UKOER3 themes and activities
moodle showing UKOER3 themes and areas of activity
We are currently going through UKOER3 project plans and drawing out key themes and areas of activity to map these against our synthesis and evaluation framework.
We use the framework as an iterative tool to support both evaluation activities of projects and synthesis activities of our team. It highlights core areas of inquiry and identifies evaluation questions that projects intend to address. We started with a working pilot phase framework in 2009 which has since been through several iterations. The latest version of the framework was created at the end of phase 2 in November 2011 and links to evidence from projects. We are currently revising this framework to reflect phase 3 activities and questions (coming soon!).
We have listed phase 3 projects and their evaluation questions and themes/areas on a new wiki page and the wordle is made from the terms in the third column of this page – themes/links. UKOER projects may find this wiki page useful to identify other projects to make links with. The funding call for the THEMES projects did identify 4 themes which has obviously shaped some of the focii.
A: Extend OER through collaborations beyond HE
B: Explore OER publishing models
C: Addressing sector challenges
D: Enhancing the student experience
It’s early days for phase 3 but what strikes me so far is that the issue of student created OERs has emerged as a more prominent focus this year. Identified by a few projects in the pilot phase as an area of interest, raising issues around ownership, digital litercaies, and licencing, it failed to attract alot of interest during phase 2 with only a few projects including student content as part of their OERs. I am pleased to see this re-emerge (under the banner of Enhancing the student experience) because I think this area needs investigating more.
Cross -sector partnerships continue to be a major theme and this phase will see several projects taking up the challenge of working with publishers – indeed new OER publishing models are being considered and hopefully developed during this phase. 3rd sector agencies as partners have also emerged with several projects working with charities and the voluntary sector – another area to watch with interest. Some projects plan to work with industry, NHS, skills councils and SMEs, continuing some interesting work that was carried out during phase two with these groups. Projects will continue to work across educational sectors and schools also feature as partners in some projects. We have been working on a briefing paper which highlights issues emerging during phase 2 around open practice across sectors. We expect this phase of activities to inform and expand on this work.
Digital literacies featured strongly during phase 2 and continues to be a focus area for many projects, as do research skills and academic practice, with the OMAC strand particularly focussing on this area. The OMAC (open materials for accredited courses) strand aims to build on the outcomes of phase 2 and focuses on the release of materials linked to the new UK Professional Standards Framework (UK PSF) for staff who teach in higher education.
A key focus of phase 2 was changing teaching practice and we noted a move of emphasis from OERs to open edcuational practices. This is a continued area of focus for projects this year and is likely to raise some interesting debate and discussion.We are currently preparing a briefing paper on open educational practice – so watch this space…
One of the challenges for UKOER project timescales is that they often underestimate the time taken to release the OERs and have little time to find out how they are used by different stakeholders. We may find that projects are able to report more about this (particularly academic use of OER) as some projects are intending to re-use existing OERs. Several projects have included a remit to investigate student use of OERs – another area which should be of significant interest to the community.
So, in summary, I think we are in for a really interesting time during phase three and I’m looking forward to working with the projects as they attempt to answer their evaluation questions. Not least I always look forward to those unanticipated findings that come from taking a few risks and being experimental…
If you have not had the chance to read the findings from phase 2 (we have been a bit tardy in reporting this here – but hope to do a series of blogs focussing on different aspects of this soon) then do check out our Phase 2 Synthesis report. It’s a meaty read but you can dip in and out of the different sections…
UKOER3 startup
The evaluation and sythesis team took part in the UKOER3 startup event in Birmingham on November 14th 2011. The event brought together the 18 projects in UKOER3 with the programme leaders and relevant support groups, including CETIS, JISC Legal, JorumOpen and the E&S team. I (Allison Littlejohn)was representing the E&S team, while the others from E&S ((Helen Beetham, Lou McGill and Isobel Falconer) participated via Twitter.
Our role in UKOER3 is to lead the evaluation of the programme from October 2011-October 2012. We are working with all 18 UKOER projects to identify key messages for the JISC, the HEA and the sector as a whole. We are delighted – and excited – to be leading the evaluation and synthesis of the programme, building on our work in phases 1 and 2 . During UKOER2 (20010/11) we identified key benefits and motivations for academics and institutions to create and release Open Educational Resources – see our UKOER2 final report http://tinyurl.com/bu5lvge which was launched the the UKOER3 startup.
In phase 3 we will evaluate the programme using the synthesis and evaluation framework we developed through phases 1 and 2. The framework has a number of key themes, each with a range of evaluation questions that are asked by project teams as they carry out their individual project evaluations. The data they collect was mapped to the questions in the programme evaluation framework, providing an overview of key issues and trends across the programme. Thus we identified key lessons learnt and outcomes and highlighted significant outputs that demonstrate evidence of this.
Watch this space….
After ‘that session’ at Alt-C
Well the cattle have been rounded up, the settlers have lit their home fires, and the preacher and the gadabout are safely departed to bother someone else. Apart from the comedy value of our session on open country (blogged by David Kernohan at http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/oer-the-cowboy-gospel-altc2011), what were the serious messages from the debate at Alt-C?
Amber Thomas, Helen Beetham, David Kernohan and Dave White at ALT-C 2011
David argued that ‘My contention was that OER was a symptom of a wider systemic issue, which takes in publishing, the idea of the public intellectual, online life, online practice and information as a right.’
David White (in the cowboy hat) offered the insight that the open use/reuse of online content is now so deeply embedded that on the demand side there is little need for the term ‘open’ – though arguably the term ‘educational’ might be more distinctive of the kinds of content being developed by the OER programme in the UK.
Amber as the ‘lady sheriff’ described how open standards (the ‘law’) can facilitate relations in open country but also emphasised that institutions have to continue to deliver learning at a time when existing models of higher education funding are under threat. We should beware snakeoil salesmen bearing the promise that open content can fill the void when teachers are dismissed.
Finally, my own slides (http://www.slideshare.net/hbeetham/open-country-hb) explore some issues emerging from final reports, which no doubt will be expanded on as we dig deeper. It has been exciting to see so many projects not only producing and sharing more resources under the UK OER banner, but reflecting deeply and productively on the wider issues of open education.
Photo: Josie Fraser
OER at Alt-C 2011
There are a number of papers and symposia at this year’s ALT conference that will be interesting to UK OER projects and followers. Links are to the Crowdvine site which requires a conference log-in. Papers may well be mirrored in other locations at a later date.
The Paradox of Openness: the high cost of giving online explores the real costs of online participation and sharing of resources. It asks, among other things, whether content sharing via open platforms is always ‘fair’ and whether academic communities can sustain open practices in times of financial constraint.
Making open educational resources happen comprises three short papers with several presenters from the UK OER programme. They explore designing for openness, supporting openness in institutions, and open content for interprofessional learning.
The World Collaboration session includes discussion of a proposed open learning exchange – not exactly open content, but drawing inspiration from the mutual sharing of content as a model.
Are we in Open Country? is a UK OER symposium with a wild west theme (!) that explores the promise and reality of working with open content. I plan to draw on emergent findings from some of the phase 2 projects, along with my co-presenters, to ask whether some of the wilder promises of the open content movement are relevant to life in present day universities and colleges, and what open practices are most valuable in uncertain times.
Three high profile UK OER projects combine to present Happening Resources, a session that touches on accessibility, OER in clinical education, and the role of the SCORE Fellows in advancing OER research and practice.
Finally, the session on the GLOmaker Tool could be of interest to those designing reusable open content from scratch, and for those concerned about the digital literacy of end-users.
tagcloud for the wiki
The team is curently working on final synthesis for phase 2 and is busy populating the wiki as we go. The final report and outputs will all be made available through it. As it grows I am concerned about people finding stuff in the mass of information. There is a side bar which, hopefully provides some navigation through the content from the different phases. I have added a link to the tags page which is a really useful list of tags and all the pages that have those tags assigned. There is, of course, also a search feature.
I’ve also been trying to find a more visual way of providing access. So I’ve made a clickable tag cloud and put it on the home page. I hope this will encourage people to explore a bit and find things a bit more easily…
This is just a picture of th cloud that will take you to the clickable version…
Update on open content/open practices
A high-octane meeting this week with the folk from the TALL team and their OER Impact Study http://oerblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/. It let me to sketch out the area that I think we are gathering evidence about in the Eval and Synth team, which is a more detailed picture of the two right-hand quadrants in the diagram posted below (features of open content, and aspects of open practice). On the left side are some emerging practices in learning and teaching that could arguably be called ‘open’. OERs are *involved* in these practices, sometimes as signs that they are going on, sometimes as drivers to make them happen, sometimes just in the background. So OER practices are a sub-set of these more open learning and teaching practices and it’s our task in the Eval and Synth team to gather evidence about whether and how the subset of practices promoted by UK OER are supportive of these larger movements. On the right hand side are some features of content that arguably makes it more reusable in an educational context – makes it more likely to partake helpfully in some of the practices on the left. We are familiar from UK OER pilot projects with the challenges and costs of moving content in these directions. However, we need more evidence of whether – and how – these features of open content actually support educational re-use. We have focused a lot on open licensing, which is critical for repurposing, but the focus in this phase is more on reuse and it may be that other features of open educational content are actually more significant here. The ‘E’ may be just as important as the ‘O’.
Printable version OER venn (pdf)
Impact model diagram
This is the current version of our UKOER impact model. We have included a description of this and have identiified emerging issues from phase 2 of the programme in more detail on our wiki https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/40291776/UKOER-Impact-Model
From the literature we know that OER release is influenced by the nature of the resources and the practices around OER creation, release and reuse. Resources release and the practices around them can be considered individually (ie the practices of an individual learner or teacher releasing or reusing resources) or socially (ie the practices of groups or collectives releasing or reusing resources).
The release of OERs and practices around these is situated within the wider educational context of Further and Higher Education. Within this broad context individual and social practices influence the release of different types of OERs, and the release of these resources, in turn, affect the institutionally based practices associated with them. Further, we recognise that these practices and resources exist within a wider societal context in which open practices and resources are evolving rapidly. These aspects of OER release are integrated in the UKOER Impact Model below.
Individual impact (the left hand side of the model) is being explored by other parts of this landscape are being explored by other funded projects, for example the OER Impact Study, led by the TALL group at the University of OxfordOER Impact Study, and Open Resources: Impact on Learners and Educators (ORIOLE), led by the UK’s Open University). Through our evaluation of the whole JISC UKOER programme, we are focusing on examining the right hand side of the model, taking a social focus.
UKOER Impact Model
The team recently prepared a presentation for the programme’s Senior Advisory Committee. Allison Littlejohn presented on behalf of the team.
We took this opportunity to present our new model which attempts to illustrate our current thinking at this stage of phase 2 of the programme. A copy of the prezi is embedded below…
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UK OER phase 2: synthesis and evaluation on Prezi
We have put a more comprehensive page describing our thinking and outcomes from the programme so far on our wiki – https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/40291776/UKOER-Impact-Model. This page brings together some of the thoughts previously shared on this blog.
Understanding the role of OERs in open educational practices
OERs across sectors
The Synthesis and Support team were keen to facilitate a meeting for UKOER phase 2 projects with an FE focus or with FE partners. We wanted to ensure that such a meeting would provide a space for projects to share initial findings, issues and positive approaches at this stage of the programme. The team were also keen to ensure that this might be the start of a broader conversation across the programme about OERs across all sectors – HE, FE, work and independent learning. We feel that it it would be helpful to tease out the specific sectoral challenges and issues as well as identifying synergies and potential linkages across the sectors.
We held the meeting on 12th April as one of the regular online Elluminate meetings and asked projects to offer some slides highlighting the following:
- three challenges that are specific to FE
- three things that seem to work in FE
- take-home message for other projects working with FE
Four project teams offered slides and these stimulated some great discussion highlighting both differences and similarities between HE and FE focussed projects. We have created a page on the OER Infokit which draws together the slides and resulting blog posts. This page will hopefully be a place we can keep the conversation alive. We were pleased to have particpation from every strand and the audience also included projects from the HE sector who revealed an openess to learning from the FE sector. We also invited Chris Kelland from the Learning Skills Improvement Service who highlighted the Excellence Gateway, which some HE based projects had been unaware of. The session proved to be an excellent start to an ongoing conversation and seemed to be very timely, as projects have enough experience to understand the issues and could also share their approaches taken so far.
We have produced a list of bullet points as a summary of the session on the OER Infokit. here are some of the points that I personally found very interesting:
- The issue of professional identity – and the challenges for staff caught between two cultures with the increasing HE in FE provision. This is clearly not just an OER related issue but one for the sector in general, and it also seems to be an opportunity to consider the differences and synergies. I think there would be value in investigating this more. The CSAP Open Cascade Project (one of those that presented) have since written a very interesting blog post about power relationships which takes it beyond the discussions we had during the session – well worth a read.
- Another interesting blog post from the Learning from WOeRK project (focussing on professional development in the workplace) illustrates the openness to learn from the HE in FE experience. The synergies in relation to workplace and employer involvement was very apparent and deserves more consideration as projects produce guidance and support materials, as well as OERs. Involvement of employers was identified as an academic imperative. I particularly liked this quote from the Educational Development Open Resources (EDOR) project.
“There is considerable experience in HE in FE- it has grown up and a signature Pedagogy is emerging that supports curricula that involves employers as academic imperatives and is delivered increasingly through a blended and/or WBL format”
- The emphasis on teaching and student satisfaction is definately an area that I think HE could learn from, as well as the FE experience of providing for a wide range of ‘non-traditional’ learners – such as work-based learners, or students who find it challenging to access post 16 education.
- Management culture in FE was identified as a possible challenge in that it could be inflexible, but it also emerged as a strength if senior management were very supportive of OER initiatives
- Staff and student OER literacies were discussed and clearly cross all sectoral boundaries – but of particular interest is the notion of students as producers of content. This was investigated to some extent in the pilot phase of the programme but the SPACE project (also one of the presenting projects) based at Doncaster College is doing this with FE students – so definately one to watch.
This is already a very long post so I’ll leave space for my colleagues to add their thoughts…
I very much hope to keep the conversation alive!