with some rich offerings on our Padlet wall, as illustrated below.

As we come to the end of Week 1, participants are currently responding to a scenario related to the often cited 21^st Century skill of “Global Citizenship”. They have been appointed in this scenario to a committee at their institution, and given a simple mission – to come up with a series of criteria for i) defining, ii) operationalising, and iii) assessing this future skill. No easy task!

Looking Ahead

While throughout the week we have debated the true significance of the changes taking place in response to Industry 4.0, and how we might need to redefine future skills, it is difficult to imagine that higher education will be unaffected by powerful change forces, including the pandemic.

Next week, we shift our attention to how traditional credentials might become an increasing focus of attention over the next few years as traditional higher education institutions respond to the future skills agenda. We spend most of next week discussing the rise and the rise of micro-credentials and what impact they are likely to have over the next 5-years.

It’s not too late to join this discussion as we seek to raise greater awareness of many competing change drivers and help fellow educators, and other related stakeholders, (re)envision the future of higher education by 2030. We hope to talk with some of you online next week.