Research Spotlights
Discussion with Wayne Mackintosh
Interview conducted by: Hailey Van Boxtel, Miami University
Wayne Mackintosh is the founding director of the OER Foundation headquartered at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. He is coordinating the establishment of the OERu, an international innovation partnership which aims to widen access to more affordable education for all. Wayne holds the UNESCO / ICDE Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic and serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the OER Foundation.
The interview answers below are licensed under CC BY-SA. All other content in this issue is licensed and copyright under different terms and by different parties.
Can you tell us a little bit about your work and what led you to OER technology, specifically how you got involved with the OER foundation?
I originally trained as a teacher and joined the profession motivated by the vocational ideals of sharing knowledge freely in the classroom. Following a 20-year career in Higher Education and International Development, in 2009 I founded the OER Foundation as a non-profit organisation providing networking and practical support to governments, institutions, and individuals so they could achieve their strategic objectives using open education approaches. We also host New Zealand’s UNESCO Chair in OER and are actively engaged in supporting the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation.
How has the pandemic influenced the work you have been doing with Open Education Resources?
At the onset of the 1st global lockdown, the OER Foundation and the Commonwealth of Learning established the OER4Covid initiative to support educators in their transition to remote teaching during the Pandemic. We surveyed educators to find out what support people really needed and how best to provide this. The top two interventions based on responses from 85 countries were to provide:
- Free online courses supporting capacity development for educators in OER and open educational practices
- Access to open source software tools.
As a result, we are expanding our Learning in Digital Age series of free online micro-courses to include professional development opportunities for teachers wanting to improve their Digital Skills for OERs using Free and Open Source Software Tools. Additionally, we are promoting digital fluencies for post-secondary educators by remixing the outstanding Ontario Extend professional development programme for the OER platform so we can extend capacity development on a global scale.
What is the biggest misconception that governments and organizations have about OER adoption and how do you address this?
The biggest misconception is that governments and organizations funding education as a public good don’t typically think of learning resources also as a public good. Learning resources funded by taxpayer dollars, that is, the resources which taxpayer funded teachers develop, should be released under an open license for the benefit of all taxpayers and society in general. The easiest way to address this challenge is to implement open policy interventions requiring educational materials developed from public money to be released under an open license that permits no-cost access, reuse, revision, re-mix, and redistribution by others.
How have OERs changed the way that educators support students and develop curriculum in primary and secondary education?
I’d slightly challenge the premise of this question because it posits the pedagogy of OER as something “different” to the pedagogy when using closed resources. Quality teaching and associated curriculum development should prevail irrespective of the copyright license of the teaching materials. We don’t ask the question of teachers using “closed resources” and how they have changed support for students and curriculum development since the advent of OER.
What advice would you give an organization in the early stages of developing an OER and barriers they should be aware of?
There are some skills that are better learned by doing. For example, it’s hard to learn how to swim by reading a book. The best advice I can give is for teachers to get their feet wet by starting small and developing a single OER for use in the classroom.
The biggest challenge we face in OER is crossing the chasm from ‘sharing to learn’, to ‘learning to share’. Most educators would agree that sharing resources to support learning is a good thing. However, learning to work collaboratively for the purpose of sharing is a cultural shift that takes time and developing new skills, both of which I think are vital investments if we want sustainable education.
What steps should OER platforms use to monitor and refine content for global audiences?
OER platforms should ensure that all resources are stored using open and editable file formats to facilitate remixing for different learning contexts. ‘Designing for remix’ as a point of departure makes it easier for global audiences to refine content for their own use. It involves small things like avoiding the use of numbering of individual units of study in case teachers would like to reuse the unit in a different sequence. But it’s more than this, component-based design where pedagogical activities are clearly distinguished in the markup of resources makes it easier to substitute with more contextually relevant activities. The use for Free and Open Source Software platforms makes it easier to refine resources for different languages because the engaged user communities around most applications have already translated their interfaces for different languages. Systems to categorise openly licensed images embedded in course resources would make it easier to replace images for an online resource developed for teachers in the Pacific region with appropriate substitutes when remixing the resource for teachers in Africa.
Monitoring should be left to the professionals, that is, teachers who are trained and experienced in selecting and adapting high quality resources for their learners. This is not the task of an OER platform.
For local educators, what strategies would you advise for those who are new to implementing OER into their toolkit?
Start small and work openly and collaboratively with your colleagues. Gain confidence to walk with OER before you run. Know that OER is a gift that continues giving and that your efforts, however small, are helping us all move towards more sustainable education practice.
Accessibility is a major factor in OER, what adaptations have you seen that ensure OER resources are inclusive?
At the OER Foundation, we take accessibility seriously. First, no learner should be denied access to study because they can’t afford the cost of proprietary software licenses, or may be forced to pay with their data to use so-called “free” online services. At the OER Foundation, we ensure that all learning can be conducted using Free and Open Source Software tools.
Online resources must also be developed for accessibility, for example, ensuring that the content can be navigated using keyboard controls, adequate contrast in the use of colours, consistent semantic markup so that learners using screen readers are not presented with unnecessary barriers when working through online resources and of course adopting a mobile first design approach.
But it is much more than the tools we use for developing and publishing OER. OER resources must ensure that people of diverse backgrounds can see themselves in the curriculum and this is a requirement to design for inclusivity. Because they are openly licensed, OERs provide significant opportunities for anyone to refine and improve both accessibility and inclusivity of the resources we use to teach in ways we haven’t considered or thought sufficiently important.
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