Marcela Morales  0:00  
I was telling you Werner, because we tried to reach an international audience, if you would mind me asking you a few questions in English, so we can do a summary of this interview, if we can, is that okay? 

Werner Westermann  0:15  
If you do not mind my rusty English, it's okay.

Alan Levine  0:20  
I say it's for the Spanish impaired!

Marcela Morales  0:25  
We can do it just in three basic questions. And just like a summary of what we just talked about in Spanish in this interview. So question number one, how can you briefly explain the offline OER and the reusability paradox? And what does that mean, in the Latin American context, in particular, in Chile? 

Werner Westermann  0:44  
Well, "Offline OER and the Reusability Paradox" is the title of a recent blog post I published just last week, so everybody's invited to, to take a look at it. And it's a reflection after the work that we have done aligning curricular collections of OER, specifically in  mathematics. So we'll have built this collections of offline OER, understanding that in many countries,  especially my country, have major challenges around connectivity, that's impairing that children can, you know get access to connected learning as the setting in this pandemia has brought us, So in that work, trying to align to our Chilean curriculum, different types of OER has been a very interesting process. And  I kind of brought back this idea to revisit this idea of the reusability paradox. 

The reusability paradox, it's a concept from David Wiley. And he alerted this, when open Ed was just, it was just in its infancy. In 2002. David Wiley alerted about this paradox,  which basically confronted a trade off between the granularity or the modularization of resources against the integration. And you have different kinds of tradeoffs. If you wanted to have high impact in learning, you needed to be very granular. But if you were very granular, you couldn't scale because the possibility of reusing that same resource for another setting, you will not have the same impact. So David Wiley has always said that this paradox could be overcomed by openness. But then only I thought, they know that only took care of one side of the tradeoff, which was related to the utilization granularity, because, you know, any resource that can be adapted, because of an open license can be impactful for another type of setting. But what happens with with integration, especially what we need to do now is not to create these collections, so we can give access to children that do not have connectivity to learning opportunities. And I think not only do we need open licenses, so we can overcome this paradox, we also need powerful tools, so we can efficiently organize, distribute the delivery.

And I think Kolibri kind of brings that back. So I think if you complement an open licensing framework, with very powerful tools, they can help you organize, distribute, and delivery of education, where when we can be very impactful in learning while we're building these big solutions of integrated resources. So it's a way to overcome this paradox. 

Marcela Morales  4:33  
Absolutely. 

Werner Westermann  4:34  
I'm very curious what David what he's gonna say about this. 

Marcela Morales  4:32  
That brings me back to the to the work that you guys are doing in Chile, like trying to overcome this paradox and also provide offline OER  to remote communities. Could you talk to us a little bit about that.

Werner Westermann  4:59  
When we talk about curriculum alignment of OER or any type of resources, basically what we're trying to do is to match a digital educational resource with the learning objectives, or the learning outcomes that normally are prescribed in curricular development. So that's been our task not just to create this collections... to deal with this objective learning objective, you have this set of resources that will help you achieve that learning objective. That's basically what we're have been doing. So that has meant for us to revise collections like Khan Academy, PHET, CK 12 and other resources that are in Kolibri. So we can create this channel saying, hey, this objective you can, you can uptake it through these resources. So we've been very impacted by how quickly you can really build very big solutions. So I think the potential is not just what we have done, which is basically organize, you know, resources related to it. 

But actually, you can build any type of curriculum and create these big solutions very efficiently. And very fast, I think. Especially when you think about how curriculums are made, you know, traditionally curriculums, it was like a very long process, where you, I'm talking about process that lasted decades. And actually we saw that in Hondorus because we have, we've also been working with Hondorus. For example, in Hondorus you had the curricular basis were published in 2004. Then in 2008, you have like the study programs for each subject. And then, three years later, you had the exercises. And then four years later, after that, you had the textbooks. And then you had some standards that were made. So we have to look at 25 years of development. Now we have tools that can really create big collections made efficiently. And so not only can you build the curriculum, you have the possibility to build a curriculum on math or science. You can think about whatever you need to teach. So you could think about really building fast a curriculum for 21st century skills, or if we want a STEM curriculum. I think the potential, especially in this moment, where we're redefining education, we're we're trying to re-conceptualize what education is, asking ourselves, what should people learn, and how they should learn. I think these tools in especially in an open framework, can really disrupt and be a revolution for curriculum development. 

Marcela Morales  8:36  
I think it's amazing the work that you guys are doing exactly because of what you say. So thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai