Falling 4 OER

This presentation is a collation of learning from class in partnership with a project I am working on called Aotearoa Kai Journey. This is an informal OER platform that is the infrastructure we hope to support the redesign of the Aotearoa, New Zealand food system. It is a collection of experiential learning, classroom learning, and the gaps I have found in the current Open Education Resources.


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Video Script

Introduction Slide

Kia ora and Tālofa, Welcome to my journey to falling for Open Ed, and hopefully, by the end of this presentation, you'll have fallen for it too.

Slide 1

To start my journey I had to understand what it truly means to be open. When I started, I thought it was free and accessible and it is both of those things, but it's more than that. And the 5Rs of OER help us understand what open educational resources truly are; They are retained or reused or revised or remixed or redistributed or it could be some or all of them.

Slide 2

Throughout this journey, I learned by asking questions. In regards to OER I thought, what about equity, inclusion, underrepresented voices, how indigenous knowledge relates to OER and how to apply learnings to practice, how informal OER differs from OER in educational institutions, the infrastructure that is required to create OER? How can I use my questions as research opportunities.

Slide 3

I had the opportunity to learn through practice this semester by building my own informal OER platform called the Aotearoa Kai Journey that is created for food systems change. This learning was integral to my experience and understanding OER looks like in real life. I gained an understanding of how it fits into the sector that I belong to which is community development and systems change. It was an amazing experience.

Slide 4

The platform was a space I got to apply my class learnings. I was able to learn from my mistakes and discuss with people about those mistakes and help to overcome them. But it helped me to really think like an instructional designer and see the gaps in the content and the design. But it also helped me to understand how to collectively develop OER.

Slide 5

One of the things that I learned during the semester was an understanding that it is all about the people. What is impactful for some communities is not impactful for all, especially indigenous communities. I created a remixed version of the COUP framework using a Pasifika analogy and what I know is important to my community.

Slide 6

I got to put the learning of people to practice by engaging with my community and building the platform. I had the opportunity to understand if the community really wants OER and I recommend that you ask communities that question. We asked whether they were ready for OER and also asked to understand their needs, wants, and aspirations for their community of learners.

Slide 7

This is a collective journey, and that's why I called this slide the village, right. We work on OER together, and I think it's important to think of it like that and develop ways we can all contribute. This is just one idea which is developing how-tos. But also just sharing and contributing and how important that is to growing sectors.

Slide 8

As we put those collective and equitable learnings to practice, we ensured that the underrepresented voices were heard, that we centered ourselves in indigenous ways of knowing as well as guided by indigenous wisdom. We also ensured that we treated cultural contributions as skills and knowledge and invest money into them.

Slide 9

During the process of designing and also my learnings from my semester, a question came up how can we guard cultural knowledge? One thing that was clear is we need to be guardians, we need to be kaitiaki, as they say in Māori. I think in order to do that, we need to protect it through licensing, ethical guidelines, understanding the vulnerabilities of communities, and the sacredness of the knowledge that we are given.

Slide 10

So what I learned this semester, is that OER works in my settings of community development and it can help support systems change. But also it's flexible and can be adapted easily, which is very important in the social sector. It allows for all contributors, not just academics. So we can learn from people at the grassroots and the private sector, in the non-profit sector as well as in government. So all in all OER is awesome.

Theresa P. Holmes

Brigham Young University & The Good Fale

Theresa Holmes is a Pasifika woman from Aotearoa. She is an interdisciplinary social impact designer, social entrepreneur, and graduate student of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University. Her research is focused on indigenous frameworks to guide the creation of online learning materials and designing OER to share cultural knowledge. Theresa co-founded The Good Fale, a social enterprise working on redesigning the food system in Aotearoa. Her work and research are contributing to the development of an informal OER platform aiming to increase food security and food sovereignty in Aotearoa.

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