This is part of the Phase2 Release strand synthesis
Project final reports
Learning from WOeRK (Learning from WOeRK final report) | SWAP (SWAP Final report) | TIGER (TIGER Final Report) | DHOER (DHOER Final report) | SCOOTER (SCOOTER Final Project Report) DeSTRESS (DeSTRESS Final Project Report) | SPACE SPACE final report | LEARNING LEGACIES (Learning Legacies Final Report)| ALTO (ALTO Final Report) | OSIER (OSIER Final Report) | ORBEE (ORBEE Final Report) | PORSCHE (PORSCHE Final Report)
Communications and presentations
Learning from WOeRK
- Website and Blog
- Project introductory video
- Project Newsletter 1 and Project Newsletter 2
- Project poster
- Collection flyer for employers
- Professor Stephen Gomez, ‘The importance of OER in delivering a flexible CPD framework’ Presentation to OER 11, May 2011
- Peter Watton, Presentation ‘The challenges of supporting learning in the workplace: the use of OERs’. Joint conference SW Library Service and JISC Regional Support Centre Workshop: resource sheet - Presentation and workshop, Learn to Share to Learn, March 2011
- Lunch time open access session, with other Plymouth-based OER projects, ‘Finding, using and developing open educational resources (OERs) for your modules’. Supported by newsletter ‘OERs at the University of Plymouth’ Information session and newsletter, University of Plymouth Teaching and Learning Directorate, June 2011
- Pete Watton: ‘Open Education Resources: Overview of Projects at Plymouth University‘. Blog post: Presentation, University of Plymouth Technology Enhanced Learning Showcase, July 2011
- Employer-focused workshop :’(Free) Open Education Resources to support Continuing Professional Development’. Followed by formal Launch of Learning from WOeRK collection. Video clip; collection publicity. Blog post: Workshop, University of Plymouth Technology Enhanced Learning Showcase, July 2011
SWAPBox
TIGER
DHOER
- New high profile institutional website OER@UCL, including mailing-list and RSS feed, developed together with CPD4HE project.
- Organisation of institution-wide launch event of the OER@UCL website on 30 March 2011
- Paper on ‘Open Educational Resources in the Digital Humanities’ on the OER11 conference in Manchester (11–13 May 2011), conference strand on ‘Academic practice and digital scholarship’. The presentation and book of abstracts have been published on the conference website
- A chapter by Simon Mahony, Irish Sirmons and Ulrich Tiedau on ‘Open Access and Online Teaching Materials for Digital Humanities’ to a new compendium on Digital Humanities in Practice, ed. by ClaireWarwick, Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, to be published by Facet Publishing, a publisher specialising in publications for the information professions, in early 2012.
- Presentation at the Digital Humanities 2011 (DH2011) Conference in Stanford (CA), United States, in June 2011, the major international conference in the field of the Digital Humanities. Book of abstracts available online
- Flyers, posters, and leaflets, distributed on numerous occasions in the UK and worldwide
SCOOTER
DeSTRESS
SPACE
LEARNING LEGACIES
ALTO
OSIER
ORBEE
PORSCHE
Technical outputs
TIGER
SPACE
ALTO
PORSCHE
Evidence of sustainability and embedding
Learning from WOeRK
Increased institutional awareness of OER characteristics, requirements and opportunities, and debate about future OER engagement
- Enhanced awareness and commitment amongst development team, as a result of project activities above.
- Enhanced awareness amongst Teaching and Learning pedagogic practitioners at Plymouth University, as a result of the above.
- Enhanced awareness and discussion amongst key Teaching and Learning and CPD gatekeepers (i.e. senior management) as a result of the above.
Capacity building
- Cross-disciplinary team of academic developers, experienced in the development of OERs, some engaged as full-time, some as sessional staff, others as free-lance consultants.
- Learning Technologists experienced in supporting academic developers with technical and IPR issues.
- Enhanced use of the UPlaCe repository for publishing project and other University OER.
- Review of OER project experience and paper to University Learning and Teaching Committee, November 2011.
- Resources to enhance capacity for Work-Based Learning, including supporting work-based mentors.
- Development of Staff Guide on OER drawing on experience of project and other Plymouth University OER teams for potential use in the PGCAP programme.
- Quality review framework developed by Project Evaluator and IPR consultant to support OER evaluation. (forthcoming)
Communities of Practice
- Emerging community of practice evolving around the project development group, with focus on OER development for the workplace and related pedagogies.
- Emerging community of practice focused on the technical considerations of OER development for the workplace, formed around the Project Director and Learning Technologists.
The sharing, use and re-use of a significant body of open licensed material to support CPD delivered through workplace learning
- 365credits of OER shared through Jorum and UPlaCe and accessible through project website. Resources optimised for the work place and work place learning.
- In early stages of use with some CPD modules which are now being piloted.
- Staff engaged with the project using the resources in their own teaching.
- Early evidence of interest and some uptake by employers.
- Exploration of alternative uses of the resources, e.g. for students undertaking the Plymouth Award.
Sustainable institutional systems for recording IPR clearance activity and evidence of due diligence linked to each OER
- Project level systems developed for recording IPR decision making and due diligence.
SWAPBox
- SWAPBox is central to SWAP’s sustainability planning. SWAPBox is an accessible and easy to use Open Educational Resource which can be self regulated by the social work and social policy academic communities with limited administrative support. To date 170 users have signed up and 758 resources have been added. In addition to a range of individual users (academics, learners, practice educators, voluntary organisations) a number of groups have also been created (see below).
TIGER
- OER policy documents - (Currently Leicester and DMU draft policy documents are awaiting strategic approval prior to release.)
- A piloted model process and criteria that promote and enable extensive adoption of the concept and use of OERs in the future within the consortium. Previous established research to practice, innovation to mainstream, pilot to scale capability has shown that a substantial and well-executed pilot is likely to lead to true transformation in the university.
- Wider, improved institutional understanding of and commitment to the value of free OERs for promotion and positioning purposes in a global HE market, across all levels and categories of staff including senior managers, supporting its extensive distance and work-based learning marketing efforts.
- Departmental and institutional awareness of OERs and associated process and benefits within the consortium.
- Departmental and institutional workflows for managing content and resources - The TIGER quality process has been developed to advise on the process of creating the OERs.
- Understanding of the limitations and benefits of different file formats for OERs by technologists within the TIGER team and at respective institutions.
- Understanding of the advantages and pitfalls of different platforms for OER sharing to inform future institutional choices.
- Articulation of mechanisms for search engine optimisation and resource discovery such as tagging.
- Enhanced capacity across all subjects involved in the generation and release of high quality OERs.
DHOER
- New high profile institutional website OER@UCL, including mailing-list and RSS feed, developed together with CPD4HE project. Top-level directory required institutional ‘buy-in’ by Senior Management.
- Significant contributions to the OER section of the new institution-wide UCL Teaching and Learning portal (texts, interviews, examples). As of the time of writing this new portal, which is supposed to replace the existing one, has not yet been made publicly available.
- Instruction and guidance for the use and re-purposing of OERs should be included in the mandatory training given to new probationary teaching staff to ensure that this becomes part of the normal workflow and so ensure sustainability.
SCOOTER
- The SCOOTER network comprises of over 3000 visitors in total to web pages and online services, 300 individuals responding to surveys, over 50 individual emails, and 45 registered users of the Forum. To enhance the notion of a CoP using social networking it is now clear that championing these activities is a significant task. Companies using SEO techniques will often outsource social networking tasks for example setting up and maintaining on-line profiles, creating comments and discussions in a strategic way. Whilst we did set up and maintain over 30 social network profiles, we did not appreciate the time to generate the dialogue, and this needs to be an important consideration for projects who wish to achieve a genuine online community, beyond just a network of users.
- OER released are of high-quality (student evaluations), and are well used on a global basis. Level of reusability is difficult to ascertain: 30% of SCOOTER visitors are people returning, so this could be interpreted as reuse. The use of online Surveys is harvesting user information, and comments provided by email do indicate that people want to reuse.
- SCOOTER has shared its trials and tribulations with the UKOER community through presentations, conference discussions and online networking. I believe our outputs (listed) do include some useful solutions, for example the interactive OER Pipeline.
- There is an extensive network of online users, and an emerging online communities of practice. The most effective community involved in producing and collaborating on resources is presently off-line and done face-to-face. So how will SCOOTER be sustainable in the future? Its users will still find the website and resources through all the on-line marketing and the SCOOTER team will continue dialogue and activity through the social networking spaces and continue to evaluate the dynamics of building a community of practice.
SPACE
LEARNING LEGACIES
- The challenge of engaging the wider subject community in the project was made more difficult by the uncertainties surrounding the HE Academy structure and the future of the HLST Subject Network. The building of a constituency of HLST academics with OER skills is vital to the sustainability of the project. Engagement with the wider HLST network and the embedding of OER skills should be priorities for the Project Officer in the next phase of the project. These tasks would be enhanced by locating the OER current project into the emerging structure of the HE Academy as quickly as possible.
ALTO
- The challenge of sustainability is serious issue for the future of the OER movement and in the context of institutional initiatives this is closely linked to issues of quality perception, IPR, risk management and pedagogic cultures. We made good progress on the IPR issues including addressing risk aversion and have provided a simple, clear and persuasive rationale for engagement. As the JISC OER Phase 1 ‘Leeds Manifesto’ stated, easy to use tools for creating and publishing OERs are needed, we addressed this by devising the ALTO ecosystem approach that provided a range of methods for publishing and sharing OERs; from ‘badging’ an existing site after an IPR audit, to sharing a file via a repository, through to using a social networking tool (Process.Arts) to share resources in an engaging manner that also provides Web 2.0 features. The aim of these diverse approaches was to lower the threshold to participation, in this connection we also decided that staff should be able to publish content directly without any mediation, as this was known to have a strong deterrent effect from experience with the UAL research repository. We also argued that OERs do not have to have high production values to be useful and used, unrealistic expectations in this area can be (along with IPR fears) one of the main stumbling blocks to sustainability. One of our biggest aids in this respect was to show UAL staff the MIT OCW site (and other OER projects) to demonstrate that ‘ordinary’ resources (word documents, PDFs, reading lists etc.) can be highly effective OERs.
OSIER
- This raises issues in relation to sustainability. As with some projects in UK OER phase 1, OSIER has concerns that it might not reach a critical mass before funding ceases. This situation is exacerbated by the changes in the sector, with the loss of HEA support for subject centres after July 2011, in addition to upheavals in the education sector generally and in ESD in particular.
- The future impact of the OSIER project is very much dependent on the sustainability of the repository and on the expansion of the user community. Assuming that these two conditions are met, OSIER will have established an important and easily accessed repository that will support and foster the use of OERs in the training and development of teachers in ESD/GC. This development will be especially important at a time when there are so many pressures on the sector.
- Project sustainability is a key part of the funding requirements within UK OER. However, there is a risk that potentially successful projects will only just have reached maturity by the end of their funding period, and that subsequent support will be very limited. This makes it difficult to allow a project like OSIER to attract more users and grow in a self-sustaining way. The repository site is also vulnerable. Whilst accepting that the UK OER programme cannot provide support to a growing body of OER repositories, it seems that little consideration has been given to the medium-term future of repositories created within UK OER. Jorum does not appear to evolved into a multi-purpose super-repository, and several UK OER projects have clearly demonstrated the value of bespoke repositories. Is a distributed rather than a centralised model more appropriate? Recommendation: HEA/JISC should consider ways in which project legacies can be guaranteed, including examination of minimal-cost systems support and improved cross-repository searching.
ORBEE
- A loose framework for maximising the potential of ORBEE has been developed to maximise impact in the built environment sector. Inevitably this is based on a large proportion of learning packages produced and uploaded. Given resources, timeframes and aims we intend to continue:
- Combining awareness raising and also attempt to 'sell /engage users' more directly: this would include HEIs, companies and harnessing existing strong links in the partnership through Sector Skills Councils and Professional Bodies.
- Extending existing communication pieces about the ORBEE initiative, how it works: launch through sector specific magazines and also use it as the basis for contacting companies and for a marketing piece that can be distributed to employers and employees aimed at encouraging use.
- Obtaining feedback /monitor performance: include this in the ORBEE communication piece itself and suggest we could make an offer to support the first users through, or invite companies to pilot the material, or ask companies for subscriptions in exchange for continuing involvement and feedback/new product development.
- Amplifying the message by using either Facebook, Linked In or YouTube (which will also be written into the marketing material /processes
- Working towards sustainability: use ambassadors to disseminate and contact key stakeholder groups (e.g. heads of department, companies, intermediaries, professional bodies and wider Sector Skills Alliance).
- External funding has been secured from North West Universities Association to develop learning packages with certain elements of OERs being developed around future skills interventions focusing on ‘low carbon criticality’. Further bids are envisaged into EU funding streams around Lifelong learning and initial dissemination of ORBEE to several European partners has resulted in the development of a bidding consortium.
PORSCHE
- Both the NeLR and MEDEV are subject to continuing changes in their respective fundinglandscapes. The Subject Centre network of the Higher Education Academy will cease to exist in its current form by July 2011. The School has reassured us that we have full support in the fulfilment of the contractual obligations, and completion of the project.
- The National Health Service is in the biggest state of flux since its inception in 1948. Against this background, together with dissolution of the Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts(PCTs) there is uncertainty about the future of the NeLR, however it has secured enough funding to ensure its continued involvement in this project until the completion date and until December 2011. At a recent meeting of the SHA eLearning Leads (Dec. 2010) it became apparent that much local content currently held at SHA level would require depositing somewhere to ensure longevity of access. The profile of and need for the NeLR has therefore increased.
- The policies and procedures developed during the PORSCHE project have laid solid foundations for the continued development and release of OER in clinical settings.