This essay is a companion piece to “Can a Repository Make the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Usable?” by Jennifer Meta Robinson. The introduction to these two essays, by John Rakestraw, can be found here.

Proponents of open education agree that “education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection.”¹ Educators at all levels can take advantage of a diverse set of resource repositories for a wide range of disciplines. However, to maximize the utility of these resource collections, it is crucial to incorporate into their design specific strategies to support their sustainability by ensuring both short-term and long-term value. Furthermore, by purposefully integrating learning materials with teaching expertise, the value of open educational resources for teachers can be greatly enhanced.

Open Educational Resources: Reconceiving the Model
First, we should rethink our use of the term “repository,” which implies a static collection of resources; while not without utility, the repository model does not take advantage of the potential flexibility offered by Web 2.0 technology. Rather than a “repository,” we should think of a dynamic “knowledge exchange network,” which will allow us to “harness the collective wisdom of a community of practice.”²

Second, an open educational resources (OER) network should be conceived “from the outside in.” Rather than merely bringing together and presenting available resources, as in the static repository model, we should begin designing an OER network by identifying potential users of the resources, figuring out how they might use these resources, and then working backward to develop knowledge products--materials and ways to use those materials --to meet those needs.

With these points in mind, we have begun to use the term “OER Knowledge Exchange Network” to refer to the emerging technical and social infrastructures which enable communities of higher education teachers to access, share, extend and apply online knowledge representations and resources for enhanced teaching and learning.

Building a Network: The Challenge of Sustainability
This model for a dynamic knowledge exchange network presents significant challenges. Although it is easy to assert the value of a community of practice, actually fostering and supporting one proves difficult. How can we ensure that faculty users of learning resources will evolve into contributors of feedback and support for teaching expertise, becoming active participants rather than one-way users? In other words, how will the network become sustainable as a social infrastructure?

In addressing this challenge of sustainability, we can learn from research on other types of social networks, which has shown that “social networking sites’ longevity is proportional to their object-centered sociality.”³ This perspective suggests that we should focus less on resources as reusable components and more on resources as focal points for interactions within a social network. Thus we should consider not only the network’s resources, but how participants might interact around those resources.

One strategy for addressing the challenge of sustainability calls for the alignment of an open education network with the strategic priorities of partner academic institutions, thus ensuring ongoing institutional support for faculty involvement and for the network’s underlying social and technical infrastructures.⁴ Interconnecting an OER network to existing infrastructures and networks, which already involve some element of object-centered sociality, will strengthen its utility and enhance sustainability.

The challenge of OER reuse in specific contexts proves to be a significant aspect of the sustainability challenge.⁵ Users who find the adaptation of resources to specific contexts to be prohibitively time-consuming are unlikely to return to the knowledge exchange space. One strategy to address this issue is to incorporate pedagogical content knowledge as part of open educational resources.

First used by Lee Shulman, the term "pedagogical content knowledge" refers to the knowledge needed to teach effectively in a discipline.⁶ Based on a combination of practical experience and scholarly research, this knowledge encompasses implicit and explicit elements across a range of learning issues, including challenges particular to topics and disciplines; outcomes associated with various topics and student cohorts; effective teaching and learning approaches and the contexts in which they work best; and assessment of student accomplishment and support of their learning needs.

The integration of pedagogical content knowledge is vital to insure an effective fit with student learning needs across institutional contexts. Efforts that focus on augmenting the learning materials in educational resource repositories with facilities for developing and sharing associated teaching expertise about the appropriate use and adaptation of the materials offer a way to "build it to provide more utility when they come--so they will come back."⁷

Integration of Pedagogical Content Knowledge
How specifically might we go about integrating pedagogical content knowledge with discipline-specific resources? Based on the content found on MERLOT,⁸ a large-scale network which provides a portal to open educational resources, we suggest incorporating into a knowledge exchange network the following types of content formats:

• Member comments--personal reflections on the value of a particular resource, which help potential users decide whether a resource is appropriate for their needs
• Personal collections--individual collections of resources created and annotated by members, allowing potential users to take advantage of the review process of other users
• Learning assignments--practical examples of how a resource might be used in a particular classroom context
• Author snapshots--portraits of resource authors, which provide insight into the design goals behind the resources
• Peer reviews--structured evaluations of resources conducted by disciplinary experts

Although these formats vary in terms of effort required to produce and sustain them, and may not be appropriate for all contexts, they offer a range of possibilities for incorporating pedagogical content knowledge into OER knowledge exchange networks.

Future Directions
Although experiments with integrating pedagogical content knowledge into open education resource networks have so far been promising, there remains tremendous potential for adapting and extending these efforts. For example, most existing initiatives do not directly address the need to tailor learning designs to specific learning contexts, nor do they link to research results and community scholarship. Several ongoing projects are currently experimenting with innovations to address this need:

• “Professional social networking” to engage faculty in knowledge exchange with their discipline colleagues;⁹
• Guides to best evidence for engaging learners, which aim to combine pedagogical knowledge from practice-based and research-based sources;¹⁰
• Supporting innovation teams in teaching “Collaboratories,” which leverage investments in course redesign projects for the benefit of the wider community of teachers.¹¹

These innovations fit well with the growing movement to consider the scholarship of teaching and learning as part of faculty activities as scholars. In fact, the larger OER knowledge exchange network also aligns with this movement, further inspiring hope in the potential to garner institutional support for further developments in this area. Collaborative approaches to exchanging, reusing, and adapting resources show how the OER community can move toward a model in which participants will be supported and resourced by their own institutions to come, providing a return on the institutional investment in terms of the institution’s strategic goals, and ensuring the sustainability of the OER networks.

Notes
1. Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, “Introduction,” in Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, ed. Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching / The MIT Press, 2008), 2. Available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262033712intro1.pdf. [return to text]
2. Ibid. [return to text]
3. J. Engeström, "Why some social network services work and others don't," blog entry, April 13, 2005, http://www.zengestrom.com. See also the extensions in J. Breslin and S. Decker, “The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics," Internet Computing 11, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 2007): 86-90. [return to text]
4. For comments on sustaining the infrastructure via alignment with partners’ priorities and needs, see T.T. Carey and G. Hanley, "Extending the Impact of Open Educational Resources: Lessons Learned from MERLOT," in T. Iiyoshi and V. Kumar, Opening Up Education, 181-196. Available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262033712chap12.pdf. [return to text]
5. For an example of these challenges, see Michael Loverude, "Measuring the effectiveness of research-based curriculum at a university serving a diverse student population," 2003 Physics Education Research Conference (AIP Conference Proceedings, 2004), 7-10. [return to text]
6. Lee Shulman, "Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching," Educational Researcher 15 no. 2 (1986): 4–14. [return to text]
7. Tom Carey and Gerard L. Hanley, "Extending the Impact of Open Educational Resources," 193. [return to text]
8. "MERLOT is a network of sixteen higher education systems and seven leading institutions collaborating on strategic directions in teaching and learning through the exchange, reuse, and adaptation of exemplary learning resources and shared teaching expertise. The MERLOT open repository, www.merlot.org, provides a portal to over 16,000 open educational resources and contains nearly 8,000 contributions of teaching expertise about those resources (these function as open educational resources in their own right). Use of this repository continues to experience dramatic growth: At the start of 2007, the 40,000 unique users per month seeking out shared learning resources represented a 50 percent increase from the previous year. Behind this public face, MERLOT is also a leadership cooperative for faculty communities, sharing teaching knowledge and managing digital resources to enhance learning and student success in higher education. MERLOT has created fifteen discipline communities that peer review the learning materials, as well as expand the shared teaching expertise available for reuse and adaptation. MERLOT programs enable faculty to provide exemplary learning experiences in their content areas through professional and scholarly collaborations with their disciplinary and institutional colleagues” (Carey and Hanley, "Extending the Impact of Open Educational Resources," 183). [return to text]
9.  E.g., http://www.altcexchange.edu.au/. [return to text]
10. E.g., http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/business/ [return to text]
11. E.g., http://www.ltcollaboratory.org/ [return to text]

Appendix: Existing OER Sources
Sites which include individual faculty reflections on their experiences as teachers:

• Peer Review of Teaching Project (University of Nebraska)
• Windows on Learning: Resources for Basic Skills Education (the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)
  

Sites which incorporate scholarly work documenting and demonstrating pedagogical content knowledge within particular disciplines:

• CAUSE (Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education)
• Reviews in PER (Physics Education Research)
  

Sites which are dedicated to sharing resources for developing teaching capability:

• The ELIXR Initiative (MERLOT)
• Lesson Study Project (University of Wisconsin--La Crosse)
• The Carrick Exchange (Australia’s Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching)--one of the first knowledge exchange networks for teaching and learning to fully engage use of Web 2.0 facilities for collaboration