SP6: Co-creation of OER in Colombia

Collaborative co-creation of OER by teachers and teacher educators in Colombia

Project overview
Project outputs

General objective: The research aims to examine whether and how a bottom-up approach can support effective OER models where participants collaboratively and actively co-create contextual resources.

Specific objectives:

  1. To study how a collaborative and local OER model can be embedded within the ecosystem of a teacher community in Colombia.
  2. To understand how a model of “adaptation-curation-creation” of OER can contribute to effective use of OER for teacher development.

Primary research question: Whether and how does a contextual, bottom-up approach, in which teachers collaboratively and actively co-create resources, support the adoption of OER in Colombian schools?

 

Subsidiary research questions:

  • What kind of processes would support a community of teachers in actively engaging with the creation and adaptation of a contextual and collaborative OER model?
  • What enabling conditions would encourage wider adoption by peers of contextually created resources within the community?
  • What new skills needed among teachers and teacher educators to adopt a new learning culture?
  • How would local needs and contexts (local language, local culture, social issues, geographies, ecologies, needs, aspirations, priorities, etc.) impact upon the universal (mostly defined through normative systems of the Global North) versus local notions of “meaningfulness/quality” of OER?
  • How would institutional and systemic factors interact with and influence the building of such a participatory OER model within in the government/public system?

 

Overview

The “Collaborative Co-Creation of Open Educational Resources by Teachers and Teacher Educators in Colombia” project (coKREA) used a Participatory Action Research methodology to study whether and how a contextual, bottom-up approach in which teachers collaboratively co-create resources, supports the adoption of OER in schools in Colombia. The research project was initiated with 48 teachers and 11 teacher educators in 11 schools in four states of South-West Colombia (one in Risaralda, two in Valle del Cauca, seven in Cauca, and one in Putumayo); 6 schools and 22 teachers managed to create 16 OER and actively participate in the study.

The research process was comprised of four main stages:

Stage 0: Call for participation and establishment of teacher teams.

Stage 1: Development of seven virtual seminars, and a workshop with teacher educators in the city of Popayán, Colombia, aimed at providing an introduction to OER for the the adoption, curation and development of these type of resources within educational practices, the objective of the study, pedagogical approaches, Creative Commons licensing, and Free and Open Source Software.

Stage 2: Identification, along with the teachers, of the educational problems related to their pedagogical practices through which they could adopt, curate and create OER collaboratively and configure OEP with each group of teachers.

Stage 3: Collection of information, with teachers, about their own OER-related activities from the beginning and analysis thereof in light of the study’s sub-questions. This stage occurred alongside each of the other stages and including meetings at the end to analyse and determine the conclusions obtained throughout the investigation.

Addressing this research through a Participatory Action Research approach allowed teachers to identify possibilities of OER in their own educational practices, as well as the conditions required for their adoption, based on collective thinking processes immersed in their own realities. Utilising Grounded Theory as a data analysis approach provided a series of procedures and techniques for analysing unstructured information, enabling the extraction of elements to understand and act on the social realities of research interest.

 

Project outputs
Sáenz, M. P., Pino, U. H. and Hernandez, Y. M. (2015). From copyright restriction to the possibilities of using CC licences in K12 education in Colombia: Preliminary findings of the coKREA project. Presentation at OEC Global Conference 2015, Banff, Canada, April 2015.

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