is a Working Environment with Social, Personal and Open Technologies for Inquiry Based Learning.

Its aim is to propagate scientific inquiry as the approach for science learning and teaching in combination with today’s curricula and teaching practices.

weSPOT will create a Working Environment with Social, Personal and Open Technologies that supports users (from 12 to 25) to develop their inquiry based learning skills by means of:

(i) a European reference model for inquiry skills and inquiry workflows,

(ii) a diagnostic instrument for measuring inquiry skills,

(iii) smart support tools for orchestrating inquiry workflows including mobile apps, learning analytics support, and social collaboration on scientific inquiry,

(iv) social media integration and viral marketing of scientific inquiry linked to school legacy systems and an open badge system.

In inquiry-based learning co-learners take the role of explorers and scientists and are motivated by their personal curiosity, guided by self-reflection, and develop knowledge personal and collaborative sense-making and reasoning.

weSPOT will work on a meta-inquiry level in that it will:

1. define a reference model for inquiry-based learning skills,

2. create a diagnostic instrument for measuring inquiry skills, and

3. implement a working environment that allows the easy linking of inquiry activities with school curricula and legacy systems.

Partners

are Visual Interfaces for Systematising and Interpreting Online Notes.

Problem: A key issue for students in online courses is to make sense of large amount of information from various resources and develop thinking skills on the web. OU students’ comments revealed that “there is a wealth of resources online to help you including forums full of people in your position”, however online study requires motivation and committed work; “it isn’t easy and you have to really be motivated and determined to make yourself work “.

Questions: our aim is to investigate whether LiteMap (a mapping tool developed in KMi) helps students and tutors annotate and map online content for increasing understanding and maintain levels of motivation. In what ways do students and tutors extract and connect online content? Can they use maps to develop visual thinking and interpretation? What are their difficulties and recommendations? How does collaborative LiteMap use affect levels of study motivation?

Foundation: Literature highlights that visual representations can facilitate the process of sensemaking by making it explicit for students to learn in a meaningful way. Meaningful learning occurs when learners choose to seek ways to relate new propositions to existing knowledge and make those relations visible to apprehend new meanings (Ausubel,1963;Novak,1998). Previous studies show that mapping supports forum discussions; writing and teamwork; however there is not enough research on annotation and how it can improve both mapping and interpretation of online content.

Research Design: Based on a ‘mixed methods’ approach, our study focuses on T891 “Making Environmental Decision”. We will analyse students’ maps in LiteMap, focus groups with tutors and semi-structured questionnaires. Our thematic analysis in Nvivo will also include gender, age, nationality and educational background.

Expected Outcomes: 1. Technological improvement of LiteMap, 2. New approaches for online learning, 3. Showcase of best practices, 4. Mapping methodology for other courses, 5. List of recommendations for users.

Links:

http://www.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/esteem/projects/themes/onlineonscreen-stem-practice/vision-visual-interfaces-systematising-and-interpreting

helps e-learners construct interpretations of open content courseware. It supports the Open Content movement for enabling students and educators to access material, in order to then learn from it, and reuse it either in one’s studies or one’s own courses.

The core efforts to date has focused on enabling access, e.g. building the organizational/political will to release and license content, and in developing open infrastructures for educators to then publish and reassemble it.

The key challenge in the next phase of the open content movement is to improve the support for prospective students to engage with and learn from the material, and with each other though peer learning support, in the absence of formally imposed study timetables and assessment deadlines.

KMi is now engaged in developing the next generation of tools for e-learning and collaborative sensemaking for open content learning support.

Participant(s):Simon Buckingham Shum, Marc Eisenstadt, Peter Scott, Michelle Bachler, Chris Denham, Kevin Quick, Jon Linney, Alex Little, Elia Tomadaki, Alexandra Okada

is a Collaborative Open Learning research community for cocreating knowledge, skills and practices with new technologies and methodologies.

This community was founded in 2000 by Dr. Okada in Brazil and became an international network in 2006 during the OpenLearn project developed by The Open University, UK.

The acronym “C” “O” “L”earn means Collaborative Open Learning. More than 3.500 members joined the community and have been participating in various collaborative open learning projects such as OpenLearn (2006-2009) OpenScout (2010-2012), weSPOT (2013-2015) and ENGAGE (2014-2016).

The term colearning was initially defined in 1996 by Frank Smith in the book “Joining the Literacy Club”. This concept was used to emphasize the importance of changing the role of, respectively, teachers and students from dispensers and receptacles of knowledge to both colearners – collaborative partners on the process of sensemaking, understanding and creating knowledge together. A decade later, Brantmeier (2005) described that colearning acts toward student- centered learning for building a more genuine “community of practice” through dynamic and participatory engagement for collective construction of knowledge.

Okada’s research (2002, 2006, 2008) defines colearning as “learning together for co-creating open knowledge through digital technologies”. Her work about colearning is grounded on Paulo Freire’s approach for emancipatory education. Her research situates colearning in the context of emerging technologies, which allow the development of knowledge, practices and skills for responsible research and innovation.

Based on the philosophy of openness, the process of colearning is enriched through wide participation for creating, adapting and sharing reusable OER for co-authoring knowledge with and for society (Okada 2012). Due to the rapid increase of co-authoring technologies and innovative pedagogies, several features which differentiate “colearning in social networks” versus the “traditional e-learning in Virtual Learning Environments” (VLE) emerged. Some of these features are: educators as “competence and knowledge mediators”, students as “colearners coauthors”, flexible curriculum integrating formal and informal learning, open multimedia content, communities of practice, co-evaluation, peer- review assessment and collaborative open learning paths.

The COLEARN network aims to investigate how these diverse features have been contributing to the process of emancipatory education, which means empowering colearners to become critical thinkers, creative collaborators, innovative researchers and responsible citizens.

Keywords: CoLearning, co-Inquiry,Responsible Research and Innovation Knowledge Mapping, Knowledge Media, Open Educational Resources, Massive Open Networks, ubiquitous Learning, 21st Century Competences.

is the OU’s Open Content initiative for making educational resources freely available on the Internet, with state of the art learning support and collaboration tools to connect learners and educators.

The OpenLearn project started in 2005 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (http://www.hewlett.org/). Sharing our aim to open access to education for all, they agreed to help us set up the OpenLearn website.

Since 1969, The Open University has been a pioneer in making learning materials freely available through its successful partnership with the BBC. Many of our television and radio programmes are already supported by free internet activities and print materials. We wanted to use our knowledge of the latest technologies in education to extend our mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. The vision was free online education.

Website development began in May 2006 and the site was launched in October 2006, with an aim to regularly add new content and features. OpenLearn now offers a full range of Open University subject areas from access to postgraduate level and has seen over 3 million visitors since launch. In April 2008 OpenLearn reached its target to have 5,400 learning hours of content in the LearningSpace (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/) and 8100 hours in the LabSpace (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/).

It continues to grow representing The Open University’s commitment to opening access to education.

www.open.edu

Team

Simon Buckingham Shum

Alexandra Okada

Michelle Bachler

Funder

• The Open University

• The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation