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.
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…
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
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)
Understanding the role of OERs in open educational practices
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.