Conference Interviews

Douglas Zahua - Nebraska
Using mainly in k-12 teaching.

He uses hippocampus.org with angle mostly.

He works mainly with the instructors.

Chris Rapp

Director of Curriculum and Instruction

Idaho Digital Learning Academy

 

JL- what value do you see in the conference?
CR- NROC is critical as it gives us access to a variety of high quality content for a cost structure that is far better than something that might come from a publisher, and certainly better than anything we can create ourselves. I’m doing the online curriculum for Idaho, and there is a lot of professional isolation. It’s great to be able to sit down with people who are dealing with the same problems as yourself. There are issues of implementation- how do you take the content and apply it to the school that you are working with? This group is pretty honest and can help you think about what can work and what doesn’t work. Even though we all work in the virtual world, the value of face-to-face is very high, as this gets us away from our e-mail and away from our staff and phones and helps us have those conversations without the pull of everyone tugging us in separate directions. On a personal level, the group running this has come from the publishing world. You see government and non-profits burn through money, and this group has a mind for sustainability. A lot of groups don’t commit to the sustainability; this group has a sense of keeping the sustainability. You don’t often see that level of commitment as you do here- a mind for business applied to OER. You don’t want to have all this content created and then watch it disappear.

Chris Rapp

Mary Sclegelmilch

Omaha Public Schools

District Supervisor of eLearning

 

"We use NROC in a variety of ways - we use it to have in our learning management system just as individual learning objects.  We also use the NROC content and cherry pick the individual objects and make master courses.  We have the content available on Hippocampus as well as on a web server for our teachers to access."

 

 

 

Steve Rheinschmidt
Iowa Community College Online Consortium Executive Director

SR: The Iowa Community College Online Consortium is a 7 college online education collaboration, similar to NROC. It’s a collaboration that shares ideas, discusses better practices and more efficient ways of doing things, as well as more efficient ways of developing the highest quality content so that students can have a more robust learning opportunity. The Iowa consortium has been associated with NROC for, I believe, four years, maybe five. We came interested in NROC because of the course content that was available, specifically the quality of the content. We’ve continued our association for other benefits, such as more recently with developmental math. The developmental math project just got underway, so having an opportunity to share in the voice in developing and implementing that project is very valuable.
Many of the people that are attending conferences such as this one where we are collaborating, sharing ideas, trying to partner- we do that on a daily basis too. We share ideas, we share constructive criticism, and that isn’t necessarily prevalent in all aspects of education. Coming here, we are around other people with like-philosophies on collaboration.

Steve's Profile

Myk Garn

Southern Regional Educational Board

Associate Director of the Educational Directorate Cooperative

We have 16 different states, and our cooperative has 16 different agencies. All the people who are members are all directors of educational technology, so we support their activities and link them together. One of those projects is Sharable Content Object Repositories for Education (SCORE) which is an initiative to share digital content between states. I am here partially because of that and partially because some of our members are NROC members. Professional development has been very helpful. It’s interesting how universally the need is and how challenging it is to share those resources. Everyone’s moving so fast to develop their projects and they need training right away, its more expedient to build it then find it.

Many are taking the NROC content and putting it into repositories that is tagged so that it is searchable and retrievable. We have at least 3 states that have tagged NROC content so we are asking whether all of our states can share those tags and not tag it ourselves.

 

Jodi Holzman, Colorado Online Learning

Jodi taught mathematics for five years before she moved into administration. She has been working in the administration of course development now for 10 years.

Jodi has recently completed a redesign of the organization's Spanish I course using a collaborative "Social Authoring" approach that brings together all of the contributing team members in a collaborative development. They began with a variety of content, some online, but all primarily text-based. She found the collaborative approach to be very successful and achieved a high level of acceptance and support for the course.

"One nice thing about the online course is it offers more opportunities for interaction and more cultural material," she says. "The online environment offers more cultural information and media." One of their online instructors, for example, is in Mexico and follows Mexican soccer teams. For students who have no other opportunities to learn Spanish the online course brings a wealth of information and cultural context to the material. Jodi's goal is to broaden the experience of the students.

Jodi is looking forward to working on the Spanish II course. She likes the collaborative process. She has not learned Spanish herself and the collaborative process helps broadens her own experience.

#####

 

Francisco J. Hernandez

 

University of Hawaii

The main thing I’m trying to get out the conference is to find out what opportunities, challenges, and issues people are facing in regards to online learning. My chief interest is in using online technologies for students who need access to a high quality curriculum in order to have access to higher education. It’s likely they would attend a high school that does not offer AP courses and college prep courses, and they would not have the highest quality teachers instructing. So, they would not be prepared for college. With online technologies, it is possible to enrich them so they are ready. They come from low-income schools, rural schools, and so the technology broadens opportunities. I summarize it as equity in and access to higher education. The difference between going to Aptos high and Watsonville high is that Watsonville doesn’t have the same resources available. I’m looking to talk to people who are directing virtual education programs at the secondary level. For example, Hawaii just passed a requirement for the starting class of 2010 to have all high schools students take a online course before they graduate. I talked with a representative from Michigan and they have that same requirement. Because I was involved early with the development of the NROC repository, I was heartened to hear all the innovations that people are applying to those courses. I was involved early on with the development, so it’s just exciting to see what people are doing with the courses

 

Judy Lowe – Chattanooga State Technical and Community College

I asked Judy to tell me about the students who use NROC.
Judy said that her organization has integrated NROC content into some of its courses and all of the course sites so that all students can use it, even if their course doesn't actually utilize the content. She said that she recently got an email from one of her English instructors saying that one of his students had started using the content as a supplement to his lectures and that student said that it really helped her understand the lecture. The student then proceeded to recommend to all of her classmates that they use it too. She concluded by saying that the students love the content.

I asked what problems she was solving by belonging to NROC.
Judy answered by saying that she wasn't really solving an issue. She said that her organization was one of the first to join NROC and that she decided to join because she recognized good content at a good value.

My last question was what she personally got out of belonging to NROC.
Her answer was that she's an admin and she got the satisfaction of giving the best resources to her instructors through hippocampus. She also said that she gets to interact with brilliant people who help broaden her mind.

 Interview with Deborah Proctor

Deborah was born and raised in Ohio. She moved to Minnesota with her husband in the late 70s. She pursued the field of education in what she describes as a "woman's path" with having children and family duties being interspersed with her educational pursuits. In 2005 she received her PHD in Education with an Educational Technology Specialization. She was the first one in her family to get a college degree. Her first job was as a Gifted and Talented Coordinator in Alaska for a few years.

Working with special needs adult students formed the basis for her focus in education. "My passion is expressed in the idea that all people are capable of learning," she says. "I started working with people with disabilities in the mid-90s. Since I was working with adults there were not a lot of books and materials available. Because I had a computer It allowed me to create some of these individualized learning packages. I was able to custom design things for those students."

Deborah is inspired by the ways technology can be used to facilitate your own personal learning. "One of the biggest challenges is that folks have invested a lot in technology," she explains. "And because of that people are asking: 'what have we gotten out of this?' I don't know that we have done a good job of tracking that. In some instances people are using technology primarily because it is fun and showy. If technology had fulfilled its promise we would be able to do some things better and help students to achieve more."

Deborah is now working in the office of the Chancellor. "I provide technology and tools that teachers use to do a better job of teaching," she explains. For more information see Deborah's website at:

http://deborahproctor.efoliomn2.com/

######

 Judy Lowe, Chattanooga State

3/2, 1:30-2:30 breakout session

Content: NROC Strategies to Address the National "Math Problem

NL: Where do you hope [the math] program will eventually go?
JL: I hope it will go from 13 years old to 75 years old.  That people will be able to access it not only in schools, past math, or in college universities to remediate, but that it will actually also be used by the general public.  When they come across a problem they need to try and solve, it will jog their memory back.  You know the "If you don't use it you lose it" paradigm.  When something comes up later in years, and people need to go back into their "math toolbox", but they've put it away, their skills have gotten rusty, and they can't use the tools anymore.  So this will help with that as well.

 

* Miss Natalie Jeanne

John Watson, focus group researcher for NROC math project

In Monday's breakout session on NROC's math content, facilitator John Watson talked a lot about the assumptions behind the project and the focused groups used to get feedback on the math project.  There were focus groups from three different regions - the midwest, the west, and the east.  Within each region, they looked at the high school and community college level.  Within each level, they talked to administrators, teachers, and students.  The focus group will expand, as there is a larger proposal to the Gates foundation to come.

I asked him if there was a lot of variation among the different focus groups.

"There was a lot of agreement, and it was all about using real world examples that are relevant to their lives.  [Earlier], I just briefly went through and showed the tie example.  Everybody said...'I don't wear ties.'  The pickup truck example they could get.  They talked about cell phone minutes and things like that.  The checking account example, the response was [that] they could understand checking accounts, but nobody's got a checking account with $2500.  Make it $25 or even $0.25.  But there was a lot of agreement."

* Miss Natalie Jeanne

Interview with Nancy Allen, a new board member.

 

AS- Tell us something about the students who use NROC.

NA- The Range of Students using NROC would be, largely, secondary and post-secondary students.

From what I know, there's a range. Clearly secondary and post secondary. My sense is that its different from school district to school district, from state to state.

 

AS-What do you personally get from being at this conference.

As a board member, I am here asking questions. Education is such a fundamental institution in society. All instutituions change with technology and how that can be used to meet the very challenging demands for technology today is important.

I'm here primarily to learn; to learn how NROC works, and to ask questions about its impact. 

Murugan Pal

Murugan was here to present on Flexbooks. Flexbooks are open source textbooks that can be edited by whoever is going to use them. The NROC material is not currently available for in the Flexbooks, but it is their hope to integrate the NROC material eventually.

Murugan said that he thought this conference was a very good start. He says that it a good opportunity to get to know other people with good ideas. Also he says that it was a good opportunity to find people to help and be helped by.

Neeru Khosla, CK-12 Foundation

 

NL: What is your involvement with NROC?
NK: I'm really not involved; I was invited by Gary to come and present our new foundation work, which is about FlipBooks (digital textbooks). 

NL: Which educational level are they geared towards?
NK: K-12, but right now we're focusing on the high school level.

NL: Any particular subjects?
NK: Stem subjects.

NL: When did you arrive and what do you think of the conference so far?
NK: I came for a little time yesterday and we did our presentation.  Looks like a good group.  They were very competent and very patient.  NROC has very good stuff, so right now it's a very good conference, and they're always trying to figure out how to improve stuff.

NL: Did you feel like the group was pretty receptive to your presentation?
NK: They were very good.  Definitely.

NL: Thank you for your time.

 

* Miss Natalie Jeanne

Leinda Peterman and Barbara Treacy

Leinda and Barbara do online professional development with states and school districts. They train teachers to design online courses and course material. They promote the NROC material as they do their training.

They said that they thought the conference was really good. They said that they learned a lot. They thought that the panels were great. They especially liked the social authoring and collaborative development and thought that it was very interesting. One of the things that they liked best was hearing the outside of the box thinking and the amazing things that people have done. They finished by saying that they loved the creative energy in the room.

 

Yong Chon and his wife Eunice chon.

Yong and Eunice drove down from Takoma,Washington with only a few days to prepare for the NROC Conference. Yong says he is impressed with the scale of the project, and proud to be here. After spending some of his earlier years working as a lab technician, Yong knows the importance of an early quality education to set up a studetn for future success. Eunice proudly tells me, "He made his own program similar to HippoCampus. It's free to everyone."
His program, Skool Plus provides tutoring for free to students grades K-12. They largely focus on SAT and college prep. He modestly described himself as "a nobody" here at the NROC conference, but his contribution to free education is definitely something. Yong is looking to contribute to HippoCapus with his ideas of solid ways to teach children. Yong explaines, "This is fantastic. I have never been to a meeting like this. We all want to do something big before we die.I want to share my ideas with them, if they will say 'yes'!  "

 

 

Robert Schuwer

Robert is here at the conference from Open University. He has been working at Open University for three years. Open University works to publish Open Education Resources. Their research experiment technically ended mid two thousand eight but the board decided to continue the project. In September two thousand eight they started on a new business model that was based on the availability of Open Education Resources.

When they decided to continue the project they also started a second site. The second site has course material for secondary schools. These course materials were designed by top Dutch scientists. They are basing their new courses on a blended teaching model that incorporates both face to face teaching and individual learning. Open University is having an event for internet professionals on computer science.

Open University is working with an organization in the Netherlands to help develop and design course materials for secondary education teachers.

Brian Mcallister

As we learn more about repositories, we continue to be creative about how we access the information, especially for student in under-serviced high school areas. Our main concerns are making education relevant through these repositories. We’re trying to get a better sense of how to use this tool to better serve a younger generation. Hopefully, this will have the effect of keeping kids in school, help them graduate, and eventually go onto higher education.
Exposure is a big problem in that there are many tools and resources available, but not many ways to get at them. This is a great tool to bring to students who might not have the opportunities available to others. There are two big themes for us- relevance and exposure, and OER can address both of those. Also it’s great to stay informed on the movement and all the progress that is being made, and hopefully we can continue it.

 

Interview with Josh Jarrett
Seattle Washington

Josh has been a Senior Program Officer with the Gates Foundation for three years. Previously he has worked as a strategic consultant to nonprofit organizations. He has an MBA and a private sector background in Management consulting.

Josh's primary focus right now is on "how the content creation and distribution economics of OER can be used to increase low-income, young adult student success in post secondary education." His work focuses on the role of innovative technologies interfacing with business expertise.

"We're trying to figure out how to double the number of young adults who attain a post secondary credential that has value in the labor movement," he explains. "Green jobs are potentially attractive jobs in a growing field. So the challenge is to see how young people can get a competitive opportunity in that area. We're also interested in how OER can help to increase the success of transition to college. How can OER accelerate teaching practices to be more student centered and engaging?"

#####

Interview with Terri Bays
OCW Consortium



The Open Courseware Consortium is a group of over 200 organizations. It is incorporated as a 501-c3 in Massachusetts. One of the goals of attending this conference is to create a network of connections between the OCW and the rest of the OEC movement.

Terri teaches at the University of Notre Dame. She started 1/2 time as project manager for the OCW Consortium in August of 2007. She became Interim Executive Director in September of 2008. Terri was born and raised in Dallas Texas. Trained as a medievalist she has a PHD in English Literature.

"I became involved at the time the Open courseware project was getting underway," she explains. "I applied to direct the open courseware project at Notre Dame." Terri maintains that she learned her "inherent bossiness" from her mother.

"A lot of what I do is about helping my fellow colleagues in OER best utilize their gifts in opening educational access to learners around the world," she says. "I add the ability to put the pieces together. To form teams so that the needs and the skills match up."

What does she think of the conference? "I'm really enjoying it," she says. This is my third OER meeting. I'm continually impressed with the level of energy, talent, and creativity."

Terri thinks the biggest challenge of the OER movement, "is to find ways of translating our ethos of sharing from the production of OER production into our relations with each other, so that we share our processes, our methods, and our strategies as openly as we share our content."

######

 Tim Olson - KQED
vice president, Digital Media and Education

 KQED is the NPR/PBS station of the Bay Area, based in San Francisco.

NL - What have you thought of all of the presentations and things you've seen thus far?
TO - It's been pretty great.  It's always great to network with like-minded people, doing like-minded stuff.  KQED has been doing Open Educational Resources for a long time, before it was even called Open Educational Resources.  We have a variety of projects with KQED, such as Quest, where we make video and audio available.  Liberal licenses, where we train educators, both formal and informal, use that media and make media leaning towards education.  So, teaching science teachers, for example, to use Google Maps and make videos of locations with their students.  Having them put that information on a TV map and facilitate 21st century skill learning.

NL - Is your aim more to reach out to students or teachers?
TO - Both, although we do a lot of teacher training and educator training.  There's all kinds of different California educators coming to us, so we go to them in many cases, and we train them.  There's some student training, but mostly teacher training.

* Miss Natalie Jeanne

Alex Chisholm
Executive Director
learninggamesnetwork.org

Disclaimer: Responses are paraphrased.

Q: What is Learning Games Network and it's purpose?

A:The Learning Games Network is about building a Learning Environment that manifests in a fun and appealing game. It's purpose is to create a fun and explorative learning environment for students. The system in which the game is hosted can measure progress in specific topics/subjects as well as records statistics to understand and tweak the learning environment to specific needs. 

More information: alex@learninggamesnetwork.org learninggamesnetwork.org

Thanks Alex,

Lisa Petrides, Ph.D.

ISKME

Institute for Studey of Knowledge Management in Education

Responses are paraphrased.

I asked Lisa what ISKME primarily deals with as a non-profit research insitution, 

She responded with a question; how do you imbed in contiuous learning into education?  How is information science used in education?

More info on ISKME can be found at ISKME.org

Today (March 5th), Lisa was very interested in the discussion surrounding Quality in OER.

She was excited to see such an invigorating discussion around this particular topic because as founder of ISKME, she has been involved in OER conferences for approx. 5 years, and this year their are many brand new faces and more international involvement. "The dialogue has increasingly being directed towards the quality of OERs, such as the rigour, accuracy and usability" Lisa said. However she would like to emphasize the importance of transparency and context in OERs. She advocates for more information disseminationin education. "Context is the key to OERs" Lisa says, "Who is the user? How does the OER add value to the user?  What is the subject being taught? It all depends on the intention of the user and the instructor involved in the interaction.

 

Thanks for the great interview Lisa,

 

 

 

Interview with Dr. Mary Lee
Associate Provost, Tufts University

Mary has been Associate Provost for six years. Prior to that she was Dean for Education at the school of medicine at Tufts University for 13 years.

Mary was born and raised in Boston. Education is her passion in life. "Even as a physician my focus was education," she explains. (She was a practicing physician for 20 years.)

As Provost her main areas are around innovative cross-disciplinary programs in teaching and learning. "It includes exploring ways of teaching in areas that address cross-disciplinary problems," she says. "We also look at innovative ways of teaching focused on student learning. A lot of education is focused on teachers rather than students. We look at it all as a dynamic flow. All of our programs involve teachers, learners, and assessment as one dynamic. They all feed one another. We involve both faculty and students in the development of new programs, so that we know how to target the program. We pay a lot of attention to the whole process of implementation."

The University's Global Health Initiatives are worldwide but focus on south Asia (including India where they work with a school of medicine and dental medicine), Indonesia, and East Africa (where they work with multiple schools.) They also work at the village level and on issues of humanitarian aid. Most of their work is actively related to OER.

Mary enjoyed the conference. "I think the diversity is terrific," she says. "Identifying common threads across the many projects was gratifying." Mary has a wide range of interests. She oversees projects across the university including K-12 learning, and engineering. "Tufts is very committed to open access since the 1980s and has many projects. "We're always eager for collaboration," she emphasizes.

What does she see as the greatest challenge? "It's critical for people to come together at meetings like this. But I think in these economic times it is difficult for organizations to fund these meetings."

See Mary's BIO at: http://provost.tufts.edu/1174149603604/Provost-Page-prov2w_1174149603859.html

#####

Lorrie Lejeune
Nature Publishing Group
www.nature.com
www.nature.com/scitable
l.lejeune@boston.nature.com

What interested you in attending this conference?

Nature recently launched nature education
premiere publishers of scientific journals
Nature is interested in bringing more scientists into the world

Scientific Method:
Inquriy approach, hypothesises, experiments, publishing, peer reviewed

collaborative learning space for science
community based content/wikis - how do you know this information is correct/complete?
Engaging a global audience

What interested you today?
sustainability breakout session
how will OERS sustain themselves?
how do we support/pay for OER for a number of years long term goals/solutions?

anything else?
incredibly dynamic group of people here at this conference.
How can Nature support the advancement of science by helping out the new projects that were mentioned at the conference?

Joel Thierstein, J.D., Ph.D.
Executive Director, Connexions

Connexions is a web-based content management system that sits on top of a learning objects repository. It has approximately 1 million users every month and have had about 10 million different users in the last year. The content in the Connexions repository covers a wide array of disciplines and educational levels, from pre-K to the post-graduates. It's available to anybody to use however they want to use it, as long as they get author permission. "Everything is open access," says Thierstein. "Everything is available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and they can do whatever they want with the material. This means that they can use it with their materials, they can integrate it with their materials, the can use it independently, they can repurpose it and sell it...any purpose at all, as long as they attribute the original author." The platform is open-source as well.

I asked him how he would respond to the skeptics questioning the quality of the open access, open source content on Connexions:

"Not to say that the quality is not good, but there's a vast range of quality. Quality, for us, is a non-issue because if you allow it to be opened up to everybody, then you're kind of taking quality out of the equation. Quality is in the eyes of the beholder. However, we have a quality control mechanism so that people can look at quality through the eyes of somebody who they traditionally respect. So that can be a professional in society, and we have many at Connexions, who endorse the quality of the materials. They're the same ones who do it in the analog world, and now they're just moving to the digital world."

"What Connexions allows people to do is develop the materials in such a way that everybody can contribute to the knowledge base. We don't know where that next great idea is going to come from; it may come from a traditional source and it may not. In fact, the odds are is that it's going to come from somewhere outside of the discipline. Most of the massive innovations have come from outside the discipline. So the idea of being able to facilitate that and allow people from outside of the discipline to comment on materials in a discipline changes the way knowledge flows. That's the power of the Internet, of the World Wide Web. It's really neat and exciting."

"If you think it's quality, great. If you don't? That's fine too. It starts the discussion. Again, a lot of this stuff is of the highest quality; it's stuff that we have from the best scholars in the field and it also has things from...crackpots. (laughs) Who may turn out to be the best scholars in the field, we don't know, or who may inspire other scholars. We don't have all of the pieces and we don't know all of the answers, so allowing more people to contribute to the archive allows knowledge to flow."

* Miss Natalie Jeanne

Sally Johnston from Winona, Minnesota
Provost and Vice President Academic Affairs Winona State University

Sally expressed how delighted she was to be able to see old friends from many aspects of her professional career, as they only see each other once a year. For her, the conversations that took place at this conference were the most valuable part of the event. 

Sally has many years of experience with the Hewlett Foundation and OER, and she explained how she became involved in the beginning: 

Prior to going to Winona state, and I've been there almost three years, I was head of an organization called the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications which was part of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, so it's a public policy program as well as an assistance program for the Western states. And the program that I headed was a professional organization with members being colleges, universities and state agencies, both throughout the US and internationally. When the Hewlett Foundation first began thinking about what they wanted to do with technology, I was part of the original group of people that worked with them to conceptualize what makes sense for investments in technology that would have an impact on raising the quality of education, not just in one institution, but in multiple institutions, and in effect, worldwide. And hosted the first meeting around what has now been called Open Education Resources.

One specific area of the conference that Sally found interesting was her participation in the breakout discussion on Social Networking and OER. (Notes from that session can be found here.)

Brendan Guenther from Michigan State University

Director of Virtual University Design & Technology

Brendan explained to me what his job involves, and how Michigan State is using technology to further agriculture:

 It is a support unit to help faculty put classes online. The online education projects that we're doing and Open Ed projects are kind of an extension of that because we've been doing content production for a long time for the credit-bearing programs.  We're doing really strategic OER. So we're not like the open MIT courses where we're doing a massive campus-wide open course project. So what we're doing tends to be more along the lines of what I would call outreach education. or extension education. And it's complimentary to many of the research programs that we've got. Michigan State has a long tradition of extension ed, particularly in agrigulture. So we have a state-wide network of agricultural extension. Which takes the latest research findings and practical knowledge that is applicable to farmers, growers and ranches. We translate the research into knowledge that actually helps them be more productive and get their stuff to market. So we also are a land grants institution. So the presidential vision at our institution right now is to take the institution from being a land grant institution to a world grant institution. We're not entirely sure what what means but we're defining it, and the OER projects are one way in which that's manifesting itself. So Open Educational Research for us gives us a way to compliment some of the USAID grants that we have and really magnify them back to those larger audiences.