Openness and Flexibility: Growing a Learning Design Mindset in Malawi’s Teacher Training Lecturers

Presenter: Isabel Tarling

Integrating educational technologies in low-bandwidth, low-connectivity contexts across Africa poses unique challenges to educators and provides a rich testbed for innovation. The Malawian Primary Teacher Education curriculum has recently been redesigned, to introduce a inquiry-based curriculum that emphasises learner-centredness.

In order to support lecturers in the acquisition of the skills and knowledge necessary to facilitate such learning, a short course was designed for Malawi’s 8 Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) and equipment was received (tablet computers and data) funded by the German government. The aim of this course was multilayered: beyond training lecturers to use these devices in their teaching practice, it was important to support them in their journey from a traditional, teacher-centred approach to a learner-centred approach that would align to the re-designed outcomes-based national curriculum. A co-design thinking methodology informed the course design, development and implementation process.

Stakeholders from the various TTCs participated in initial co-design workshops to develop a persona and identify/refine the design challenges, after which the course design was developed through various iterations of reflection and redesign with an initial cohort of 40 participants. The course designers built it Moodle as an OER (drawing from a variety of OERs( and presented virtually from South Africa to Malawi during July and August 2020 using BigBlueButton, an open source video conferencing tool. The initial course participants were pre-selected by their as technology champions with the aim to train them so that they could then facilitate further iterations of the course for colleagues at the TTCs.

The course was offered as a hybrid model, lecturers attended a 3-day webinar-delivered workshop using their phones and tablets, followed by a 4-week self-directed online learning phase, and a 4-day closing webinar-delivered workshop. This allowed participants to move between highly facilitated, synchronous collaborative learning design spaces and self-regulated asynchronous learning experiences. Using the Teacher Change Frame (TCF) (Tarling and Ng’ambi, 2016) participants could plan their own learning journey based on their individual needs and aspirations. The Integrating Technology in Teaching and Learning (ITTL) course, emphasises the need for home-grown innovation to address contextual challenges in teaching, learning and assessment.

Learning Outcomes:

• Describe the course-design process to develop an OER virtually from South Africa for Malawian lecturers
• Explore the innovation process to solve contextual challenges at a distance that impact how participants accessed learning in low-bandwidth, low connectivity contexts.
• Examine the application of a design-thinking methodology in an online, open course design process and analyze how this process equipped local actors with design-thinking tools to develop solutions within their own contexts.

Reimagining PreK-12 OER Development through Teacher Education Programs

Presenters: Stacy Katz, Jennifer Van Allen

Open Educational Resources (OER) have taken higher education by storm because they provide students greater access to course materials and instructors greater instructional flexibility. Yet, OER creation and use have been quite limited in prekindergarten through high school (PreK-12) educational contexts. A study of K-12 educators in the United States found that only 5% of those surveyed utilized OER, with only 31% indicating they had an awareness of OER (Seaman & Seaman, 2020). Yet, K-12 educators overwhelmingly rated OER curriculum as high quality and effective at encouraging deeper learning. It is clear that more work is needed to increase awareness of OER in PreK-12 education and increase the breadth of materials available.

Teacher education programs provide a unique opportunity to not only increase awareness of OER, but also develop open materials as part of the learning process. This session will share the results of a study in which nine graduate-level teacher education candidates participated in a renewable assignment as part of a course. Based on an open pedagogy approach, a renewable assignment is one in which the artifact produced has value to others beyond the course, leverages the permissions of OER, and is made available publicly. In this study, the candidates produced an open resource for teaching and learning by creating, adapting, or remixing existing OER and were invited to submit their finished artifact to OER Commons (http://oercommons.org). Utilizing a convergent mixed methods research design (Creswell & Creswell, 2018), we collected quantitative and qualitative data through a survey, interviews, and artifacts to explore the decisions and perspectives of the teacher education candidates as they engaged in OER development. Results showed that the majority of candidates (67%) created a new resource; yet, only a few (33%) decided to share their resources openly. The teacher education candidates largely viewed the renewable assignment design as a valuable learning experience. While candidates’ reported increased awareness and understanding of OER and demonstrated positive beliefs about the value and effectiveness of OER, their self-efficacy stymied their willingness to share their work openly.

We aim to share valuable insights, challenges, and implications from our research for engaging teacher education candidates in PreK-12 OER development by reimagining coursework and assignments.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will consider key findings and insights about how to prepare primary and secondary educators to use and design OER through teacher education coursework.
• Participants will learn about a model for integrating renewable assignments within teacher education coursework.
• Participants will discuss implications for and challenges of developing PreK-12 OER in teacher education coursework and assignments.