This is a space to develop a short paper around lessons learned re part-time tutors during phase 3 of UKOER.
Possible Titles: Part-time tutors and open practices, opening practice of part-time tutors, part-time tutors and OER - changing practice, etc.
not very catchy are they?
Introduction
A significant amount of language teaching in universities is delivered by hourly-paid or part-time staff, and yet this is a group whose excellent work and contribution to academic life is often unrecognised. Many tutors are on ‘teaching-only’ contracts, are in Language Centres rather than academic departments, often do not have access to permanent working space (desks, computers), and are on intensive teaching schedules leaving no time for research or professional development. All of these factors reinforce a sense of low status. (Coleman, 2004; Howarth, 2011; Klapper, 2006). In addition, recent years have seen many language departments downsizing or disappearing, thus reducing the breadth of language provision in UK HE and increasing demand for language teachers on fractional or temporary contracts.
The FAVOR project sought to address the issues outlined above through open practice, specifically the sharing and creation of open education resources (OERs). Our plan was to engage a number of hourly-paid language tutors, from 5 different HEIs, in publishing their language teaching resources as open content, and in creating a suite of new open educational resources designed to assist prospective students in understanding the nature of language study at HE level. This material would also provide ‘language tasters’ which would promote interest in language learning among a wider group of potential learners. The project also wanted to work with languages which are less widely taught and to engage the wider community in language learning. Our key objectives in asking tutors to participate in the project were to raise awareness of the work of the tutors within their own institutions and the wider academic community, and enhance their professional profiles; to train and upskill tutors in open practice and use of technology, and to establish an online community which would then offer mutual and on-going support for the development and sharing of language teaching materials. These aims did not change throughout the lifetime of the project.(FAVOR Final Report)
Challenges
Engagement
Impacts
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students now have access to extra resources
- staff have more opportunity/mechanisms to share resources and a place to store and find stuff
- consider diffs between adapting existing content and releasing new stuff - having been through tricky probs of releasing existing stuff they gain awareness of what to consider/avoid when creating new stuff
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ox baselining – almost all pt tutors interested in knowing more and being trained
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FAVOR outcome tutors very enthusiastic - no access to prof devt opportunities in usual working life - positive glow is big as they have learnt so much - new technologies, digital literacies and open practice.
- Enthusiasm has been great - most tutors thanked the team / JISC for the project as an opportunity to learn and move forward in relation to other technologies, pedagogy and making their work open.Tutors do feel more connected to the institution - publishing under banner of institution and feel more connected than previously. Sharing in ways never done before - very rewarding and exciting. working collaboratively been very positive experience. It was helpful to have an external person (from project team) to work with tutors at the partner institution which experienced most barriers to engaging part time staff. Co-ordinator at that Institution will be investigating and taking forward what they learnt with senior staff. This may be valuable outcome if they reconsider their practice.
- Open practice has proved to be good vehicle to support changes - need support for tutors to keep moving forward.
- Language subject area - enagaging with open practice - impt opportunity for sharing resources for less widely used languages - offered a voice and place - helped to level playing field for their languages.
- Range of motivations - of hourly paid tutors - assumed that they would want to be closer to their institution - not all did and some were not wanting to engage with that
- time significant re enabling being involved - time it takes to re-purpose and create new resources
- The nature of hourly paid work: tutors don’t spend long in institution and are only there for teaching; take on lots of hours as never sure of student demand – this can result in being over-committed and unable to take on more work outside teaching.
- community led repository focus - tutors found this liberating cf institutional control over repository. control was important - allowing quick and easy access to their own materials - seeing people using their stuff (seeing views, etc.)
- reported improved practice and noted change in practice - learnt from others and tried new things and plan to implement them. open to new ideas - hunger for prof devt. and to try new things. A lot of opportunity to try things out - do a lot of teaching.
- change in attitude to open practice - usual fears - quality, ipr etc. after awareness and engagement activities now evangelising re open practice, - much more open to this - don’t worry about the same things. seeing other people’s stuff was interesting and of high quality. (change in attitude)
- published over 340 resources (combination new/old) - videoing students , screen capture, audio, teaching handouts - don’t have to share polished stuff (community rep) ideas are as important.
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Sustainability
- Both projects optimistic that this may grow and take people forward within their institutions. Will be interesting to see what happens in future.
- Challenge is that open practice is not sufficiently embedded into practice yet. It needs supporting and promoting by institutions – e.g. in the pg cert content and performance review and in departmental strategies.
- SESAME wonder if student will bring pressure to continue.student expectations – this term will be the 1st time all students on the open access programme will have access to the online resources collected by the project, ~ 10% of courses will have course-specific sites. The programme has a returning student rate of ~40% so it will be interesting to see if they notice that some courses have course-specific resources and others don’t and what their feedback is.
Outputs
Quotable chunks from reports
FAVOR
Open practice offers an effective vehicle for professional development of part-time, hourly-paid language tutors. Over a relatively short period of time, tutors engaging in open practice through the project were able to develop professionally by learning new skills, methods and approaches, and by making contact with new colleagues, sharing ideas and reflecting on their own work. Open practice is a low-cost option, available to all to engage with at times, locations and levels of their own choosing, and which requires no third party support to make engagement possible (if using a community-based repository like LanguageBox). It allows for simultaneous affiliations to particular institutions and also to other organisations or wider interest groups. These factors make it particularly relevant to the working practices of part-time tutors and tutors realised this: “open practice is a way to work as a teacher, sharing not only resources but ideas, opinions with other teachers and learn from each other.” (tutor comment)
Engaging with open practice can enhance teaching quality. The experience of FAVOR tutors demonstrates that the critical self-evaluation inherent in preparing materials for open publication has led to improvements and changes in tutors’ teaching practice. Publishing work as OERs can be empowering and motivating as tutors share materials and ideas, and see how their work is appreciated by a wider audience of viewers and downloaders. In addition, tutors have adopted new skills and ideas from seeing the OERs of others, and many have also lost their reluctance about using third party materials in their own teaching after realising the quality of OERs available. This reflection on teaching materials and activities inevitably leads to improved practice.
‘Blended’ communities of practice enhance and maximise the benefits of open practice. We have found that a mixture of face-to-face, local community-building and online, wider community-building is powerfully effective when fostering communities of open practice. Tutors unanimously reported that it was pleasing and motivating to be able to meet their colleagues to discuss how they approached the publication and creation of open resources. At the same time, situating this local activity within a wider, online community of practice was additionally motivating. This ‘blend’ of offline and online seemed to enhance the impact of the project on tutors by encouraging them, motivating them and boosting confidence.
Part-time, hourly-paid staff constitute a considerable reservoir of knowledge, experience which could be utilised better by HEIs. Part-time tutors bring a range of experience to their teaching which is often gained from working outside of the education sector either as part of their employment portfolio, or as prior experience. Many also work across several institutions. This means that it is often difficult to incorporate research or professional development activities into their lives. However, this wealth of valuable experience tends to be unrecognised and therefore unexploited by institutions. This knowledge has great potential to enhance the student learning experience (a key aim of all universities) through offering insights into how different disciplines can be used in the work place. Staff working across different institutions can also provide alternative perspectives on teaching methods, curricula and pedagogy. In addition, many part-time tutors have an unwitting ambassadorial role for their institutions, as they often teach on lifelong learning programmes which recruit adult learners from outside universities. In this way, tutors’ teaching has a direct impact on the wider public and on their impressions of particular institutions and of universities in general.
Part-time, hourly-paid staff relish the opportunity to improve their practice, learn new skills and make contributions to the academic life of their institution. The project has demonstrated that such tutors are enthusiastic to develop themselves professionally and will embrace such opportunities. The FAVOR tutors grasped this opportunity for professional development and of their own volition, extended it by challenging themselves to go beyond the bounds of project expectations. In this context, we feel that a small amount of resource and endeavour would have a significant impact and improve job satisfaction and overall performance. Giving professional development to hourly-paid and part-time language tutors has an immediate impact on teaching and learning because of the high number of teaching hours such tutors often have: language tutors are able put their knowledge into practice immediately with students (as many FAVOR tutors are doing as the new term starts). Tutors working on the project have welcomed the opportunity represent their institutions, as this gives a feeling of inclusion in institutional life which they do not often feel.
Institutional policies play a crucial role in enabling part-time and hourly paid staff to access professional development opportunities, either through participation in small projects, conducting their own research, taking part in staff training or getting involved in open practice. This project has demonstrated that institutional policies have a huge impact on part-time tutors’ capacity and willingness to get involved in work outside of their standard teaching contracts. There were five institutions involved in the FAVOR project and all of them experienced (to a greater or lesser degree) issues with how their institutions deal with part-time tutors. Institutions create situations which make it difficult for part-time tutors to engage with professional development: from the issuing of intensive teaching-only contracts, or alternatively, ‘zero-hour’ contracts which offer work ‘as and when’ it is available; the lack of working space often offered to part-time tutors within institutions; a lack of systems to pay part-time staff for work other than teaching; a lack of time and funds devoted to part-time tutors’ development, and other bureaucratic eccentricities which serve to reinforce the notion that part-time tutors are somehow not part of the institution which employs them. The hunger with which tutors embraced this project speaks loudly of the lack of recognition and support they typically encounter, as one tutor noted: “The mere existence of the project helped boost language professionals’ confidence and well-being at work, in circumstances which are uneasy these days in higher education.” Correspondingly, it is no coincidence that the FAVOR institutions which offered their tutors the most support on this project are likely to reap the most benefit from engaging with it, and realise the greatest impact on staff and students. The external evaluator noted that the benefits and impact of the project risk being lost without continuing institutional support and recognition. Finding ways to engage and incentivise part-time tutors in academic work outside teaching is clearly of benefit to tutors, students and institutions.
Open practice offers a key benefit to languages. Many tutors working on the project teach what are termed as ‘less widely used languages’ (in a UK context), for example, Hungarian, Finnish, Amharic, Slovak. These tutors noted that open sharing of their resources offers a means and a space for their languages to be heard in an environment dominated by the main European languages. They emphasised a need for more ‘lwul’ practitioners to share their work to widen the pool of available resources.
SESAME
With changes in higher education, it seems certain that there will be more part-time academics delivering education in new ways. This continues the trend of recent years where the mainstream activities of the Department have moved from being atypical in higher education to matching the reality of practice for many institutions23. Thus it seems certain increasing numbers of individuals and institutions will engage with online and ‘open educational practices’ whether through encouraging use or production of OER or by delivering MOOCs24. There is a discourse that sees open activities as being core to the future of higher education, but while it is not yet clear the extent to which OER will play, it does seem inevitable that an increasing number of academics and institutions will engage with this inspiring area of development.
We anticipated that the project would enable us to enhance teaching and learning standards on the Weekly Classes programme through providing access to new resources and learning opportunities, and there is no doubt this has been achieved by the project. All weekly class tutors teaching courses in 2012/13 academic year have been given the opportunity to create a site on the Sesame discovery point, about 150 tutors have engaged with the project, 31 course sites have been created across the last three terms and, so far, 3917 courses have requested a site for the 2012/13 academic year. More broadly, the 25 subject collections, which include well over 1,000 resources, mean that whether or not an individual tutor has chosen to participate in the project, all students will benefit from easy access to high quality, online resources, selected by the Department’s tutors.
In addition to improved access to online resources for our weekly class students, our tutors have reported that their participation in the project has had a positive impact on their teaching:
“It helped make you think about your teaching in a dynamic and engaged way.” (Tutor participating in pilot)
“I felt the standard of my hand-outs improved due to them being publicly accessed!”, “I was also aware that *anyone* can read my stuff, so took probably more care writing/producing it.,” (Tutor participating in pilot)
“I think carefully now about the kind of sources I use, use more source-based teaching generally, better attribute it, and am more conscious about the variety of approaches to teaching generally.” (Tutor commenting in final tutor survey)
“A general re-orientation of the way in which I approach teaching, to make far greater - and hopefully more creative - use of the internet in teaching.” (Tutor commenting in final tutor survey)
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.
More specifically, as mentioned in our Interim Report (Manton, 2012), 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 material13 can restrict activities that would be normal in any other academic context:
“I released far less than I had hoped. Almost all of my handouts contain material still in copyright. I hope to address this (to some degree) in the future.” (Tutor participating in pilot)
This can also prevent participation:
“I am still very interested in the project. However, nearly all of the hand outs I have prepared this term contain quotes from contemporary texts.” (Tutor correspondence with Sesame project team)
More generally some tutors are unclear about what legitimate practice is and what is “cheating”:
“It has changed the way I think about getting teaching resources together; I no longer see using others’ materials as cheating or plagiarism.” (Tutor participating in final focus group)
On a related note, and corroborating data from our OER Impact Study report (White and Manton, 2011), 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. More generally, our tutors discovered much existing bad practice:
“I e-mailed one American professor to ask for his permission to reproduce a diagram from his student resource website, and he replied that it was not his own and he could not remember where it came from!” (Tutor commenting in final tutor survey)
From the experience of the OpenSpires project we were aware that original podcasts and videos produced by tutors are good sources to create OER from as, from a copyright perspective, they are less likely to contain contentious pre-existing materials. 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. While we were able to reduce these barriers to some extent during the Sesame project, for example by investing in recording devices and developed supporting materials to help tutors to use them, this has remained the area where our tutors indicated the greatest desire for additional training and support in our final tutor survey (68% of respondents to our final survey rated their knowledge and skills for producing podcasts as ‘limited’ or ‘none’ and almost all the requests for further training were in this area).
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)
“I feel self-conscious.” (Tutor participating in final focus group)
Clearly this is a valid response which will still resonate with many practitioners, although there is some evidence that this fear declines, with using OER acting as a stepping stone to producing OER.
“I am less wary of them (OER). I am also thinking of how best to make more of my teaching materials available.” (Tutor commenting in final tutor survey)
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)
“I had to stop and draw the line somewhere, or I would have spent a limitless amount of time on this!” (Tutor commenting in final tutor survey)
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.
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