This page is part of the Open Practices briefing paper

Why engage in open educational practices?

Our evidence for the benefits of open educational practices are drawn from our experience with OERs, but we have used this to speculate about the general benefits of making educational activities more open through the use of web-based services and media.

Institutional benefits

Many universities are are releasing open educational resources, e.g. via iTunesU, specifically to promote their learning experience to prospective students. The UK OER programme has documented significant successes in achieving this. It seems likely that a similar process is at work with open research data and open access publishing initiatives: as well as showcasing specific strengths and successes, they demonstrate a forward-looking approach that is attractive to potential research staff and research partners.

Some universities are using open access to research data as part of a public outreach agenda, associated with the need to communicate with business and community stakeholders and to demonstrate research impact in the REF. Through the use of web 2.0 tools, public communication can become public engagement, with stakeholders contributing to research and knowledge banks on issues that concern them.

The Houghton report demonstrated that open access solutions to academic publishing are highly cost effective for participating institutions and for the sector. Two separate JISC programmes – the Virtual Research Environment programme and the Business and Community Engagement programme – have both shown that collaborative environments can be built efficiently using open technologies.

Many universities are interested in extending their reach beyond the UK. Using OERs to provide course materials to students located in other countries or on partner campuses is an obvious trend. Learners in 185 different countries have downloaded material from Oxford University's iTunesU site, and universities with a lower international profile have still enhanced their global reach considerably in this way. The OER University represents a new model of international collaboration which allows study across institutions and which blurs the boundaries between informal and formal learning.

Digital literacy, capability and confidence are critical to open practices of all kinds. Universities that engage in OER projects have demonstrably built capacity – legal, technical and educational – which enhances their ability to respond to new demands and opportunities. There is also evidence from JISC-funded projects that universities continue to build on the partnerships created by open access initiatives long after they are completed.

Personal benefits - staff
Most staff who engage in open practices say they do so out of a commitment to open scholarship and open access to learning opportunity. There seems little reason to doubt these motives. Academics with a passion for pedagogy can reach more learners with a single, popular open resource than with a decade of classroom teaching. Researchers can see their papers commented on and their findings taken up by people who they would never otherwise have encountered.

Showcasing is another reason for individual academics to engage in open release. We have encountered many examples of academics who have built a new digital reputation through involvement in an open release project, or who have secured a legacy of their teaching experience or scholarly activities. Reduced security in academic employment may make open release more attractive as a way of enhancing personal reputation. Academic blogs, slideshare presentations, youtube lectures, online articles and digital teaching portfolios – all increasingly part of the apparatus of scholarship – are even more valuable to individuals who are or expect to be in the job market.

Finally, staff involved in open projects funded by the JISC almost always report that they have worked across institutional or departmental boundaries in new ways. Open practices enable new kinds of collaboration to take place. Staff benefit from these new contacts and from the new ideas and skills they are exposed to.

Staff report that they also gain personally from the benefits to students and to subject communities as reported below.

Personal benefits – students

The most obvious benefit of open learning resources is that students are free to study in a wide range of settings. This can help overcome problems with access, or can mean that learning in the field, the workplace, or on placement is enhanced by access to relevant content.

Use of open educational content, whether guided by teaching staff or self-directed, exposes learners to a wider range of ideas, media, representations, and conceptual approaches than a closed course can provide. We have found evidence of students being troubled by this variety: they worry that they will be penalised if they use material not approved by their lecturer or will 'waste time' covering material that is not central to their assessments. This demonstrates that open approaches need careful introduction to students. Where teaching staff explicitly embrace and reward self-directed research, students benefit from the exposure.

Open teaching/learning practices in the curriculum allow students to develop relevant skills for living and working in an era of open knowledge. These skills are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Releasing sample OERs as an aspect of course marketisation – a growing trend – allows students to make meaningful choices between learning opportunities, both when they are choosing what and where to study and when they are choosing options within their programme.

Open research helps to blur the boundaries between learning and original exploration. Taught students can be directed towards open access research data and publications, particularly in subject areas where these are becoming more widely available. Students can also become involved in research projects much earlier in their careers if projects are conducted in an open fashion, involving a range of expert and less expert contributors.

Community benefits

Social media and networking software are allowing new practices of sharing to emerge in academic communities. Although these tend to be more powerful in research communities - perhaps because they are already closer knit – broader subject communities are emerging around an interest in teaching and shared learning materials. The community repositories developed by the Humanities, Social Sciences and Art&Design projects under UK OER funding support a number of practices that make open content more sustainable, for example open peer review, open commentary, open sharing of teaching experiences associated with content (replacing or augmenting one-time-authored educational metadata), open sharing of teaching and research profiles, and collaborative development.

This approach is decentralised, sustainable at scale, and requires lower injections of capital than institutional initiatives focused on high-value content and reputation enhancement. But however low the threshold of membership, sharing communities cannot reach out as widely as content 'in the wild' of the open web. The two approaches can be seen as complementary. Sharing communities may be a sustainable means of developing and quality assuring OERs, while a broader range of materials on the open web will continue to be discovered and brought into teaching/learning practice by members of the community. A key focus of the UK OER programme now is aggregating these available materials more effectively so that teachers and learners can discover and reuse them more easily.

Benefits to academic communities, then, include enhanced discussion and debate about academic ideas, a much wider pool of resources to draw on, and opportunities for collaboration among teaching peers.

Go to the next page in the Open Practices briefing paper: Open practices and open learning