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, Africa Anglophone Coordinator,  Open Knowledge Network  
. Kumasi, Ghana - mbeganimgh@gmail.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.