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See also 

Evidence - Adoption of open practices

Evidence - Open partnerships

Evidence - Practices of different stakeholders

 

 

Culture and practice

Evidence - Enablers and Barriers to the adoption of open practices

 

 how practice is changing among OER stakeholders (teachers, learners, support staff, other sectors), and how practice change is being enabled and supported

Themes strand

CORE-SET (CORE-SET final report) | ReACTOR (ReACTOR Final report) |  Opening up a future in business (Future in business Final Report) | COMC (COMC Final report) | PARIS (PARIS Final Project Report)  HALS OER (HALS OER Final Project Report) | PublishOER (PublishOER final report) | Great Writers (Great Writers Final Report)|  ALTO UK (ALTO UK Final Report)  | ORBIT (ORBIT Final Report) | DEFT (DEFT Final Report)    | FAVOR (FAVOR Final Report) | SESAME (SESAME Final Report) |

 

OMAC strand

BLOCKeD (BLOCKeD Final Report) |   Digital Literacy and Creativity (Digital Literacy and Creativity Final Report | Academic Practice in Context (Academic Practice in Context Final report) | Teeside Open Learning Units (Teeside Open Learning Units Final Report)

 

 

What enablers and barriers have you identified to the adoption of open practices by your stakeholders, and in what ways have you addressed them?

 

Enablers

Reputation

• Hourly paid tutors have a range of motivations for engaging (or not) with open practice -  Many of our tutor-recruits were attracted by the idea that participation in the project would raise their profile within their institution and beyond; that they would have a public professional profile which would be held outwith any institutional affiliation, and that they could participate in a research project and attend conferences; however other potential recruits were not so persuaded by these ideas. We found that the nature of part-time, hourly paid work was both an obstacle to engaging with open practice AND a motivator. During the recruitment process, coordinators reported that while some tutors may wish for greater integration into the academic life of their institutions, others may not. It quickly became clear to us that many such tutors choose their working patterns (rather than being forced by circumstances within an institution) and so do not necessarily have a particular interest in a professional profile or greater integration into their institution – and so were not that interested in open practice and the FAVOR project. Similarly, the lack of job security felt by tutors disinclined them to share their work generally. (FAVOR Final Report) 

Security

• Conversely, another coordinator reported that these factors inclined the tutors she had approached to share their work. She noted that her tutors were experienced teachers of long-standing and had a wealth of material ready to share with others. They were happy with their working conditions and not insecure about their work situation, and therefore saw no reason not to share work.  (FAVOR Final Report)

Institutional support

• Institutions’ policies, procedures and attitudes play an important role in enabling and encouraging engagement from hourly paid staff with small projects (FAVOR Final Report)
• Institutions’ policies and attitudes towards the ownership of materials created by their staff are important in facilitating engagement with open practice (FAVOR Final Report)
• As the Sesame project worked exclusively with the Weekly Classes programme, a well-established programme working with a large number of part-time tutors, we were able to benefit from having a comprehensive administrative infrastructure for working with part-time tutors already in place within the institution. (SESAME Final Report)

Feelgood factor

• Generally our tutors felt that OER were ‘a good thing’.  However they were clearly more comfortable simply putting content online rather than making it fully open, as just over half expressed concern about what happens when content is openly released.  In terms of reasons to engage with OER, our tutors self-reported being far more interested in the altruistic reasons for engagement: "it is a good thing to do", "student learning will be improved" or “[it brings] benefits to the institution”, rather than the potential personal gains, either financial or reputational.  Interest in training was highest in the area of how to find good resources and how best to use them. (SESAME Interim Report)
• This change was also evident in our final tutor survey where the number of tutors agreeing with the statement “I fully support the idea of open content and open educational resources” was 76.9% compared to 56.8% in the baseline survey.  SESAME Final Report)
• The drivers for the academic leads included
• Wanting to be involved in another OER project because they believed that this was something that the University ought to be doing
• Wanting to prepare materials that teachers beyond Oxford can use
• Knitting together university and secondary education
• Being involved in the change of education materials to online provision
• Becoming more involved in podcasting as an important way to disseminate their work. (Great Writers Final Report)
• Coupled with this continued vigilance on copyright, the project team has endeavoured to spread the word about OER and Creative Commons. All contributors were happy to released their materials under the CC licenced used at Oxford and felt that this was for the benefit of educating the world. Due to their closer involvement, our academic leads embraced the openness of the project:

“wider communication is the main point. Most academics want to communicate things; most conventional publishing fails to do that substantially” and
“I am much more likely to use OER than before, particularly outside my own area” Academic Lead (Great Writers Final Report)

• “I recently completed a doctorate at university, and published a few scientific journal articles from the work, before joining this company. However, I gained no real understanding of the IPR and copyright issues of that work. The aim was for me to publish the outcomes of the research in places that were highly specialised, and probably only read by a very limited technical audience. The thing I like about this specific project work [CORE-SET] with your team at university, is that we will be publishing and promoting a range of this company’s electronic resources – ones that we choose, guided by you and relevant engineering students – to give them multiple audiences, globally; basically, an internet-plus means of disseminating ourselves and our expertise. We are bought into this concept, and understand that it will require an investment from us in terms of time and staff, and possible technologies. We are fully up for that. Though, we are hoping that over time, the processes we invest in can be streamlined, as we become more confident and self-sufficient with OER and their associated legal and technical requirements.”[Project Partner D] (CORE-SET Final Report)
  

Champions

• Working with enthusiasts as early adopters, and fully supporting them to understand the real issues, has been a very productive strategy for the project. This provided us with insight into what is really involved in releasing OER, valuable exemplars to show to participants of future project activities, and advocates for the project. Our early adopters made the case for participation and provided reassurance against common concerns to others (SESAME Final Report)

• each institutional coordinator played a vital role in achieving project aims. Each coordinator became an effective champion of the project, open practice and the tutors’ work. This methodology (using champions as key facilitators within their own institutional contexts) has worked effectively in many LLAS-led community projects before, because it enables partners to have ownership over the project and also to work within a wider community. It was a particularly potent force in the FAVOR project, where one of our key aims was to reinforce and enhance institutional working. (FAVOR Final Report)

Reward

• We offered a small payment for participation in our first pilot and for creating the subject collections and there is no doubt that this was an incentive, at least initially, for many tutors to engage. Certainly the lower levels of uptake and follow through on the second pilot indicate that payment is a motivating factor; however, counter to this is to the fact that 81% of the tutors who were paid to participate in the first pilot have continued their engagement with the project, when no additional payments have been made. (SESAME Final Report)

• Student Ambassador - The drivers for being involved in this OER project included: To learn and be part of something that is valuable from an educational perspective Interest in public engagement, being able to “open the learning out a bit more” Wanting to be involved in an online project, an interest in digital formats in English Literature An interest in open access materials A way to demonstrate transferable skills on a CV The opportunity to write A faster way to get published and have their work in the public domain (which is a key concern when thinking of future jobs). (Great Writers Final Report)

Flexible approaches

• The key lesson learnt was that when providing development opportunities for part-time tutors there is a requirement for flexibility and opportunities need to be provided throughout the calendar year. In addition, where face-to-face training is required, this may need to be scheduled outside the normal working day, for example during evenings or on Saturdays, to ensure maximum uptake. (SESAME Final Report)

• sharing was seen as an essential element of professional identity (as one of the respondents indicated, "you are sharing with kids anyway all the time) and a crucial part of continuous professional development - an impulse to enhance/improve good teaching. At the same time, while both teachers and PGCE students were happy to share resources within their immediate network (i.e. peers on the course; teachers on placements), they had a number of reservations when it came to releasing their resources openly online and sharing them with a potentially unknown audience:

I am always willing to share my resources with other members of staff in school and have done this on a regular basis at my current placement. I have shied away from sharing materials online contexts, however, as I always feel a little protective of the things I produce because I  invest a lot of time in making resources, and don’t feel entirely comfortable at present to make it freely available for anyone to download.  I like knowing who is using it! (quote from a focus group with PGCE students). (DeFT Final Report)

 

Communities of Practice 

• user involvement from the start. - good level of interest but takes a lot of time particularly at early stages - surprised by level of interest around what we mean by open - linked to sustainability - for this project sustainability is strongly connected to the community – Our Friends in the North -  useful group - given feedback and offered to pilot resources - tying into existing CoPs (Teeside Open Learning Units Interim Report)

Efficiencies (time saving)

• Enabling busy practitioners to adopt more participative approaches necessarily involves identifying how lecturer time can be saved in other elements of learning.  To achieve this delivery of significant elements of the collaborative learning objects is intended to be self-regulating.  Once the resource is launched participants work independently through the content and the knowledge checks (receiving predetermined feedback on those interactions).  This provides a basis for exploration of the topic in the collaborative element.  Even the collaborative elements start with administrative elements, such as allocation to groups, which are self-regulated.  Whilst this is intended to reduce the tutor workload of detailed e-moderation, the distinctive feature of collaborative learning objects is that they include opportunities for feedback from the tutor, particularly on the process and product of the student interactions.  This will be a focus of the guidance document produced to support the release of the CLOs. (BLOCKeD Interim Report)

Digital literacies support

 

• teachers in our target groups needed assistance with digital skills and confidence in relation to OER creation and also needed some sort of conceptual and practical framework to operate within. ALTO UK Final Report
• Staff development within institutions is desperately needed, and it will take a considerable amount of time, to raise levels of compliance:

 

•  Attributing third party works;
•  Seeking permission;
•  Replacing current unlicensed content with openly licensed alternatives;
•  Signposting copyright statements clearly (on your own work);
•  Routinely carrying disclaimers;
•  Managing expectations of assistance with complex legal enquiries;
• Taking a risk-managed rather than a risk-averse approach to incorporating published works in OER. (PublishOER Final Report)

Trusted sources (Use)

•  Quality of resources is a paramount concern for practitioners and the use of ‘trusted sources’ (such as subject association websites and professional networks) was regarded as a way of ensuring that materials would be of a high standard. (ORBIT Final report)
•  The issue of licensing was not regarded as a priority amongst teachers and many teacher respondents said that they had used online materials without checking their copyright status. However, the majority of teachers and teacher educators said that they would use a website that specifically offered ‘permission to use’ materials. (ORBIT Final report)
• Practitioners believed that a resource bank like ORBIT would make the discoverability of high quality resources easier and they would also have increased confidence in sharing their own materials through this means. (ORBIT Final report)
• The most important features that should be incorporated into a teaching resource bank such as ORBIT, according to respondents, were: tagged resources (by age, subject or topic); validation of resource quality; an appropriate range of materials for different age groups and curricula; availability of openly licensed materials; adaptability of resource materials. (ORBIT Final report)

Support to change and learn

• “We have been very impressed by your earlier OER output [the CORE-Materials site], and all of its technical functionalities, which you developed and refined over recent years. It gives us reassurance that you have produced something of high quality that would sit very well alongside our business and its vision for the future. We appreciate that there will be a transfer of know-how from yourselves to this organisation, and that will then allow us to play catch-up with others who are much further ahead of us, who at the moment would have a competitive edge in promoting their offerings to global clients and customers. Though, I now appreciate from our discussions that this working arrangement will not be one-way between your Project Team and staff from a number of our business units represented here today; marketing, staff training, technical services. It is pleasing to hear that you feel we also have something to offer you, in academia, from the range of case-study materials and research-oriented outputs we have put together. I was not aware that such things were becoming more sought after by students and lecturers, and as a business we will be more than glad to contribute to that.”[Project Partner C] (CORE-SET Final Report)
• “I full agree with the rationale you adopted in CORE-Materials, in creating open resources that are very small and discrete. The advantages to the user of having flexibility to construct their own learning is clear, compared to the design of a large course or block of material for teaching that by comparison is more restrictive to the learner. This approach is also pragmatic for us, as we test ourselves with OER as a new activity of this charity. We can more easily offer small elements of our content, and learn from the processes of their open release to new and wider audiences.”  [Project Partner E] (CORE-SET Final Report)

• Of paramount importance is the transfer of experience and expertise from the Project Team to the partner organisations. This would provide them with a step-change in their activities relating to open practices, and here reference was made on many occasions to the previous outputs of the UKOER Programme, in our case that of CORE-Materials from Phase 1. (CORE-SET Final Report)

Barriers

• It was also been important to acknowledge the challenges as well as the benefits of open practices with an audience that will always contain sceptics as well as advocates. Thus we collected pragmatic advice from earlier pilots to feed in to later training. (SESAME Final Report)

Lack of institutional infrastructure

•  Pedagogic cultures that can, in some cases, tend to be conservative, with access to, and use of technology limited, IT skills and confidence are often low, institutional support and IT infrastructure capacity can be limited. ALTO UK Final Report

Time constraints

• Others mentioned concerns about the time investment needed to upload resources online. (DeFT Final Report)
• While the project aimed to provide an environment in which the ideal of seamless sharing might be possible this was far from reality. Depending on their level of engagement, tutors reported spending between ten minutes and four hours a week in addition to their normal preparation time (to support two hours of face-to-face teaching).
  “It's a lot of extra work to make it worthwhile!” (Tutor commenting in final tutor survey) (SESAME Final Report)
  
• While we are confident that this time commitment is likely to reduce with experience, it is not possible to ignore that this kind of activity is a significant extra commitment for busy part-time tutors, many of whom are paid a fee based solely on contact teaching hours. (SESAME Final Report)
• Time is a significant factor in enabling tutors to engage with small projects and with open access - Time impacted on tutors’ abilities to engage with the project in various ways. Part-time and hourly-paid tutors often take on work as, and when, it is offered and cannot always schedule for this in advance, or they work part-time due to other commitments. In some cases, this meant tutors had to pull out of the project entirely:
• All of the coordinators commented on the difficulty of getting all of the participating tutors in one place at the same time due to their varied schedules (FAVOR Final Report)
• Tutors reported that engaging with open practice was time-consuming in itself: “[you must] think about learning objectives, how you teach, how you present your materials, but it is very rewarding” – tutor comment (FAVOR Final Report)
• The nature of part-time, hourly-paid working can hinder ability to engage in activities other than teaching (FAVOR Final Report)
• Similarly, contact was made with a number of teacher educators in other HEIs, particularly those who had supported the original ORBIT bid. It is fair to say that most, whilst still enthusiastic to help ORBIT, were unable to contribute in any significant way. This mainly due to lack of time and their existing work commitments. (ORBIT Final report)
• While the author focus group identified challenges around understanding licensing and the time-consuming nature of reviewing OER to ensure it met the required quality level, all agreed that they would continue to work with OER in the future. (PARiS Final Report)
• Time and content proliferation: Open Classes produced under a CC BY SA  license and in pulling in large networks and diverse resources need ‘feeding’ – all the time. They can become  “real-time” beasts.   (COMC Final Report)

 

Pedagogic fit (Use)

• A small minority were also concerned about pedagogical issues and the potential risk of stifling creativity through excessive reliance on resources "off the shelf":

While I think this is a good idea in some respects, such as sharing outstanding practice, taking the pressure off teachers' time (planning and so forth) it may have the less positive effects of stifling creativity and causing teachers to put less effort into preparing lessons for the specific classes they teach, instead just teaching another person's lesson wholesale (quote from a focus group with PGCE students). (DeFT Final Report)

Complexity for teaching staff

• While open practices have become increasingly straightforward in recent years, creating and using OER is still complicated and there are many real barriers to engagement. Thus, in the implementation of the Sesame project the extent to which we could benefit from lessons learnt from earlier projects was less than hoped. While we used resources from OpenSpires11 and other UKOER phase 1 and 2 projects as much as possible12, these materials had to be heavily customised, and in many cases we eventually developed materials virtually from scratch for our context. (SESAME Final Report)
• identifying what is an OER remains complicated, with many OER repositories or search engines regularly returning results for content which are either hard to be sure are OER, or which are definitely not openly licensed. We also had issues with identifying OER produced in languages other than English and would welcome guidance on international equivalents to creative commons (SESAME Final Report)

Legal challenges

• the issues around copyright and IPR and what can be released are still confusing. In addition, the gap between what is legitimate practice in the classroom and much other academic practice, for example using third party quotes with references, and what is permitted in openly licensed material can restrict activities that would be normal in any other academic context (SESAME Final Report)

• On a more pragmatic note, the survey confirmed our initial thoughts that one of our biggest challenges in terms of making content associated with our weekly class courses online and open is the fact that, with the exception of reading lists, those resources which tutors most often currently make available to students in hard copy are often those which cannot usually be openly licensed, such as photocopies of book chapters and journal articles, copies of photographs, diagrams, maps or illustrations and copies of primary sources.  Thus much perfectly legitimate classroom practice thwarts the promise of seamless sharing and openness. (SESAME Interim Report)

• Open practice is still a new concept to many language teachers and issues around copyright, IPR, licensing and quality still need to be discussed and worked through. (FAVOR Interim Report)
• Other disincentives for sharing were related to copyright, with some project participants openly admitting that they wanted to "avoid the hassle of figuring out copyright stuff" and assumed that sharing within the network of their peers bypassed the need to address these issues. Some believed that copyright was irrelevant if resources were shared for educational purposes and reasoned that "nobody would bring it up… they are not going to go back to someone". Others went as far as to argue that if resources are available online then by default they can be reused without regard for copyright as evidenced in the following quote:

That’s the one thing that I have not really thought about, I mean the images that I use, I think if they are freely available to get on line, and if you can to listen to it on line - that might sound really bad, but that's my impression, then surely they are free to use (quote from a focus group with PGCE students).

The above exchange illustrates a number of misconceptions related to copyright and sharing open resources - such as for instance that copyright is irrelevant if resources are intended for private and/or educational use. These misconceptions need to be addressed so that teachers can model good practice and take full advantage of benefits offered by Open Educational Resources. (DeFT Final Report)

Digital literacies - lack 

• However, during the Sesame project we found that there are significant barriers (such as the need for recording equipment, knowledge of how to use it, skills to edit recorded material, and resources to produce transcripts) for part-time tutors to overcome in order to produce these resources themselves. (SESAME Final Report)
• There are also many issues around engagement of students with the open platform approach not just in terms of their digital literacy skills (fluency) - when digital literacy was not the focus of the class’ activities – but also their awareness of the changing Media and HE landscape, their attachment to old models of both, their resistance to collaborative learning, etc. etc.  (COMC Final Report)
• Getting student groups to present their archives professionally (in terms of layout, design, organisation and visuals) from the outset – this is not a technical but a communications issue – if “you are visible” you need to communicate professionally consistently.  (COMC Final Report)
•  Students are now treated as digitally literate but frequently aren’t (they are autodidacts and are specifically and highly capable) but they are not fluent in the professional use of digital media. This raises issues for the open platform approach in terms of their literacy skills- when digital literacy was not the focus of the class’ activities. (COMC Final Report)

 

Staff insecurities

• While we had many enthusiastic participants there were still tutors at the end of the project who expressed concerns about the increased visibility of their practice through releasing OER.
  “I do worry about getting negative feedback from other academics.” (Tutor participating in final focus group)(SESAME Final Report)
• some concerns about revealing accounts of "unpolished" practice and even worse, incompetence with regard to technology.  One of the key themes emerging from our conversations with the teachers was that a lot of them argued that their students were much more digitally competent than themselves and that accordingly, they (i.e. the teachers) needed to work really hard to be able to keep up with their students - to be able to respond to the knowledge and skills that the students were bringing into the classroom. In terms of professional development, a number of project participants expressed their concerns about being able to keep up with the rapid changes in technology to keep their teaching interesting - The open textbook has the potential to signpost teachers to ways in which they could enhance their practice and so OERs could be helpful in terms of helping them 'catch up'. (DeFT Final Report) 
•  While most teachers argued they preferred accounts of pedagogical practice that were imperfect but which showcased challenges and problems encountered by other practitioners, they also were very reluctant to produce accounts which revealed their own struggles with technology that could potentially put their professional skills in a poor light. Similarly, as pointed out earlier, the PGCE students were keen to stress that they saw the process of sharing resources as an essential requirement of their chosen profession. On the other hand, when contemplating the possibility of releasing their own resources online so that they could be shared openly with others, the students said they would be very careful and would only consider sharing materials that were of sufficiently high quality. For instance, a number of students were quite adamant they would not want to share their lesson plans so as not to reveal that they ‘had no clue what they were doing’.  Arguably, the tension between the wish to showcase ‘polished performance’ and the need to engage with accounts of ‘real-life’ practice has implications for sharing resources and their open release. (DeFT Final Report)
• Authors saw it as positive that their modules were widely accessible and that they showcased quality work of experts in each field. At the same time, the number of students who might access the modules was daunting – some authors felt more exposed to critical scrutiny than they would normally be for the academic content of their undergraduate teaching. (PARiS Final Report)
•  The ‘digital noise wall’: making large amounts of content freely available online and within a open-access frameworks (which can be largely ‘passive’), can in itself be intimidating to those outside the OER world. We see this, in part, as a symptom of our own transition from a ‘broadcast’ (‘sage on the stage’) culture, to a collaborative (actively Open) one.  (COMC Final Report)

 

Sector challenges

• The school context presents unique challenges when it comes to learner-produced resources, these include issues around e-safety and e-security, as well as ownership of resources and the need to consider permissions from parents/guardians for the open release of resources. (DEFT Final Report)
•  The fear of ‘free-ness’: an unexpected reaction, particularly from schools and colleges - the anxiety over whether they can - use and re-use ‘our’ material. (COMC Final Report)
• Team members visited the Colleges, walked-through the class sites discussed potential uses, emphasised the open and free nature of the content, resources and networks. The only ‘cost’ to these participant for enhanced access to the classes  and additional support was that they put some comments on the classes and especially the core COMC  project pages. In the event none did so.  This experience highlights the barrier that exists on our part on the transition from ‘broadcasting’ modes and on the part of potential external participants if the arrive at the class after its development (COMC Final Report)
• A second aspect of this ‘fear of free-ness’ is the nervousness about social media networks and their absence in some context. Our most effective ‘actively-open’ classes, have learnt the social media lesion of going to where the fish already swim and connect with networks that already exist. In the case of some contexts that we would wish to engage with, those peer communities/networks are under-developed, only just forming or non-existent. This has proved to be the case with regional Colleges (Phoenix Partners) – there is little educational networking amongst them and less use of social media - this leads us back to an ineffective broadcasting model. The broadcasting of Open resources ‘at’ colleges creates its own resistances.     (COMC Final Report)

 

Project challenges

• The nature of part-time tutors’ work also affected the project in other ways. For example, within the Department, if a weekly class course does not attract a minimum number of students it does not run. The cancellation of courses was something that had implications several times during the project. (SESAME Final Report)
• Several tutors noted that the timing of this particular JISC project (October – October over one year) put strains on their ability to contribute, because “there are parts of the year when you can’t do anything else, like exam time” – tutor. In addition, focus groups reported that there had been a steep learning curve between phase 1 of the project (publishing existing materials) and phase 2 (creating new materials) and “tutors found it intense…a huge amount of new material has been uploaded at the last minute,” as a result. (focus group) It was noted that it would have been preferable to have more time for planning in phase 2. (Southampton video report) (FAVOR Final Report)