Evaluation buddy meeting between REACTOR, Opening up a Future for Business and CORE-SET
One of the approaches that we have adopted to support projects with their evaluation activities is to establish pair/teams of evaluation buddies.
An evaluation buddy is basically another project who can:
- check that evaluation plans are sensible, credible, valid, do-able, relevant to programme aims
- provide peer review of content, interfaces, and other practical outputs from the projects
- sharing ideas, experiences and interim outcomes of evaluation
- swaping time and expertise, e.g. analyse data for one another (extra objectivity
- sharing resources e.g. external consultants buddy up for e.g. workshops, critical moments (writing up etc)
- act as a sounding board and be a neutral ear to articulate findings, thougts and any concerns about evaluation outcomes.
It is a support mechanism that can develop into long term relationships for future OER work. Of course it does not preclude the development of other useful relationships across projects. We describe a bit more about this approach in the toolkit.
We held the first of a series of meetings with these pairs/groups this week. This meeting included three projects REACTOR, Opening up a Future for Business and CORE-SET. These projects have several areas of commonality which we explored in the meeting.
Each project gave a brief overview of their project and the evaluation questions/issues that thay were looking at.
CORE-SET
Led by University of Liverpool, this project builds on the Pilot Phase project CORE-Materials and expands the remit to various stakeholders outside HE (including private companies and 3rd sector agencies). They see the value of adopting a baselining approach which offers a more systematic approach to evidence gathering. They have developed an instrument to gather current understanding and practice of their stakeholders and will apply that at various stages throughout the project to evidence change. This is likely to reveal some interesting information about readiness of other sectors to engage with OER and highlight perceived barriers and enablers.
REACTOR
Led by Doncaster College this project builds on the UKOER phase 2 project SPACE and aims to develop 3D interactive resources for environmental technology which will be made available on web from project website, but also to be downloadable onto mobile devices. Also focussing on a range of sectors outside HE this project has also invested significant energy into engaging very different groups of stakeholders (including sector skills councils, private companies, public sector, as well as HE in FE) Early research to identify what teachers and students within these curriculum areas want or need has been supported by the wider networks of these agencies. They also bring different resources to input to the OERs and offer opportunities to make sure they reflect the curriculum needs of many stakeholders.
Opening up a Future for Business
Led by Southampton Solent University this project has an FE & 6th form college audience as it aims to collate and produce an OER to enable 16-19 year olds, thinking about their future, to move forward with confidence in to studying Business and Management topics in Higher Education. The project emphasised the need to reconceptualise their approach as the project has progressed. By examining how FE teachers already use OERs they discovered several institutional barriers such as blocking of some sites, to very protective and risk averse management of access to services on the web. Copyright restrictions on materials produced by other educational institutions have affected what teachers use and what can be adapted as OErs. The project is looking at how openness spreads within institutions. All of these issues are impacting on platform choice for their disaggregable book – with Moodle emerging as a strong choice as many of their stakeholder institutions use this VLE.
Common themes and strands
The following areas/linkages were noted as significant for this group of projects and we anticipate interesting lessons emerging around these:
- Linking with students as important stakeholder group
- Students for evaluating and testing
- Students as project employees
- Student-generated content
- Subject area linkages- engineering, environmental technologies, business
- Linking with a wide range on non HE stakeholders – not just educators and students in these organisations (lessons around stakeholder engagement, practice change, challenges/enablers)
- Choice of Platforms (links to different stakeholder requirements, constraints and influence)
Isobel and I found this meeting really valuable and the projects also highlighted the usefulness of this approach to enable sharing of similar evaluation instruments, sharing processes (not just evaluation related), talking through issues and reflecting on emerging lessons at regular intervals, and in the longer term possibly in presenting evaluation outcomes to a wider audience. We also discussed the evaluation toolkit and how this can help with reflection on lessons learned and preparing for reporting.
This buddy team did note the value of meeting as they prepare their Interim reports and are planning another meeting in June. We will meet again as projects prepare for their final reports too.
Evaluation toolkit
We are delighted to launch our new Evaluation Tookit which aims to benefit UKOER projects by providing a structured way to collate their findings and observations and can also be used in the reporting process. It also provided lots of information, advice, examples and videos, on evaluation, sources of evidence, and buddying. To help projects get the most out of the toolkit, we have produced a guide.
- UKOER Evaluation toolkit on the wiki
The interactive element of the toolkit provides two alternative routes into the structure – through the programme themes, or through key evaluation focus areas. Both routes utilise the same underlying mechanism to record findings, observations and evidence – a series of google forms and spreadsheets – but the higher level user interface is very different.
- The key focus area route, via links on dedicated wiki pages, is useful for those familiar with our evaluation framework. Each focus area has an individual wiki page which provides a description of that area and some specific issues and aspects that the programme is investigating.
- The programme themes route offers a more visual approach via an interactive mind map (using spicynodes) where you can explore the themes of the UKOER3 programme and drill down to find the specific issues and aspects that relate to the themes you are investigating. We have produced a quide to using the spicynodes maps.
Whichever route projects choose, they can opt to receive an email record of their entries for future reference and report writing.
As projects approach writing their interim reports, we hope this provides an opportunity to reflect on, and perhaps reframe, the evaluation questions they started with, in the light of experiences to date, as it becomes clearer where their valuable contributions lie.
We welcome feedback on the toolkit, and expect to revise and improve it in the light of comments.
Open educational practices – what do we mean?
To conclude our posts for open education week, I’ve been asked to introduce our new briefing paper on open educational practices.
I think we’ve been talking about open practices since the pilot phase of UK OER – you can find it in some of our recommendations. When we set out, I for one had the idea of a perfectly formed OER as openly licensed, self-contained, professionally tagged with educational metadata, and probably hosted in an open repository. Very quickly it was clear that open release would be messier and more interesting than that. OERs were caught up in a host of other emerging practices, such as guiding students to freely available content (with open licensing being only one way of judging value), or using third party services to support students outside of institutional learning environments. The people who were interested in making open content had other open agendas too, some of them very radical.
One problem with tracing the links between open practices is that they tend to be ‘owned’ by different agencies. Even within JISC there are fascinating developments in open education at large, in open access publishing, and in open research data management, that I am only just finding out about. Can we build better connections? The Curriculum Delivery programme has reported on new pedagogical models in which open content makes good sense, while the Curriculum Design programme aims to make design teams more effective and collaborative – couldn’t high quality OERs be of some help here??
Finally, I’m interested in how ‘open’ embodies a different set of values for different people. Other members of the team have pointed out to me that open learning is not the same beast as open education. And our work with earlier phases of the programme confirmed that different stakeholders have very different perceptions of benefit and risk. It’s important to acknowledge the complexity of the open landscape and I hope our new briefing sheds a little light. Do also head over to where Amber Thomas has collated some visualisations of the wider open education landscape. And please comment!
TEPL-SIG webinar
On 2st February 2012 isobel Falconer and I led a webinar for the TEPL-SIG (Technology Enhanced Professional Learning – Special Interest Group) on Open Practices which aimed to encourage participants to consider their own practices. We considered open educational practice (OEP) but also touched on issues around wider open practices with a focus on how this might differ for people in different stakeholder roles (learner, teacher, employer -or even a mix of these). We were keen to take a broad view to emphasise that open practice in one aspect of your life can lead to or influence openness in other areas. The level of participation was excellent and I left hoping for an opportunity to take this further as we only had time to touch on a few issues.
The group included people from around the world with several different roles and levels of experience with OER or OEP. It was nice to have some of the UKOER project team members there as we were drawing on their work and the work of the UKOER programme to illustrate our discussions. We made a wiki page for participants to refer to prior to the session with specific reference to the new briefing paper on open practice across sectors. below are the slides that we used for the session.
Before talking about UKOER and findings we asked particpants a series of questions which really got the discussion flowing (see slides 2 and 3). We were basically asking if open practice is a new concept or if our existing practices are just changing – not rocket science to be sure but a useful way to get participants to reflect on their own practices and how these are impacted by organisational cultures. As expected we did have attendees from professional contexts where some organisational knowledge was seen as a commodity that shouldn’t be shared. We discussed issues around degrees of openness where, in some contexts, there were valid reasons for maintaining some restricted access – a good example of this being around patient data in the NHS.
Isobel offered some insights from the UKOER programme which led to discussion around the motivations for open sharing and the benefits in different contexts. We finished with by considering the challenges and barriers for different sectors.
What is always frustrating at events like this where you have a very fast moving text chat is that people say something really interesting and then chat moves on and you don’t have time to really delve into a particular aspect. The conversation touched on areas such as:
- inequalities and whether OER adds to the rich/poor divide or actually helps to challenge it
- issues around use – the differences between learner/teacher use and how the means of production impacts on quality and size of OER/OCW
- organisational showcasing
- notion of institutions paying ‘lip service’ to the principle of being ‘open’ online but not necessarily considering the value of this in a local community context
- sustainability and embedding of tools to support open processes (and challenge of integrating these into existing practice)
- issues around confidence of individual teachers
- fears of litigation
- questions about why we are even talking about this – are some initiatives already making our discussions obsolete (Coursera, Udactity, MITx)
- how current initiativess around assessment and accreditation are going to impact on things
One of the people attending suggested that we hold the webinar again during open education week which has not been possible – but we hope publishing this post will at least provide some useful information to support the activities during the week and you can watch the recording of the session too. we would be delighted if you would like to continue the conversations we started here in the comments section too.
UKOER phase 2
Synthesis activities for the first two phases of the HE Academy/JISC UKOER Programme have included cultural and institutional issues across a number of sectors. The Evaluation and Synthesis team’s final report on phase 2 synthesises evidence and outputs under five main headings:
- Practice change
- Development and Release Issues
- Cultural Considerations
- Institutional Issues
- Impacts and Benefits
and includes recommendations to the funders and to the stakeholders represented in the various strands of the programme. Further, detailed findings from each component strand of the programme addressed how different communities and cultures are progressing towards openness in their educational practice and in their management and use of educational resources:
- Release – projects undertaking release of new or repurposed OERs in key subject areas
- Open Materials for Accredited Courses (OMAC) – projects releasing materials linked to the national professional standards for staff who teach in higher education
- Cascade – projects cascading and embedding their own good practice in OER release to other contexts
- Collections – projects using a range of technologies to collate existing OER in thematic collections
On practice change, evidence is accumulating that teachers do share content informally, but do not necessarily consider IPR, or share resources openly. Thus they are engaging in some of the practices associated with OER, but they do not necessarily recognise OER terminology, and in asking about use/reuse of OER we may be asking the wrong questions. This finding has implications for development and release, where cascade strand projects noted that choice of search engine affected which resources were found and used, while collections projects found that their users expected searches to be “google-like” in their ease of use, personalisation, and production of relevant results. Users expressed frustration with the search functionality of many OER repositories. They were also disappointed in the scarcity of relevant OERs, a finding echoed by the release strand PORSCHE project. Most of the collections projects decided to include “grey” or “non” OERs to get round this problem – while clearly labelling them so that their non-licensed status was clear.
Thus a key question that is emerging as important to OER practice is what difference does it make to practices of development/use/reuse and sharing, that the resources are “open”?
Experience during this phase confirmed that OER practice cannot be divorced from other open practices.
In some disciplines, sharing practice through a range of open technologies has emerged as important as sharing resources, and is having an impact on the way subjects are being studied and taught. Considerations of OER use cannot be divorced from these wider changes to disciplinary knowledge practices. Social science subjects, for example, are being changed in radical ways by the availability of public social and research data online as well as the rise of new social/digital practices.
Findings from this phase confirm those from the phase 1 institutional strand, that there are different cultures of openness at different educational institutions. This is not as simple as a single dimension from closed to open: rather there are many different ways in which institutions can support open educational practices.
For all stakeholders, then, a key question is, why engage in open practices? But equally, what is it about a practice that makes it open?
Our final report on phase 2 offers no simple answers, but lots of evidence to support you in exploring these issues.
open practices across sectors: briefing paper
The HE Academy/JISC UKOER Programme has encouraged cross-sector approaches to OER development, and is increasingly focussing on broader issues around open educational practices (OEP). Synthesis activities for the first two phases of activity have included cultural and institutional issues across a number of sectors. Activities to date include a UKOER phase 2 programme webinar on OERs across sectors , a presentation at the JISC Innovating eLearning Online Conference in November 2011 – Open practice across sectors and a recent TELP-SIG webinar on open practices. It is anticipated that phase three activities will continue to address cross-sector issues and identify good practice for the wider community. It has become clear that a significant benefit of engaging with the concepts and challenges of OEP and OER is in the way it encourages cross sector understanding, collaboration and outcomes.
same horizon by lou mcgill cc-by-sa
The UKOER Phase 2 Synthesis report considered practice change in detail:
“Collaborative practice has emerged as important during this funding phase. Cross disciplinary approaches are beginning to have an impact at an institutional level and reveal a new benefit of open content – that it is easily shared and co-constructed across existing boundaries. Engaging with partners outside the academic sector has been challenging but has encouraged new partnerships, trust and levels of understanding. Several projects comment that working across boundaries to develop project outcomes (business/community/academy, staff/consultants, students/teachers) has been one of the most radical aspect of their experience and has the potential to change practice more widely.”
We invite you to read one of our new briefing papers which looks at the various motivations for different stakeholders across sectors in engaging with OEP and OER and it also identifies some synergies and differences between HE and HE in FE, NHS and employers.
One of the core questions around open educational practices seems to be around the terminology:
Recognising new or changing practice as ‘open’ or OEP has added to the complexity in the field as it needs defining and explaining – is existing practice becoming more open or does it require people to change their practice? During the JISC online conference discussions many people argued that some people have been engaged in open practice (and even producing OERs) for many years but do not use this terminology to describe it. Whilst some may prefer not to use new terminology, it can be useful to engage people with the concepts and generate institutional-wide understanding that can be fed into strategy, policy and practice. It can also be valuable to situate open practices as an extension of existing practices, which may generate less anxiety or resistence and establishing OEP as a credible and valid form of scholarship has been identified by projects as one way of normalising these practices.
What are your views on this? Are you already an open practioner?
Grand Challenge in Open Learning
During Open Education Week, the JISC UKOER evaluation and synthesis team, Lou McGill, Isobel Falconer, Helen Beetham and I, are collecting together ideas for a Grand Challenge in the areas of Open Education or Open Learning. This is following on from my work with the EU-funded STELLAR Network for Excellence in TEL in developing ‘Grand Challenges’.
A Grand Challenge is about taking the areas of Open Education and/or Open Learning to a new level. It’s about focusing global attention on a specific problem – a problem that is important but has not been solved. Through a Grand Challenge, we identify a problem, link people and disciplines to build new concepts and innovative solutions. Each Grand Challenge should be defined by a problem statement, rather than a solution, which is stated simply, measurable and time bound.
Identifying how realistic and desirable a Grand Challenges might be is complex. Every Grand Challenge brings together ideas and concepts from different disciplines to help solve some of the biggest problems associated with Open Education and Open Learning. The likely impact of each on human learning is governed by a complex interplay of factors including:
Contextualisation – Groups of people directly involved with each Grand Challenge will bring to the project their practices, cultures and values, grounding emerging ideas and solutions in known ways of learning and working. A high degree of contextualization embeds the research and outputs within specific settings, reducing the risk of solutions not being taken up. Conversely, a high degree of contexualisation makes the abstraction and diffusion of concepts to other settings more complex.
Interdiciplinarity – Inclusion of a wide range of disciplinary groups within a Grand Challenge enriches the outputs and solutions generated through the project. At the same time, the knowledge generated through the project is likely to be more abstract and less easy to apply directly to solutions across a range of different contexts. Consequently, projects with a greater the number of disciplines tend to be more complex and incur a higher the risk that the outputs will not be adopted widely.
Timescale – The timeframe for the impact of concepts and solution on human learning is proportional to the complexity of the Grand Challenge. Complex, interdisciplinary projects will require a longer timeframe for the adoption of solutions, as knowledge is diffused across and interpreted by different stakeholder groups.
Let me know your ideas for a Grand Challenge in Open Education or Open Learning by writing a short problem statement. Outline the context, disciplines required to seek solutions, timescale and measures (ie how we will know the Grand Challenges has been completed).
For example:
By 2022 learners will be able to use and contribute to all knowledge from publicly funded projects. The project will include researchers from information, organisational, social and learning sciences, computer and material scientists as well as research funding bosdies, schools, colleges, universities, health services, museums, NGOs, legal entities and government agencies. By 2012 all public projects will be asked to identify how learners can have access to and can contribute to the project knowledge prior as a condition of a funding agreement.
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