OER Discussion Forum 2 - leadership and local initiatives - the KRC October 24, 2010
As part of the current OER discussions Wayne Mackintosh <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg>, Ph.D., Director OER Foundation <http://www.oerfoundation.org/>
wrote:
- So my question remains - -Where are the education leaders? Let's take some OER decisions ;-). I firmly believe that decisive leadership is critical in moving OER forward. So where are the institutional leaders who are going to make this happen. I want to work with them.
I replied:
I wonder if it is easier to find your innovative OER leaders on the demand side (outside of the traditional formal educational system.) The people most likely to embrace innovation are those who are not served by the existing system. People outside the system who are trying to get low-cost/no-cost education (or training) for themselves (or for the people they teach) are most likely to be users of Open Education Resources - in the widest sense of those words. Maybe we should look for lots of small steps towards OER change and see how they can be helped to come together. Maybe we should do more to explore how the newly developing non-formal systems and the existing formal systems can complement and support each other in this time of change.
I introduced John's work....
With that in mind you may be interested in the work of my colleague John Dada at the Knowledge Resource Centre (KRC) at Fantsuam. http://www.dadamac.net/projects/education-and-training/krc.
John has a vision to provide high quality affordable tertiary education to people in his local area, and to other people like them. He already has a well established CISCO academy, at Fanstuam Foundation, and he therefore has a VSAT connection to the Internet available for the KRC.
Various challenges remain. The bandwidth is not sufficient to allow the kind of Internet-enabled learning that people from this list may normally associate with OERs, but the step from low or medium bandwidth to high-bandwidth is "almost trivial" compared to the huge achievement of providing a reliable Internet connection in the first place. More challenging even than the technical problems (and financial problems) that he faces are the problems of local attitudes to learning and teaching. The prevailing culture is one of rote learning, limited choice (or no choice) about what courses you study and never asking questions. However some of his team understand what he is trying to do and are supporting him in providing alternative models of learning - gradually changing people's attitudes and expectations.
Obviously what John has on the ground is tiny compared to established traditional institutions of tertiary education, but for a location in Africa which is outside the range of normal Internet provision it is remarkable and ground-breaking. There are other people and projects on the ground elsewhere driven by the same desire to access educational opportunities and find out how the Internet can help.
Maybe if we want to understand the role of OERs we need to look at the growing non-formal use of OERs and well as their use within the formal education system and encourage greater collaboration between the two.
Relevant links
I have included links below for anyone who wants to see the detail of what I have described:
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You can see John at the KRC in this video clip - from around 3 minutes and ten seconds until minute 4 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlEBTCZ67NI (earlier in the video John does a brief general introduction to the work of Fantsum Foundation, this is followed by Kazanka Comfort describing the micro-finance programme and around 1 minute 40 secs Ochuko Onoberhie starts to describe Zittnet, which provides the KRC with its Interent service. For more about Zittnet see http://www.dadamac.net/projects/business-sme-livelihoods/zittnet-rural-connectivity
To understand the situation at KRC see the edited archive of a recent online meeting discussing details of present reality and future plans see - https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1BPngjRJbaZ6GdRQ2fu29Od0C-X5P4RnuuM2hHUWfE5s&hl=en_GB#
(For an introduction to John see http://www.dadamac.net/about/john )
The KRC supports an approach of open-ness and sharing. in fact we already have an example of what might be described as an OER produced at the KRC in the local language (Hausa). It is a set of instructions to build a small eco-dome, related to a an experimental technology transfer programme that Marcus Simmons did with us at Attachab eco-village. http://www.dadamac.net/projects/ecology-appropriate-technology/ecodome
The ecodome project was on-the-job training, a technology transfer approach, so that any future eco-dome could be built without help from Marcus. In fact less than a year later one of the team (Perry) emailed Marcus to say he had built his own "Perry-dome" (naturally at his own expense) - a remarkable example of genuine technology transfer. It is Perry who took the instructions that Marcus has provided in English and translated them into Hausa for the benefit of others. I wonder if that would count as an OER.
John is also active in local public health projects and collaborated with Professor Dick Heller on producing the first two pilot courses for what subsequently became the Peoples Open Access Education Initiative: Peoples-uni - Building Public Health capacity using Internet-based e-learning. Not only did John help Dick in the preparation of the courses via the Internet from Fantsuam, but in addition, some of the participants in the pilot study were health professionals from around Fantsuam.
More about OER Discussion - October 18, 2010 - OAW - Invitation to join OER Discussion Forum 2: What works, what does not and under what conditions?
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Pamela McLean
Pamela McLean - http://www.dadamac.net/about/pam
Email pamela.mclean@dadamac.net
Twitter @Pamela_McLean and #dadamac
Website http://www.dadamac.net/company
Dadamac's Posterous http://dadamac.posterous.com/
Dadamac - "We introduce people to each other (mostly UK-Nigeria) and help them do useful stuff. How can we help you?"