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See also

Evidence - Legal Issues

Evidence - Sustainability

Processes for sustainability

Institutional processes

institutional/organisational policies and processes

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)

Institutional processes

What changes in the policies of your institution or partner organisations have you observed as a result of involvement in OER?

• The project employed student interns to support activities which has had been an exciting part of the project and led to a new college-wide approach and policy for Doncaster college to work with students in this way. This approach aims to harness the abilities and skills of these interns and provides real life experiences and opportunities for new graduates to enhance their CVs. (ReACTOR Final report)

• A UAL IPR policy that will be clearer, less ambiguous, that specifically recognise OER/P as a scholarly activity and makes provision for it (ALTO Final Report)
• Work is also being undertaken to embed OER activities in the Department’s Five-Year Strategic plan and its Access and Widening Participation strategy and, as part of this work, we will develop a Departmental OER strategy statement. In particular, this will build on work that was undertaken in parallel with the Sesame project, and has seen significant financial investment in classroom infrastructure and technology that enables recording and streaming of lectures and seminars. The purpose of the investment is to facilitate our ability to offer a significant amount of OER material in the future. As a result, our lecture theatre and principal teaching rooms will shortly be equipped to enable the simplified recording and sharing of material. (SESAME Final Report)
• The Sesame project has proved to be a catalyst and has supported the creation of momentum that will lead to refinement of the Department’s historical mission. Not only will the Department offer courses face-to-face and online, but it will repurpose and offer an increasing amount of OER material online for the benefit of learners globally. The Department will also, in conjunction with the activities in the University’s IT Services group and elsewhere in the University, continue to raise the profile of OER and open practices across the institution and build the case for ongoing support. (SESAME Final Report)
• HALS has continued to drive our university cultural change with project activities raising awareness at all levels – students, staff and senior executive.  This is feeding into an institutional policy and strategy for the scaling-up of OER. Future activity will be directed through a Faculty of Health and Life Science “Centre for Open Education” which is part of the faculty strategic plan 2012. (HALS OER Final Project Report) 

How has your institution supported staff to adopt open practices?

What institutional enablers and barriers to adoption of open practices have you encountered and how you have addressed them?

• Need for HE institutional ‘buy in’ with regards to the uptake of the 30 credit online module. To this end, the 30 credit module and it’s 9 units have been structured into the three blocks of 10 credits, to provide more flexibility and each individual ‘unit’ can be taken as a standalone unit too. (Digital Literacy in Creativity Interim Report) 
• At a project partner meeting (with a pro VC responsible for learning and teaching) and the user needs analysis survey, the following issues were identified: HE institutions have a great deal of variation in their PG Certs in HE and CPD opportunities for HE staff, in terms of the structure, organisation and delivery modes of the these. (Digital Literacy in Creativity Interim Report) 
• It is a challenge to get institutions to look at and adopt the new 30 credit online module on ‘Digital literacy and creativity’. In the meeting with the pro VC and other stakeholders the discussion highlighted institutional barriers and differences between HEI’s approaches to the ‘up skilling’ of a HE tutors with respect to digital technologies and their use for learning and teaching. (Digital Literacy in Creativity Interim Report)
•  Project based on (and is providing evidence to support) the notion that the barriers to technology-enhanced learning are primarily pedagogic rather than technical.  Its purpose is to explore how to refocus staff time on the participative elements of learning.  For many staff this challenges their underpinning conceptual framework of learning and teaching. (BLOCKeD Interim Report)

What issues have you encountered in developing and sharing collections of OERs across institutional/sectoral boundaries and how have you addressed them?

• A significant aspect of the project was the diverse range of stakeholders working in partnership to scope, design and contribute to the OER, including several further and higher education institutions, curriculum staff, students, sector skills councils, the Higher Education Academy and a range of commercial companies. We invested a lot of time with potential users of the resources before development. This ensured that the resulting OER reflect sector and college needs, are of sufficient pedagogic quality to support a range of existing courses and have a user base already committed to using them in a variety of learning and teaching contexts. We also had a series of discussions with private/public sector organisations to confirm the accuracy of the resources and identify existing resources that could be collected and repurposed. (ReACTOR Final report)

   

What institutional issues and challenges have you met in working with another sector or organisation to develop and release OER, and how have you addressed them?

• Many of our partners found it hard to believe that these resources were being made available as a ‘free’ resource. This raises challenges because it takes significant effort to engage stakeholders deeply enough with OER to raise understanding around deeper nuances of licensing and re-use. It is even more challenging to get institutions to consider that this is a sustainable approach after the funding period. This is particularly true for very high quality, highly produced resources like ours. Despite high interest and involvement of our partners, and some indication that they want to continue the partnerships, their perception is that continued development of this kind of requires additional funding. (ReACTOR Final report)