AI and Human-Centered Open Education

 In response to a post on LinkedIn about the OER World Congress by UNESCO in Dubai, the question was asked, "Spreading the word on upskilling has to be a global effort—collaborations, partnerships, and community engagement could help bridge that gap. What strategies do you think would work best?"

We have a potential example that we think provides an example that others can follow.

(The following is an abstract of a more in-depth paper that will be published by MIT CSAIL in January 2025.)

AI and Human-Centered Open Education

This paper describes an innovative approach to K-12 education that functions effectively in classrooms with or without internet access. Currently being implemented in the Northern Region of Ghana, this project creates an example for other countries facing similar disparities in technology access. AI-enhanced, offline-first tools deliver quality educational resources and personalized learning experiences to students in remote and underserved areas. The initiative prioritizes those with the least access and then scales to all classrooms, regardless of internet availability.

The global K-12 education system is ready for a solution that offers translation, assessment, and teacher professional development tools adaptable to any setting, with or without internet access. In Africa, some schools have internet access, but many do not. Teacher training on digital assessment tools is rare as is access to low-cost high quality instructional materials. Our solution leverages proven, low-cost technology - MoodleBox, Kolibri, Internet-in-a-Box, and Kiwix - to provide all teachers with access to high-quality, free, culturally relevant instructional materials and help them become proficient with the technology. An offline-first model is crucial for guaranteeing equity and inclusion for all students.

Our solution focuses on three key areas: 1) Translating educational materials; 2) Assessing student learning; and 3) Enhancing teacher skills and professionalism. Using the student's first language for instruction and assessment is central to our approach.

While the education ministries in many African countries mandate instruction in the student's first language, high-quality first-language materials are often lacking. Our solution provides accessibility to high-quality instructional resources by using AI to help translate open education instructional materials (including assessments) into the first languages of teachers and their students.

We also support teachers’ systematic delivery of assessments and the use of assessment data to better support their students and reflect on their instruction. Currently, in most rural African classrooms, teachers write the assessment questions on the chalkboard and students respond either verbally or on paper at their seats. This chalkboard-based teaching method limits teachers' ability to use assessments for formative purposes thus hindering broader educational progress. Our solution makes using assessments for formative purposes more feasible and allows teachers to access and reflect on data at any time. The technology also supports the delivery of comparative achievement assessments across different regions. Our solution makes it possible to monitor incremental progress in achievement for individual students across classrooms, teachers, schools, districts, and regions.

Finally, our solution uses the same technologies being used by students to provide professional development. We have partnered with several local nonprofit organizations experienced in similar projects to offer on-site professional development and technical support, focusing on empowering educators rather than merely delivering products. The professional development content materials are openly licensed and delivered using the same tools the students use.

Based on the encouraging results of our pilot in the Northern Region of Ghana, we expect 5,000 students in Ghana to increase learning achievement in reading and math by at least 40% in the next three years. The offline accessibility and rich, interactive, locally curated content create a new learning paradigm, removing the barriers of internet access and limited resources and empowering teachers and students.




Co-Authors:

● Dan McGuire, Executive Director, SABIER, Minneapolis, MN, USA - dan@sabier.org

● Robert Murphy, Owner and Principal Education Research Consultant, LFC Research,

Mountain View, CA, USA - bfmurph@icloud.com

● Sadik Shahadu, Executive Director, Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, Tamale, Ghana

uniques.sadike@gmail.com

● Peter K. Amoabil, Founder and Executive Director of Rural Literacy Solutions, Tamale,

Ghana - amoabilhatma@gmail.com

● Maxwell Beganim, Climate Advisor Pan African Youth Union. Kumasi, Ghana -

maxbeg2003@yahoo.com

● Musah Fuseini, Team Member, Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, Tamale, Ghana -musahfm@gmail.com

● Steve Miley, MoodleBox Advocate, Santa Barbara, CA, USA -

stevenraymiley@gmail.com

● Stephane Coillet-Matillon, CEO, Co-founder, Kiwix Offline, Lausanne, Switzerland -stephane@kiwix.org

CC BY NC is the new Standard

It’s time to update my thoughts on why educational materials should be openly licensed and not for commercial use. Six years ago on my blog, I wrote:

 

“Eventually, our public institutions will begin exercising their ability to intentionally and purposely create publicly owned Creative Commons licensed alternatives to the current proprietary 'added value’ models for which they pay handsomely.' CC BY NC is consistent with that intent and purpose."

Public institutions in the United States still aren’t exercising their ability to create publicly owned Creative Commons licensed alternatives to the current proprietary 'added value’ models. They still usually just write checks to for-profit publishers or require students to write checks.

Today, in the Global South, writing checks for educational content isn’t an option for public institutions, or their students, or their students' parents. There isn’t any money for the proprietary ‘added value’ content that costs anywhere from $10 to $100. There is no education ‘market’ in the Global South.

In the Global South, the creation of publicly owned Creative Commons licensed education material needs to be paid for by the people who can afford to write the checks. In some cases that will be governments that get grants from the North. In others, philanthropy will pay for the materials and provide them directly to schools and teachers bypassing the governments. The business model of education in the United States doesn’t work in the Global South.

When philanthropists or governments in the Global South pay to create educational materials they don’t want to be providing raw materials for a product for which for-profit companies will generate revenue. That’s why CC BY NC licenses are the only practical option. The materials can still be developed for the South and sold to institutions in the North willing to pay, but the creators need to be more than adequately included by choice in the revenue generated.

If we really do want to:
     Boost rigorous instruction, student feedback, and assessment in all content areas;
     Provide scalable and timely student support;
     And expand opportunities for quality teacher professional development,

CC BY NC is the new Standard.

OER Kicked to the Curb

It looks like OER has been kicked to the curb. In early 2022, The U.S. Department of Education turned the responsibility of promoting open educational resources (OER) over to ISKME. Recently, the Go Open National Network, the ISKME entity that is the steward of the Go Open Movement, offered a webinar on the 2024 National Education Technology Plan (NETP.) They tried to connect the NETP to OER but weren’t able to explain why OER isn’t even mentioned in the The Plan. 

 In the 113h pages of the 2024 NETP all kinds of things related to education and technology are mentioned. It’s a 113 page laundry list of everything you might want to include in education technology related topics EXCEPT OER. One of the panelists from North Carolina, a state that has theoretically embraced OER, said in the webinar that only about 20% of their teachers visit the state's repository of OER. Visiting the repository, of course, doesn’t mean that the Resources are actually being used in the classroom. The panelist then admitted that it doesn’t appear that there is adequate support in schools for teachers to become proficient at finding, adapting, and using OER. 

The NETP features a few hundred mentions of UDL, a proprietary framework that also doesn't talk about OER. If you don't have permission and don't know how to modify educational resources at the classroom level and don't have adequate support, you can't really Design or USE content that provides universal ACCESS. 

 In the webinar, I asked - Where is OER mentioned in the NETP other than as an anecdote? The response from one of the primary authors of The Plan was that it was a framework or a vision of what they’d like to see in classrooms and what we need to focus on in order for that vision to come to life. But regarding OER, the author said there’s other places where things like OER can be connected to the NETP. Which means that the NETP doesn’t explicitly connect OER to the vision of what they’d like to see in the classroom. Go someplace else to find out about how OER can reduce the divides of Use, Design, and Access in teaching and learning; it’s not covered in the NETP.

K-12 OER Awareness (in the U.S.?)

 The [OER-Comms] Weekly News Roundup - 8/4/23 mentioned that Michael K. Barbour had made a post on his blog entitled "OER Awareness in K-12 and Higher Education is on the rise." That post was about a report that will be released sometime this summer by Bayview Analytics that says “There was an increase in awareness (of OER) amongst K-12 teachers, reversing a small decline we saw during the pandemic.” Bayview Analytics had made a presentation at a conference in July about this report. Here’s a link to the slides of that presentation. Download presentation slides

Slide 24 includes this chart: 

  https://www.bayviewanalytics.com/reports/presentations/usdla_oer_20230719.pdf

I’m going to assume that this survey was of only U.S. K-12 teachers. Bayview explained that they determined that if teachers said they were aware of OER and also said they knew what Creative Commons licensing was, Bayview would consider the teachers' awareness as ‘Strict.’ The ‘Strict’ qualification isn’t necessary.  If a teacher doesn't know what Creative Commons licensing is, they are NOT really aware of OER. 

Only 3% of upper elementary teachers surveyed said they are very aware of OER and how they can be used in the classroom. We don't know, though, what part of that 3% has actually used OER. Saying you are aware of and know how OER can be used in the classroom is not saying that you've actually used OER in the classroom

We need more information, a lot of it. What type of OER are we talking about? OER include many different types of educational materials.

1. The most common use of OER by K-12 teachers currently is going to a website and downloading a page or multiple pages that the teacher then prints and makes copies of for all of their students, or just makes copies for themselves that they use as a lesson guide for example.

2. A type of OER that’s similar to the one in #1 is a website that includes docs or PDFs that can be read online or downloaded and copied to a student’s device.

3.. Another common use of OER by K-12 teachers is to provide students a link to a website that includes some widgets that students can manipulate. Students can respond to prompts on the screen and then are able to save to a Google Classroom folder. for example.

4. And there’s the type of OER that is a website that has some videos for students to watch and also includes the ability to download PDFs of the student activity directions and/or copy them to Google Classroom. for example.

5. A complete LMS course that includes assessments and opportunities for students to collaborate and communicate with each other is a less commonly used type of OER. Here’s an example that includes an LMS course shell for teachers to complete with their own activities for students in conjunction with links to GeoGebra’s digital online interactive version of an OER curriculum. The course shells here can be used with any of the LMSs in use by K-12 schools.

Differences in how the above types are used in classrooms result in big differences in benefits to teachers, students, schools, and parents. Each type requires different levels of awareness and skill by teachers in order to create effective learning activities.

The next survey Bayview Analytics does needs to go deeper. We need to know what types of OER teachers are aware of, what types of OER have teachers used in their classroom (being aware of and actually using it in your classroom are very different), what types of OER have teachers edited, what types of OER have teachers created, what types of OER have teachers redistributed and how did they redistribute the OER. In what subjects was OER used?

Getting more detail about how teachers currently use OER and the particular types of OER are the first steps in increasing the percentage of teachers that are aware (at any level) of OER. But, that’s just the first step; there’s a lot more that needs to be done. Awareness of OER isn't our goal - teachers and students actually using, editing, revising, and redistributing OER is what we want to measure. It's easier and more meaningful to measure teacher actions than it is to measure teacher awareness.

OER is Being Productized

The headline on this Linkedin article got my attention - It's time to start paying attention to OER in K-12

 I can't share it via Twitter which is apparently blocking links to Linkedin posts, so I'm pasting the link here.  Click this link 

From the article "The first-generation category of OER encompassed lightweight materials from sources like OER Commons or peer-generated materials from websites."

This article is, with a few exceptions, a very good history of K-12 OER in the U.S.

Something that needs to be pointed out is that when OER is 'productized' it ceases being OER. The affordances of OER to enable revision to meet the specific needs of students and to be able share it again with the whole world is gone. Also, when OER is printed out it becomes difficult at best to revise, retain, and share with others. It's still OER when it's printed out; it's just not as versatile as digital OER

For the most part, this article only applies to U.S. use cases. Digital platforms exist in Europe and the highly developed areas of Asia but often need to be translated. Often, the governments outside of the U.S. aren't keen on paying money to U.S. corporations. In large swaths of the Global South, digital platforms of the kind that are used in 'productization' are not viable.

Something else being overlooked in this move to 'productization' is teacher professional development. It seems that U.S. school districts would rather write checks to businesses that are usually for-profit than invest in building the skills of their teachers. That can't be sustainable for the long term.

An Open letter to the #GoOpen Network

How can more state departments of education and school districts be encouraged to begin using OER curricula more than they are currently doing? Maybe this will happen without any controversies. Maybe there won’t be any politics involved. Maybe this will happen very organically and blissfully. Maybe all of the people whose current livelihoods in all of the state departments of education and school districts depend on the distribution and monitoring of proprietary curricula will just wake up one morning and say - “I think we should not keep doing what we’ve always done and that I’ve become recognized for leading. I want to do something completely new and innovative.” Maybe.

Maybe a state department of education other than Iowa’s will decide it wants to spend $17 million dollars to create openly licensed curricula that can be readily used on an LMS like Iowa has done. Maybe they’ll make that curricula for Math, Science, Social Studies, and ELA in grades 6-12  available to all other districts like an open license requires, which Iowa hasn’t done for some inexplicable reason. Maybe.

I don’t think any of the above is likely. Getting more state departments of education and school districts using OER more frequently and more effectively is going to require some conflict and some risk taking. Somebody might need to risk being wrong.

Update to Iowa Dept. of Ed. Squanders $17million on #OER

 Here are a few more details about my previous post. The previous post was the culmination of many email exchanges, phone calls, and Zoom meetings with Iowa Department of Education staff.  IN early 2021, SABIER started planning PD courses for Iowa schools.  We would be focusing on showing teachers how to create equity in materials using middle school math OER courses as described here.    The content we would be using would be digital OER versions of Illustrative Mathematics for middle schools. In 2020, SABIER created OER LMS courses using GeoGebra's OER digital app version of Illustrative Mathematics embedded in open-source OER Moodle courses.  That work is described here in a CC Medium post. (If you want more info on OER please see this from UNESCO.)

In March of 2022, I learned that the Iowa Department of Education had created revisions of the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum in Canvas courses.  I asked to talk to the person in charge of the IM course development for the Department because I didn't want to pursue Professional Development for Iowa teachers that didn't include work that the Iowa Department of Education had been doing. I was introduced to the head of math for the state of Iowa. She did a screen share and showed me a couple of pages of one of the courses they had created in Canvas. It seemed to be very thorough and appeared to be comprehensive. I said, "That's wonderful, please, send me a copy and I'll combine it with the work we did with GeoGebra and give teachers some great options." She said she couldn't give me access. She said that while showing me this screen - https://elearningcentral.iowa.gov/course-repository/ilc-8th-grade-math-full-year, the screen that very clearly displays the CC BY license, a license that permits free sharing of material.  I was confused as to why she thought she couldn't give me access.

It gets worse. The director of  Iowa AEA Online had not yet been given access. Iowa AEA Online had been leading support for digital learning in Iowa schools for over fifteen years. They're really good at it, and have nine offices scattered around the state. I repeat; they haven't been given access yet to the digital OER courses created with $17 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Education. And, the IDE hasn't budgeted for professional development for the new digital curriculum being delivered via an LMS for the first time in most Iowa middle school math classrooms.

This initiative by the Iowa Department of Education is important for several reasons:

It's the largest amount of money spent by any government entity anywhere on K-12 OER curriculum, and it's the first major expenditure at any level by any government entity on full course OER delivered via an LMS. That's a big and important innovation. Iowa should be proud, although I don't think they actually understood what they were doing and what the ramifications were. I strongly suspect they were led down this path by Instructure, the purveyors of Canvas. As is, this initiative will be a huge boon for Instructure-Canvas. Even if the courses were moved to a free open-source system it will still be a huge revenue source for Instructure because lots of K-12 districts would rather write checks than own their own content and processes.

There are at least four for-profit companies that have taken the OER Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, the OER OpenSciEd curriculum, the OER Great Minds curriculum and the others that are included in Iowa eLearning Central and put them into their proprietary LMS like platforms.  Two of those companies have been acquired by venture capital companies in the last two years. Venture capitalists have not historically been interested in K-12 instructional materials. They're investing because the course content for the middle school math content alone on Iowa eLearning Central if sold to all schools in the U.S. is equal to about $450,000,000.00 - half a $Billion. 

The Iowa Department of Education could become the leaders in implementing this curriculum nationwide. Teachers need to be better supported and paid to learn new skills using digital curriculum and digital tools that can make the curriculum more equitable. Those $billions should be going to paying more teachers more money and enhancing their skills. Teachers can lead the needed equity efforts using OER curriculum and digital tools. That's why I founded SABIER six years ago. 

Here are some supporting documents:

My letter to the U.S. Department of Education Inspector General. Their response to me was to contact the program officer. I've been told that Lauren Golubski, lauren.golubski@ed.gov, is the program officer. They haven't returned my calls or emails.

Here's a response I received from the Iowa Department of Education's General Counsel, Thomas Mayes after about a dozen or so calls and email to various people at the IDE. 

And, here's my response to Mr. Mayes.