Before this class, I had never heard of Open Educational Resources (OER) as a term. I was familiar with free ESL materials like Randel’s Cyber Listening Lab or lessons on the BBC website, but had never considered them OER.  Overall the materials on the OER databases seemed to favor K-12 or college level ESL material, so for my work with graduate students the materials were a bit easy. However, I did find ample material focused on college writing that I could use.  For example this worksheet on paragraph organization has both clear descriptions of idea paragraphs but also graphic organizers to assist students.  When I am creating materials, this type of worksheet can take significant time, so it is great it is here as free resource. At least in my field this concept has been around and is viewed as highly valuable.  With so many educator’s abroad, publishers were attempting to get material out to English teacher as quickly as possible.  Of course, the majority of textbooks were really expensive, but even as early as 15 years ago ESL professionals has access to photocopial material (although mostly from British publishers. The trend for ESL materials to increase in cost continues and just like topics like science and math the information can quickly age and become boring for students.  I remember when these textbooks by Tapestry were cutting edge, they included CNN videos and hot topics in the news.  Now of course, despite the publisher’s efforts to address general topics, it is dated.   Regarding copyright, that has always been a factor in selecting materials and delivering content so I feel fairly comfortable with it.

Hi, everyone.  Although I wasn’t aware of the official term “OER,” I was aware that some things existed that were open access.  The business school-specific education class that we took included some information about MERLOT and the availability of cases from there.  However, I didn’t realize that there were full comprehensive textbooks for some of the courses that I potentially might teach!  I found a few from BCcampus as well as Boundless.  The only catch is that these textbooks are generally for an introduction to accounting, which is just the first class of many that accounting students will need to take.

There are resources available for members of the American Accounting Association (our professional association) that can be used.  Cases are frequently developed and published in Issues in Accounting Education, many of which were designed to be used by fellow educators (generally with attribution).  In addition, many large accounting firms, knowing that accounting educators are the feeders into their firms, provide educational resources as well.

From the little I’ve had the time to look at, it definitely seems like there may be some value in terms of the cases that I might want students to work on.  However, I feel like there might be some limitations on my ability to use general resources like textbooks or slides, given that many universities (especially large public ones) may standardize textbooks across class sections.  However, given how standardized a lot of material in my field is, I definitely see a potential role for OERs, especially given how many students may start to value electronic or online resources that they can access from anywhere without needing to lug many books around, as I did over a decade ago!

I apologize for my very late post. I have been on work travel for the past week and as a result, my day was spent in discussion and workshops while my evening was spent doing my real job. Now that I have returned from sunny Bloomington, IN, I can rejoin the land of the living. As an aside, the workshop I was participating in was an excellent example of heutagogy with a focus on “student”-directed learning, reflection and re-application of learning, and a focus on developing learning skills (in this case around leadership and strategy).

As I’ve mentioned, I recently took a course on andragogy, and many of the principals I learned aligned well with my target student audience. I was not familiar with heutagogical learning (Blaschke, 2012)., but having read about it, I see a lot of potential in using it as an approach for some of the assignments I am developing. In particular, the drive towards double-loop learning (Argyris, 2005), is one which demonstrates the higher levels of learning taxonomies. Since my goal is to enable students to apply the classroom learning in multiple context, this self-driven, self-reflective approach appears to offer a lot of potential.

For adult learners, I see three principals of self-directed learning which I would want to highlight in the assignments I developed. First, I think that adult students are often best equipped to understand how the lessons and theories in the class can be applied in their own context. Assignments need to be such that students are able to focus on specific areas, rather than the whole. This can make rubric development extremely difficult, but I see a lot of potential in increasing the quality and value of the final products. For instance, while there may be several leadership theories students are supposed to learn, assessing their knowledge of all of them may not be as practically useful as allowing them to focus on one which can be applied in their workplace. In addition, this offers opportunities for students to teach one another the ones which they have become experts.

Second, adult-learns they often have richer scenarios for analysis than generic ones which the instructor can provide. In my experience, adult-learner students were able to create much more dynamic and interesting case studies and discussions than the instructor alone could have provided. In addition, they bring a lot more passion to the subject. Having assignments which set the framework, but allow students to determine the specifics may allow for higher engagement as well as more valuable knowledge generation. For instance, instead of offering a stock case-student for assessment, allowing the students to submit their own case study from their experience. I may be bias to this approach as such an assignment led to the genesis of my dissertation J

Finally, since the purpose of learning is more towards application than strict assessment, these two aspects of self-directed learning allows the students to best apply it in areas which provide the most value as well as bring their own motivation and drive to the class.

The next step of the process where I think this can be applied is in the collaboration focus of online classes. Since the students become, in essence, the subject matter expert of the assignments, the discussion can become real-world problem solving efforts with each student taking the role of a scholar as well as practitioner. I’ve seen examples where students have worked on classroom assignments and then gone on to apply the solutions other students have offered in their organizations. Designing papers and projects where students can operate in this manner allows for effective assessment of learning, better student engagement, and reflection back to the instructor to help further develop the course.

In these cases, the instructor’s role becomes that of a facilitator, gently guiding the students. There is still a need to ensure that students are staying focused on the assignment, applying the theories and principals of the class, and not going too far off the rails. This can be very challenging for the instructor to allow the right amount of room for students to explore in a self-directed manner, while still maintaining the integrity and learning objectives of the class.

Joseph Drasin

Argyris, C. (2005). Double-loop learning in organizations: A theory of action. In K. G. Smith & M. A. Hitt (Eds.), Great Minds in Management: The Process of Theory Development (pp. 261-279). New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Blaschke, L. M. (2012). Heutagogy and lifelong learning: A review of heutagogical practice and self-determined learning. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 13(1), 56-71.

Learning-Centered Assessment: After reading the provided resources on self-evaluated and self-directed heutagogical learning, describe your initial thoughts about designing an entire online/blended course or even just an assignment around these ideas/methods. Will you (or have you) consider these approaches? Why or why not? If so, briefly outline your idea(s). The resources that were provided to you were just a start. Feel free to research more to gain additional traction on these types of assessment.

Here is my thinking about this. I will first summarize a new term for me: heutagogical learning.

Andragogy is the educational theoretical underpinning of the self-directed learner; heutagogy is the educational underpinnings of the self-determined learner. The facilitator is still a mentor and tutor, but there is a difference: The facilitator surrenders the learning path to the learner, who determines what will be learned and how it will be learned. In heutagogy, there are two components, competence and capability. So, not only is the knowledge acquired, but also the learners develop confidence that that they will have the capability to identify and solve the discipline-specific problems they are learning about, but to apply them in multiple and unfamiliar settings. Competent learners have specific knowledge and skills. Capable learners can reproduce knowledge and skills in unfamiliar settings. This is what is needed in complex and changing work environments, such as nursing, which is changing so fast in a complex environment.

So there is a continuum, with pedagogy requiring the most structure and scaffolding, building to andragogy, to heutagogy, needing the least scaffolding of all.

So I am in the process of developing an online/blended course for graduate nurses who are seeking to become advanced practice nurses, specifically nurse-midwives. This is part of a post-master’s certificate in nurse-midwifery that we are endeavoring to develop within the School of Nursing at Emory.  As graduate students, I think that our students will be self-directed (-based on the current face-to-face cohort-). Yet as a group, they will not necessarily be self-determined, except for some of them. But perhaps the whole point is to seek to transform the self-directed ones to be more self-determined.

There is a delicate balance to maintain however. Students need to master certain core knowledge, skills, and attitudes to achieve the core competencies of midwifery education. They must pass a national certification exam at the end of their program in order to be eligible to practice as a nurse-midwife. I do think assignments can be crafted to encourage self-determined learning, as long as it has boundaries that require students to explore with the goal of the basic core competencies that they need to master. I think scholarblogs would be an excellent tool.

There is an interesting article I will add to diigo that discusses how blogs encourage self-directed learning as well as personal information management. How to encourage self-determined learning is based on facilitating a process where learners truly feel the   freedom to master the objectives in their own way. Here is the link  about blogging and self-directed learning (the transition to self-determined can be built with assignments asking them to think in more complex ways:

http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=2687335

So students can be given boundaries. Make the objectives very clear what they need to master. But they can explore how to do this in a variety of ways and then need to write in Scholarblogs about what they are doing and how they might share it in other unfamiliar contexts. This would be an ongoing process throughout the course.

I am most attracted to the idea of authentic assessments (Mueller, 2014) because it allows students to be held accountable for their ability to apply information in a real-world setting. I think the ability to apply knowledge in meaningful ways is at the top of Blooms Taxonomy and is a four on the depth of knowledge (DOK) levels (Norman, 2005). Having read my “classmates” syllabi I have realized that the course I plan to offer is a little different, but I got a lot of cool ideas from reading about what others plan to do. Because teaching is such a hands-on-field I have questioned if the online platform is the best way to teach teachers how to teach well. With this, I think authentic assessment is the way! I think teachers could record themselves teaching in classrooms and upload it to be graded. My concern is that teachers and students are often very aware when a spectator is in the room, whether it is an instructional coach or a video camera, and classroom behavior is greatly adjusted based on the presence of the outsider. However, I acknowledge that this is the same dilemma that would present itself whether I was actually in the classroom or whether a camera recorded a lesson. Authentic assessment allows me to observe how well teachers can actually perform the task. I can teach about classroom management, they can also understand what they learned; but can they actually manage a classroom! That is the burning question! And that is what I intend to assess.

I would consider authentic assessment my area of strength because I used to serve as an instructional coach and I supported teachers through their actual practice. I think with teacher education application is the goal. I am not really as interested in traditional assessment (fill in the blank, multiple-guess) as teaching is a about application. No student or parent would ever be concerned if you knew the “five stages of classroom management” what matters is can you actually control the classroom and keep students learning in a safe environment. I think there are lot of opportunities for growth and improvement. One concept I really like heutagogical approach of allowing students to be involved in the creation of the learning process. I think that allows for students to set themselves up for successful outcomes. I wonder how that can be negotiated in the online classroom? Especially because they syllabus, or my vision for the course, is already created. Also thought that learning through mastery (or teaching to show mastery) is a great way to allow students to take true ownership of the knowledge acquired in the course.

I think adobeconnect would be an ideal platform to host this kind of learning.

In considering the second prompt, my immediate concern related to self-assessment and heutagogy is the student who is purely there for an A and nothing more.  (I think these students are becoming more and more common as grade inflation continues to rear its ugly head.)  If I’m teaching a introduction to financial accounting class, there’s three types of students in the class: those who definitely want to continue with accounting, those who are on the fence, and those who are there because they have to be.  Heutagogy would seem to work with the first two groups, but the third are probably the most likely to take the easy way out and set low goals for themselves.  I would even imagine that the students who self-select into accounting might be overly concerned with objective measures of performance.

I think that classes later in the curriculum might benefit more from heutagogy.  In particular, the topic of auditing is much more subjective in its content and application.  (Auditing, for those who don’t know, is the third-party verification of financial information so that outside parties, such as stockholders, can rely on the information.)  There are so many cases where the correct or incorrect decision is not clear, and as such, the self-set goals of the classes could be much more focused on the students’ involvement in the learning process as opposed to the standard “did you get the right answer” goal.

A particular example would be case-based learning, where students are put in a real situation and asked what they would do in the situation and why.  Afterwards, we would cover what actually happened and why.  This would allow the students to not only self-assess their progress, but even potentially explain why they might still stick with (or change) their decision, even given the known outcome.

In summary. it seems that the more subjective a class’s content is, the more suited it would appear to be for self-evaluation and heutagogy.  But I’d be happy to be wrong about this!