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Feedback from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Grantees Meeting in Yale

Tue, 20/04/2010 - 10:06 — KarenC

OU staff Patrick McAndrew (IET, Director of OLnet), Simon Buckingham Shum (Senior lecturer KMI working on SocialLearn and OLnet), Karen Cropper (IET, Project and Liaison Manager OLnet) and Freda Wolfenden (FELS and TESSA) all attended The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2010 Grantees Meeting at Yale University on 8-10 April 2010.  At this meeting the Hewlett Foundation presented for the first time to a public audience their new funding strategy for the next 7 years.

The strategy is not yet available as a public document and the Foundation are still working out the details of how they will implement and communicate the elements.  The presentation was about their philosophy and broad themes.

The strategy has three funding themes:

  1. California policy: the home state for Hewlett but seen to have "systemic failures" as well as infrastructure needs.
  2. Open Educational Resources: excited about OER and its potential to contribute to the overall goals. But need to cross the innovation chasm to get into mainstream adoption.
  3. Deeper learning: belief in a need for deeper learning as we go forward rather than rote learning of facts just to pass exams (similar aims to 21st century skills initiative but carefully chosen terminology by Hewlett).

The deeper learning is to be focussed on specific subject areas and also possibly specific US States. There is also a parallel strategy of trying to change US government policy by 2017 so that the methods of assessing and accrediting learning reflect the deeper learning concept (since if measurement is just about regurgitating facts for exams, the way that things are taught will continue to be the same to get the maximum grades on that kind of testing)

The area of Open Education Resources that OLnet and TESSA are interested in is to be focussed less on production of new resources and more on infrastructure. Within that there were 4 categories mentioned:

  1. Flagship agencies and networks
  2. Guidelines and tools
  3. Research and evaluation
  4. Advocacy and communication

The infrastructure agenda is to equalise access to knowledge & improve teaching and learning.

  • Example - need to address more directly the use of OER within the disabled community.
  • Example - OLnet project to understand and build on the knowledge of what happens when OER are used.

Deeper Learning – the aim is: "So everyone can succeed in a changing world". Goal - to increase economic success [in USA] and civic engagement by educating students for a changing world.

Deeper Learning has five elements:

  1. core knowledge
  2. critical thinking & problem solving
  3. communication
  4. collaboration
  5. learning to learn

Further information about the meeting is available on the cloudscape: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2053