Sustainability

The enabling power of technology, especially information technology and social software, prompts a radical shift in economic and social interactions in societies around the globe. Existing traditional school based, formalized learning formats are unable to accommodate specific new learning needs. Hence, customized to the respective purposes of personal wellbeing, inclusion or requirements for professional performance, lifelong continuous learning is no longer a choice but a necessity. At the 2011 Davos World Economic Forum it was already stated that the lack of adequately educated people not only limits personal fulfilment but will also hinder prosperity and economic growth in the near future. Since the learning needs and learning possibilities today differ fundamentally from the 20th century the question is how to unlock the learning potential of people in a situation where mainstream education still heavily relies on traditional institutionalized closed formats.

Since more than a decade the Open Educational Resources (abbreviated as OER) movement provides new ideas on how to generate and share educational resources for educational use (within and outside formal institutional, open education) by large audiences for a variety of learning purposes. The vision of developing and sharing OER resources for Open Education (OpenED/OE) is interesting in this context for its great potential to substantially help solving existing educational problems. Open education based on sharing (OER) open resources for education enables people across continents and organizations to transform their talents into professional competences and grow by removing existing (economic) barriers and invent new strategies to open up education. To date though the OER/OpenED vision materializes primarily in activities organized as dedicated sponsored projects.

Crucial for a sustainable future of this appealing approach and the capability to bridge existing “education gaps” is our capacity to translate the OER/OpenED vision and existing commitment into appropriate, sustainable business models for OER/OpenED.

Sustainability is a key requirement for the OER business model. Education in the 21st century has the character of life long education, so the question is not so much whether a specific OER project can be funded adequately but whether we can create an underlying business model foundation able to serve as a flight deck from which necessary OER based learning activities can be launched, as part of completely open educational offerings or embedded in hybrid educational constellations, across organizations and countries.

After sketching the scene in the introduction, we move to describing how the application of the OER paradigm radically changes not only learning itself but from a business perspective also the interactions and relationships between learners, “teachers”, creators and users of educational resources as well as relations between educational institutions, designers and service providers of both formal and non-formal learning offerings. In paragraph 3 we draw conclusions from these changing relationships, which leads to a new perspective on sustainable business models for, OER based, (open) education. Next in paragraph 4 we describe our ideas on the essential components of the proposed business model to become a viable sustainable living reality. Based on heuristics from research on learning networks, open innovation and collaboration we describe methods to frame OER/OpenED activities to lay the groundwork for sustainable learning ecologies. We end with concluding remarks and suggestions for future work.

Aaron Doering’s experience as a K-12 Geography teacher convinced him of the need to link the real world to the classroom via technology in order to motivate students. Today he is associate professor in learning technologies at the University of Minnesota, co-director of the Learning Technologies Media Lab, and runs the adventure learning project Earthducation, which focuses on bringing global narratives on education and sustainability to students the world over.

Doering (www.chasingseals.com) recently stopped through Barcelona to deliver the keynote address at the International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies - Edulearn12, and to share his recipe for combining adventure and teaching in order to create change.

How is adventure learning possible…virtually?

What we do is write this specific curriculum, tie it to our experiences, and then bring in all the experts. So if we’re talking about whaling in the Arctic communities, we talk to a scientist, but we also bring in the students and the elders from that community, which people don’t normally do.

It’s applicable to every area, not rocket science at all, and the idea is that the ‘explorer’ is the expert in the field. It does take a different way of designing the learning environment, but you could have an electrical engineer providing real-time updates in coordination with the curriculum, for example.

Earthducation has you dog-sledding across the Arctic and cross-country driving in Australia, does the e-learning part of your project have as many miles under its belt?

It all depends on the year and how much exposure the project gets…But we’ve had over 3 million students a year who use our projects. That’s at least 2,000 classrooms on six continents.

Some of the climate hotspots you travel to are pretty remote, is e-learning a real option for isolated rural communities today?

It’s actually funny to talk about Internet access around the world, because it’s not what you might expect. In the Arctic, for example, maybe there were areas that weren’t connected 10 years ago, but now most are. The school is the hub of their village, and so they’ll have Internet access there, interactive whiteboards…it’s pretty amazing.

I’ve also spent a lot of time with the Sami, and they’re talking about how they can sustain their culture and their language, through online learning. They run videoconferences so as to teach in regions that otherwise wouldn’t have classrooms or teachers.

If that’s the case, what kinds of roadblocks does online education still face?

Well, take Africa, for example. You find they’re using little chalkboards because they don’t have textbooks, and they don’t have pens, but what they do have is mobile technologies. So it’s crazy, everyone’s texting when they don’t even have access to water.

So if we have mobile technologies in these communities…I mean, we’re dealing with other problems like how to charge the battery, or access to solar power…but the future might just look like this, like the mobile.

How does Europe compare to the U.S. with regards to online learning?

I think our goals for online learning and education are pretty similar. But we really need to rethink how we’re delivering online learning. It can’t just be discussion boards, or throwing up a power point and asking students to learn from that. It’s about creating an experience for each learner individually, by having them generate projects related to who they are, even as they’re working on the content we’re teaching.

What’s your advice for teachers who aren’t well versed in technology?

The first thing is that they just can’t allow themselves to be afraid of it. And we have to remember that this process takes time. Technology not only has the power to motivate your students, but also to reenergize you as an educator. It’s not going to happen overnight, though, and you have to move forward without fear. If you’ve got motivation and ambition, then you can truly change students’ lives with technology.

The forum aims to draw on lessons from work conducted by the OECD, Cedefop, and other organisations on the implications of the green economy for skills development and training policies. These insights will contribute to the OECD’s Green Growth Strategy studies such as the LEED project on Measuring the Potential of Green Growth and to Cedefop’s Green Skills activities, which contribute to the European Commission’s initiative on New Skills for New Jobs.

Contributors are invited to submit proposals of a maximum 500 words to the conference organisers by 1 December 2011.

For more information, please refer to the call for papers.

EN

Call for papers

People who would like to attend the forum without presenting a paper are highly welcome too. The website containing more information as well as registration will be available soon.

For more information: GreenSkills-Forum2012@cedefop.europa.eu