Open Education panel at Dean’s Graduate Conference
My institution holds an annual graduate research conference, where all students can present their ongoing research in a friendly and welcoming environment. This is both an opportunity to practice for students who are planning to present at for example CIES or AERA, but also a great opportunity to break down some walls and learn about what other departments and divisions are doing. Before I even enrolled at OISE, I went to one of these conferences, and it gave me a great overview of the kind of research conducted at OISE, gave me contacts among some students doing interesting research, and was overall a great experience.
This year, I wanted to see if we could put together a panel on open education, since I keep feeling that OISE as one of the world’s premier institutions conducting research on education ought to be more aware of this growing trend. We ended up with a great panel, featuring three presentations on open education, and one about institutional university networks and cooperation. I put the two presentations I were involved in on Slideshare, and linked to them below. Note that the audio is quite poor, since I was recording with Audacity and my laptop’s built-in mic.
In general, I found the presentation format challenging, because the audience had no experience with open education. Thus, I was torn between providing a general introduction to open education, and presenting my cutting-edge research or ideas – all in 15 minutes (luckily we had three presentations that could build on each other). It’s good practice though, to try to boil messages down and still make them comprehensible and compelling.
Kirk Perris, who is writing his PhD on the open universities in India and China, invited me to present with him on open education in China and India:
And I gave a presentation outlining some of my thoughts on evaluation and accreditation of open education. I lent heavily from the work of Christine Geith and Philipp Schmidt, but I also began to think about how one would approach accreditation from a human capital theory, or alternatively from what used to be called a ‘credentialism’ theory:
All in all, it was an interesting panel, with some great feedback from the audience. I hope that this, and similar events, will help raise the awareness of open education at OISE, and lead to more researchers and graduate students wanting to do research on it, and perhaps also participate in the movement.
Stian
April 27th, 2009 @ 2:41 am
[...] One of the things I say towards the end, is that I think there is an unprecedented opportunity for the educational research community in China to make a contribution both nationally, and internationally, when it comes to open education research. I have in the past called for the use of more theory when researching OER, and part of the reason why that doesn’t happen, is that many who are attending open education conferences in North America are not from schools of education, or have backgrounds in relevant fields. They are doing incredibly important work, and creating great innovations, but I keep wishing that more people within the field of education would begin studying this area (which is also why I this year presented on OER at CIES, and at the OISE Dean’s Conference). [...]