NMC and UOC Release Call to Action for Open Education

Forty internationally known leaders in open education and technology met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the NMC's first official European event, the Open EdTech Summit, cosponsored by the Open University of Catalunya and the New Media Consortium. Together, this extraordinary group considered the question of how to design educational institutions that fully embrace open education as means of being truly responsive to the needs of contemporary society and of today's students.

Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution that can meet the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action - five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving the promise of open education:

1. We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media. In order to achieve this, it must be easier to find, use, and cite pieces of media, especially for educational purposes. Contextual tools that perform these tasks, co-developed by students as the end-users, must be created and made available to all. We must also develop ways to translate rich media, not only between languages, but also between modalities, such that content produced in a certain geographical area and medium may be accessed and reused in other places and in other forms. Portability of rich media is key; content must not be tied to a certain platform for delivery, nor to a specific medium or environment.
2. We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms. Mobiles - not simply phones, but all kinds of handheld and portable devices - are powerful tools for learning because they are controlled by the holder. With mobile devices, users can direct their own learning experiences, accessing information where and when they need it. It is critical that we effect a paradigm shift toward recognizing mobiles as a primary platform for delivery of educational content - not content that is translated for use on mobiles, but content that is designed for such use from the outset. We must actively encourage development practices that remove platform dependence. Likewise, we must advocate for a global mobile network that is as easy to use, as inexpensive, and even more ubiquitous than the web.
3. We must award credentials based on learning outcomes. It is time to recognize the learning that occurs outside of courses and beyond classroom walls. The model of awarding credentials solely on the basis of participation in established programs must give way to a more flexible design that separates credentials from coursework and recognizes mastery regardless of where or how it is attained. As more learners choose alternate means of education, including non-university programs, mentoring, apprenticeship, and other informal or innovative options, we must accept and recognize their achievements as equivalent to those gained in more traditional ways.
4. We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. We must empower students to share knowledge with one another in ways that are viewed as collaboration rather than cheating. Assessment models must change to support these practices. Ultimately, we see a culture of sharing as a crucial piece of the infrastructure of a scalable educational system that can support the millions of learners who will participate in it.
5. We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable their use and understanding. Content out of context is at best easy to misconstrue, and at worst, too difficult to use. Content producers and users alike must embrace strategies (reflective blogging, metadata, documentation of process, visualization of learning, etc.) for linking content generation to "pedagogical wraparounds" that embed content within effective learning practices. Such strategies would ensure that the focus remains on learning objectives and process, rather than on the technology used to deliver the learning materials.

The attendees noted that the task of reinventing higher education is complex, and the road to change long. Institutions change by degree, and the group underscored that it must become part of our culture to embrace our collective knowledge and wisdom when it comes to designing learning experiences. Higher education must begin to recognize the utility and value of informal avenues of learning, self-directed learning, and the new forms of mentorship made possible via the network and social media. Thoughtful experimentation must be encouraged at all levels, including the formation of whole new forms of institutions.

The work of the attendees was captured in real time in the summit wiki.  For more, please read the full Communiqué.