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!
Interim programme meeting evaluation session
Helen Beetham attended the HE Academy/JISC Phase 2 Programme interim meeting on 19th Jan 2011 and led some sessions on evaluation with the projects. Her presentation is available here.
Please let us know if you are a project and have any questions emerging as a result of the activities and discussions.
Reflections
Reflections from the HE Academy/JISC OER Phase 2 programme interim meeting held on Wednesday19th Jan 2011. Quite long but we would appreciate your thoughts too, whether you were at the meeting or not.
Financial constraints mean institutions are less willing to invest in learning and teaching innovation. However, once the political paroxysms are over, the new funding regime might mean that learning and teaching agendas such as OER will have a new relevance. In non-elite institutions it will be necessary to demonstrate that the university experience is worth the money., and that it is distinctively different from the experience at comparable universities. What benefit models might be convincing in this climate, especially in terms of differentiation around the student experience?
In the short term, with threatened mergers etc, visibility and reputation enhancement may become the key drivers of OER release. OERs project the institution’s values to the world, and iTuneU in particular is an important marketing tool. However, there are a lot of institutions where the only OERs that are visible to the outside world are informational or marketing in focus. Is this sustainable in learning and teaching terms? Focus on learning and teaching production is very different from focus on institutional reputation and there may be polarisation of these two agendas in the coming months and years.
Course marketisation may be a link between the two. If every course has an OER profile in order to give students positive choices about their learning, then both strategies come into play. At present none of the institutions represented in the strand have a policy of tasters/trailers for all courses, but there is a move towards this view. They give potential students a view of the kind of experience they can expect, they raise the profile of the module, and they can be particularly powerful if they showcase work by students themselves.
Reward and recognition for teaching and learning are key. So is it about embedding OER into formal processes e.g. quality, course approval, or raising the visibility and status of individuals involved in OER, or embedding into high level policies (teaching and learning, marketing, content management, to name just a few)… or all of these? What works best?
How students are engaging with OERs may be a different issue from how staff are: embedding into the student experience of learning is not the same set of strategies to embedding into the curriculum. So while staff recognition and reward is probably key, student motivation is much more about quality and relevance of the resources.
It is possible that more insecurity in academic employment might actually make OER release more attractive as a way of enhancing personal reputation and profile. Weaker affiliation with an institution → ‘public’ scholarship as a career path. Academic blogs, rich media papers, open research data, pre-publication versions, and personal content legacies are all becoming part of the apparatus of scholarship and professionalism in academia. OERs are part of the picture of borderless institutions on the one hand, and public scholars on the other.
We can expect more conflicts between academic ways of managing knowledge and the opportunities presented by world-wide web – OERs, iTunesU and marketing depts are places where some of these conflicts are being played out. The ‘borderless university‘ is another way of expressing these tensions.
Defining ‘open‘. For JISC open = openly licensed to support repurposing and reuse. But some other aspects of openness are at odds with one another – there is not a single dimension along which institutions can be measured. For example, open sharing in communities tends to involve some minimal gatekeeping e.g. log-in and personal identifier, to support the virtuous circle of release and re-use, and enrichment of content. Open resources ‘in the wild’ are available without gatekeeping but lack the history and community ownership that allow for sustained reuse. Resources may be made highly accessible to students in all contexts by including pedagogic support, but this makes them less accessible to teachers who want to repurpose them in different pedagogic contexts.
OERs allow universities to position themselves as sites of public knowledge, in an age of near-universal access. But what does that look like in practice? Outcomes of the UK OER programme which would be nice to see:
- ‘Best of’ UK OER resources to showcase quality
- Talking heads: towards open public knowledge (students, potential students teaching staff, professionals, developers, managers talking about their OER experiences)
- Impacts: 2 sides of A4 on institutional and educational benefits and lessons learned
David K raised the issue that there is no funding available for dissemination, so the evaluation and synthesis team needs to think about how outcomes from the projects and from our own work can be designed to meet some of these criteria without ‘extra work’ disseminating them in new forms.
‘OER’ as an issue might become less visible in the coming months, because on the one hand it is just part of the developing digital landscape, and on the other hand it is just a new mode of content sharing, which has always been an aspect of the academic community. OERs can be differentiated from other content (open licence, cost free, accessible design…?) but for most users these are of limited visibility and interest – it’s just content. UK OER is a particular moment in the evolution of both digital content and open practices in education, but the evolution will continue.
Elluminate Second Tuesday session
We had the first ‘Second Tuesday’ session in Elluminate last week where our team shared with projects the way we would be supporting evaluation activities and mechanisms to synthesise programme outcomes. We had some useful conversations around the questions that projects were hoping to ask and ultimately answer…
Projects were shown where to find outputs from Phase one activities (such as our wiki) or the (OER infokit) and asked to identify something that they thought might be useful. I found the session useful and hope the projects did. Below are the slides I used which may prove helpful to refer back to.