Open Learning Network

In spite of high expectations and the support given by prestigious funding and educational institutions, OERs have not been adopted widely by teachers and learners in practice. In the meantime, educational structures are also becoming increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and non-linear requiring experts but also novices to quickly gain different levels of understanding and skills.

On the 30th of June 2009, the first of a series of OLnet workshops took place at the Open University with a mix of practitioners and experts in educational technology. The workshop was used as an instrument to capture, extract and evaluate useful information concerning the effectiveness of the design patterns for the repurposing of OERs. The main aim was to understand the potential of re-purposing existing OERs through the use of appropriate mediating artefacts, to investigate if these may enable a more effective OER cycle of creation, design, use and evaluation and to facilitate a greater degree of transfer of best practice.

The workshop consisted of the following components:
1)    An activity based on the ‘Think-Pair-Share’ pedagogical pattern in which participants were asked to “Think of an existing resource or activity that you have created and write down a short representation of its design”, Pair with your neighbour and present your resource and design”, pair and discuss with their neighbour followed by a whole group discussion.
2)    An exercise involving a “Task swim line’ visual learning design representation using CompendiumLD, where participants analysed an existed OER in this representation. Creating a new LD representation of an existing resource using CompendiumLD. This activity aimed to assess the affordances of the CompendiumLD tool and mainly the process of going through a resource and getting its LD representation, as a step prior to the repurposing of the resource.
3)    The third activity involved them using a set of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) pedagogical patterns and the visual learning design representation to act as mediating artefacts in the repurposing of an OER from the OpenLearn repository on social work.

Mediating artefacts used:
1.    Think-pair-share activity as an activity
2.    Think-pair-share visual representation of the pedagogical pattern
3.    Task swim line representation – both electronic and paper-based
4.    The CompendiumLD environment
5.    Workshop format overall
6.    Workshop facilitators
7.    Other participants
8.    Participants own representations

Key Research Findings: