Taking Care of Business: Emerging OER Business Service Models [O-048] Members : OER19

Group Admins

Public Group Active 5 years, 7 months ago

Thu, Apr 11 2019, 4:00pm – 5:00pm

Authors: Joe Wilson, John Casey, DIane Gardner, Wolfgang Greller, and Ronald Macintyre

Room: G009

Theme: Sustainability

Type: Alt-format (7 mins)

Description

Session Description

We describe the role of OERs in developing an Adult Literacy service called Citizen Literacy to operate at scale in the UK. It is based on ground-breaking work being undertaken at the City of Glasgow College that it is the subject of a forthcoming documentary. A multidisciplinary team is working to reach adult learners in the workplace and community with Trade Unions (https://www.unionlearn.org.uk/ & https://www.scottishunionlearning.com/) delivering ‘real’ qualifications accredited by City and Guilds. The task is daunting with levels of illiteracy and poor literacy numbering 12 million, amongst the highest in the developed world (OECD 2016).

To meet this challenge the project has to operate within the tight financial and institutional constraints of vocational and community education, so is developing a franchise model enabled by OER content for tutor training and learning resources delivered using the Open University OpenLearn Create service for content delivery.

We view literacy as a social justice issue requiring an inclusive approach. Thus, our view of OER moves beyond ‘things’ (content and code) to include services including Trade Unions, Community Groups and Libraries etc. This approach seeks to overcome some of the current limitations of OER practice.

Influences include: Paulo Freire (1970). The Opening Educational Practices Scotland project (OEPS 2017). Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (2017). Frugal Innovation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frugal_innovation)

References
OECD, (2016). Building Skills For All: A Review Of England
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder
OEPS (2017) https://oepscotland.org/
Hardt, M. & Negri A (2017). Assembly. New York: OUP

Session content

ALT format of a flash or lightening talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talk
We shall give a brief overview of the project and its rationale and be showing the latest ideas about development of our business model using OERs / OEP and asking for feedback on that. If we have time we will also show a demo of a smartphone app we have ben developing to assist adult learners improve their textual literacy skills.