Evidence - Impact on various stakeholders

 

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How have OER or the OER release process benefited your stakeholders? How have your stakeholders' appreciation of the benefits of OERs changed through involvement in the project?   In what ways has your approach to OER release and re-use enhanced the profile and reputation of your institution?  In what ways other than reputation, have OER release and re-use benefited your institution? Broader impact

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Impacts & benefits - benefits, and appreciation of benefits by stakeholders, institutions, students

 

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)

 

How have OER or the OER release process benefited your stakeholders?

• It is important to acknowledge that project funding to develop OER has had a very positive impact on the way we work internally within Doncaster College. We have been able to build on previous collaborative ways of working established during the SPACE project with the FusedWorks team, curriculum staff and students. Doncaster College has also developed some strong external partnerships which we aim to maintain. We are keen to benefit from the valuable input to align on-going curriculum development needs with those of wider sector partners. There is potential for these partnerships to go beyond resource creation and use and be mutually beneficial in other contexts. (ReACTOR Final report)
• for subject disciplines like this the value of developing strong collaborative partnerships with sector skills councils and private companies is evidenced by our approach. The value lies in both the OER released, the closer alignment of curriculum and industry needs, the dissemination and use of the resources and the future potential that such partnerships offer in other areas (ReACTOR Final report) 
• We discovered that many colleges have previously invested in physical examples of the various components (such as solar panels) and that using REaCTOR resources as an alternative could generate cost savings. This is particularly relevant for some technologies which are very expensive, hard to obtain or that are very large, such as wind turbine components. (ReACTOR Final report)
• The resources have proved to be of high value within the subject discipline and we expect other colleges to use the resources, as they present significant value for staff and students, as well as potentially offering cost savings to institutions, which would not need to purchase demonstration models of components. Most individual institutions would not have the resources (offered by this project funding) or specialist partner input to create such high quality 3D materials. (ReACTOR Final report)

• The project has made a powerful step forwards for OER/P engagement in the UAL and amongst the partners and the ADM community in general. It has also explored some innovative solutions to sustainability in this sector. The idea of a creating a shared service to provide an online space for Art Colleges to work and benefit from the OER/P ‘economy’ is a viable one (from feedback received) and needs to be explored further.  
  (ALTO Final Report)

• OER/P engagement is a powerful driver for positive change in HE/FE and encourages greater accountability and transparency – important factors in the current economic and political climate and can help in public relations. For the ADM subject community this can provide a valuable marketing and collaborative opportunity in the UK and internationally that could also bring the following benefits:

•    OER/P related activities should continue to be supported, as it provides a powerful way of driving the reform and opening up of higher and further education and the cultural change needed to support this. 

 •    Involvement with OER/P can provide a good basis for the development of flexible and distance learning capacity in the HE/FE sector as it involves developing many of the essential skills and capacity required (i.e. pedagogic design, shareable representation of the curriculum and effective digital resource management) (ALTO Final Report)

•  OER Creators/Owners/Publishers. Students and staff involved in this project are now much more aware of the IPR, Copyright and Privacy issues involved and how they need to be attended to early on in the process. The publisher partners are more amenable to releasing some of their content under Creative Commons licences and like the idea of a project like this being a ‘sandpit’ to explore options and new market possibilities – we are exploring continuing the relationship to facilitate this for mutual benefit. (ALTO Final Report)

• Endangered subjects will benefit from a simple and scalable means of capturing and preserving knowledge by using the Open CourseBook template (ALTO Final Report)

•  Publishers will be able to benefit from exposure to new markets (particularly FE and community education) and experiment with different models for OER engagement. (ALTO Final Report)

• Kirklees College

•    The Applied Arts Dept. are using the approaches we used in our workshops and the Open CourseBook experience to redesign their ceramics courses for revalidation and they are exploring more flexible form of delivery
•    Are intending to produce and use more online video and use what they have produced in the project with their own students. First year students are now routinely videoing demonstrations by their tutors and technicians and their work in the studio
•    Taking a more organised approach to learning resource management – using file naming conventions and organising folders
•    Now aware of the Creative Commons licence system and using it (ALTO Final Report)

• Heriot Watt University, School of Textiles and Design

•    Staff are using the approaches we used in our workshops and the Open CourseBook experience to redesign courses to cope with the effect of redundancies – by enabling more effective and consistent representation and sharing of courses and learning resources. Instructional videos and other materials created in the project are going to be used with students during this academic year as a way of maintaining quality and extending study opportunities outside the workshop see this link for an example.

•    Flexible delivery options and course redesign using the lesson learnt during this project are being actively explored to cope with a rapidly changing market for these subjects.  (ALTO Final Report)

• Brighton

•    Staff at the HEA ADM subject centre (now closed) at Brighton had the opportunity to carry out OER/P awareness-raising and focus group work in their own institution, using the techniques developed in their involvement in the two previous OER programmes.
•    As part of their involvement in the ALTO UK project the ADM centre organised a national UK Art OER conference ‘Drawing on All Resources’ (please see the outputs section above), which was a great success and demonstrated a need for shared UK HE Arts online platform. This has put OER/P firmly on the agenda at Brighton where discussions are underway to incorporate a commitment to OER/P engagement into institutional policy.
•    Brighton University has agreed to continue supporting the online ADM community magazine activities of the old ADM centre and we are in discussion with them about how this might be incorporated into a national shared online service for the UK ADM sector, as envisaged in the original ALTO UK project proposal.

• Publishers

•    Both publishers were surprised at the size of the FE market for ADM subjects and in the past had been focussing more on HE, as it was more ‘visible’ to them. Both are interesting in using future involvement both as a marketing tool and as a way of gaining market intelligence.

• Bright Lemon

•    Prior to this project Bright Lemon were unaware of the OER movement and during this project they have gained a greater insight and are now examining this area as a potential future market. (ALTO Final Report)

• The resources produced for the Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education include a set of OERS mapped to the UK Professional Standards Framework. These have been incorporated in a sister project Digital Literacy and Creativity for university teachers undertaken at University of Bedfordshire whose aim was to design a module for teachers in HE addressing digital literacy. Elements of this have been incorporated in the PGCertHE at the lead institution, Sheffield Hallam University and dissemination of approaches to OER have resulted in the identification of OER as a focus for a funded pilot for OERs in the curriculum within the faculty of Development and Society. (DeFT Final Report)
•  A number of the case studies incorporated elements of collaboration between the schools and the local community organisations, highlighting the potential of OERs and open practices for the public sector. For instance, two of the case studies - at Halfway Junior School and Winterhill High School explored the use of QR (Quick Response) codes to enhance digital literacy skills of pupils. The Halfway case study was based around a treasure hunt where the children used mobile devices to find QR codes in Heathlands Park, and follow clues to find a story. The pupils at Winterhill created open resources to accompany exhibits in the Fire Pavilion at Magna Science Adventure Centre; the visitors will be able to access the resources via QR codes attached next to exhibits. Through these collaborations, the schools cascaded and modelled open practices, and also created a more long-term foundation for future involvement - in both cases, the collaborative work will continue beyond the lifetime of the project (DeFT Final Report)
•  The work undertaken within the schools also seems to have a positive impact on parents - the feedback from dissemination events held at participating schools indicated that parents expressed an interest in learning more about digital technologies and ways in which these could support both their children's learning but also their professional and personal life. (DeFT Final Report)
• Increased pool of language learning and teaching resources (FAVOR Final Report)
• Increased interest in sharing resources from other language teachers (FAVOR Final Report)
• Both the project team and the academic leads benefitted from fruitful discussions on scope, target audience and more detailed debate on content. The academic leads played an important part in being the project’s representatives within the Faculty, and were central to on-going discussions about the longer-term future of the site (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• Introduction by the academic leads was essential to gaining the support of their colleagues. It seems that peer-to-peer contact solicits a more favourable response when asking for contributions (a lower level of success was achieved if Student Ambassadors or indeed the project team approached academics directly). (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• As a result of this project a huge corpus of literature resources with a variety of media types has been collected together and made freely available for reuse, remixing and repurposing for the benefit of teaching and learning worldwide. Packaging existing OER with new content and placing it with an academic wrapper makes previously dispersed content episodes more meaningful and therefore more useable for a wider audience. (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• The Sesame project hoped that by collecting and releasing OER through the activity of the Weekly Classes programme, we would provide new learning materials to wider society, and on many levels it is clear that this has been achieved. However, our ability to gauge the potential use and thus the impact of the resource on wider society has been limited. The project has only been in a position to actively promote its outputs from the start of October 2012 and the interface with wider portals such as podcasts.ox.ac.uk or Jorum is not yet complete. We know that the Sesame platform has attracted over 4,700 unique visitors and we will continue to track this once the project is complete and the outputs have been more widely disseminated. (SESAME Final Report)
•  The ORBIT project was a timely project. The new national primary curriculum was published during the funded period of the project. This curriculum is restrictive in core subjects, but flexible in other subjects. In response, we are seeing many schools becoming academies, and needing further resources. The ORBIT resources are timely and will offer valuable guidance to teachers having to adapt to new circumstances. Although the secondary curriculum has not been announced just yet, it is expected to be similar to the primary curriculum in outlook, and therefore the secondary resource within the ORBIT wiki will be just as relevant. This is indeed a time of change for ITE with a bigger focus on school-based training. Likewise, professional development will increasingly be organised by schools as groups, rather than central or local government organisations. (ORBIT Final report)
•  In summary, our evaluations, research and observations have highlighted SIX important areas for the OER community to consider, three of which demonstrate the impact and value of working in open education for all involved (staff, students, prospective students, collaborators) and three highlighting barriers to the success and sustainability of open education activities moving forward.

•    OERs enhance staff and student experiences and opportunities
•    OERs are the ideal vehicle for widening participation and access to education
•    OERs enhance collaborative opportunities and working
•    Open practices need to be scaled-up and sustained within institutions
•    OERs need to be discoverable and technically “open” for use and reuse

•    Tensions and opportunities between open education and the publishing industry requires further exploration (HALS OER Final Project Report)

• Involving schools and colleges in OER activities has raised awareness of the existence of OER, and been a vehicle for informing prospective students about university courses and subjects. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• Working relationships with external collaborators will continue to grow, and the mutual benefits in terms of education and research will emerge with time. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• With benefits such as efficiency savings, promotional opportunities and enhancement of the student experience, Open Nottingham is designed to foster increased use, reuse and publication of OER by staff and students across the university and beyond. It aims to improve the understanding of what impact OER has on teaching and learning and to measure the effectiveness of open resources as a promotional tool. (PARiS Final report) 
• Although the Ear Foundation was initially cautious about the concept, it realised commercial viability may be maintained while increasing peoples access to information. The project encouraged staff to use skills in a new way by creating content for interactive modules and working with an external company. It also ensured that materials previously charged for, were released in an adaptable format and for free.
  The initial evaluation of the resources released, which are discussed in section 3.4 of this report, has judged them to be very valuable for both parents and professionals. The Ear Foundation will continue to incorporate OER into its working practices, and has committed itself to a further set of deliverables that they will self-fund (PARiS Final Report)

• Impact of PublishOER
  

• Development of more robust ‘risk managed’ approaches and advice especially in relation to VLE and recorded lectures;
• Raised awareness of copyright infringement in the HE sector;
• Recorded the current position of publishers (those who participated) regarding OER;
• Identification of potential business models for embedding third party published works in OER;
• Developed a prototype technology for supporting new ways of embedding third party published works in OER;
•  Better understanding of how students see and use content, and to get feedback about what they want. There is plenty of scope to extend this work to map where students are aiming to be, and what technology they have versus what staff would like them to achieve, or think is good for their students! (PublishOER Final Report)
• Elsevier has appointed an OER champion, who would be required to leverage some commonality of approach across publishers and involve trade associations in realising the agreement around a common licencing framework; (PublishOER Final Report)
• Elsevier has reviewed their open access policy across a range of products and services; (PublishOER Final Report)
• Elsevier, Nottingham and the RVC would undertake a year-long trial involving the donation of 17 textbooks onto 20 iPads for students to borrow, in order to investigate further what students wanted in terms of delivery of content; (PublishOER Final Report)
• Continued collaboration between Elsevier and Newcastle, to work in medicine and dentistry, likely to involve piloting the technology using content from open access journals; (PublishOER Final Report)
• Consideration of embedding published works in MOOCs and associated support materials; (PublishOER Final Report)
• Rather than changing the attitudes of these stakeholders, it has strengthened links with the University through inviting them into the production of the OER and engaging in the idea of explaining business and entrepreneurship to our target age group.  SSU is coming to the end of a major project involving issues of employer engagement and student employability led by a Deputy Vice Chancellor. From this there is a strong, university-wide commitment, which we can engage in, to establish ways to sustain these links.  (Future in business Final Report)
•  At the outset of the project we saw how much material produced about any business that is in the public domain always came back to selling that business.  This made it inappropriate for use in education.  Recruiting business people, entrepreneurial colleagues and students to engage in the project has produced a resource in which there is relevant and helpful discussion about what working in an SME is like, its opportunities and how to benefit from this and the process of starting up a business. (Future in business Final Report)

 

How have your stakeholders' appreciation of the benefits of OERs changed through involvement in the project?  

• Working with external partners, and particularly the NHS have been very enthusiastic providers of OER, and completely understand the philosophy behind it. There have been no barriers in terms of gaining © approval to use the Creative Commons licence from any of our partners. (HALS OER Interim Report)
•  Raised awareness of the benefits of OER to partners who had previously not heard of the concept. The notion of open sharing has been discussed in detail and the efforts of the team to engage commercial partners has been significant and resulted in openness to colleges and educational institutions using some of their resources in learning and teaching materials. (ReACTOR Final report)

• 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)
• Awareness around OER and Open practice remains low outside the project team within the educational institutions and much lower in wider sectors. A significant part of our early activities were around awareness raising. Funded OER projects support awareness raising and provide collections of exemplars to persuade people of the value of open sharing of learning resources. (ReACTOR Final report)
•  By working with external collaborators, we have high-quality life science OERs that will mutually benefit both organisations, by being available for both undergraduate science teaching and staff continuing professional development. (HALS OER Final Project Report) 
• The wider academic community has access to life science resources for example the FastTrack haematology analyser that they otherwise would not be able to access. Resources professionally endorsed by the Forensic Science society, a repository for midwifery OER and an archive of histology and histopathology images are similar such examples. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• HALS has enabled a publisher to initiative discussions with directors and their organisation regarding open educational resources, and whilst the impact of our OER has yet to be evaluated, has raised some interesting thoughts about types of author contract and how Creative Commons licenses might be applied in the future. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• Unanticipated benefits - relationships between academics and publishers - need to continue (PublishOER Educational Workshop)
• Benefits to publishers -
• increased understanding of what students need
• Promote their products!
• exposure of their content
• increased understanding of how academics want to use their content in teaching and learning
• Publishers recognise the changing environment, and new ways of accessing their content
• market research plus extras! (PublishOER Educational Workshop)
• What we didn't anticipate, at the outset, was how important authors were -publishers checked back with them for many different things it was a really close relationship (PublishOER Educational Workshop)
• As part of the COMC project we have been keen to improve our awareness of the general trends that form the context of OER/OEP. The department has committed its own resources (external to the JISC project) to this activity. We have worked with an external partner to produce a draft scoping report on the field. This will inform a publication in the near future. Together with our own growing awareness of related projects and developments – acquired during the deliver of the COMC project we are aware of some major trends which are influencing our thinking during this evaluation phase. (COMC Final report)

 

In what ways has your approach to OER release and re-use enhanced the profile and reputation of your institution?

•  OER/P can be an effective marketing tool for international and UK students and help students make more informed course decisions by seeing what actually happens in the courses they are considering applying to (ALTO Final Report)

• Raised profile of LLAS and the lead institution, Southampton (FAVOR Final Report)

• We have made more links with business, bringing more business people into contact with the university and into knowledge of OERs.  Rather than changing the attitudes of these stakeholders, it has strengthened links with the University through inviting them into the production of the OER and engaging in the idea of explaining business and entrepreneurship to our target age group.  SSU is coming to the end of a major project involving issues of employer engagement and student employability led by a Deputy Vice Chancellor. From this there is a strong, university-wide commitment, which we can engage in, to establish ways to sustain these links.  (Future in business Final Report)

   

 

 In what ways other than reputation, have OER release and re-use benefited your institution?

• One positive impact on Doncaster College is that our experience of establishing student internships resulted in a college-wide change of practice and the establishment of a new student internship programme. This provides valuable opportunities to experience paid work in real contexts, at a time when job opportunities are scarce. (ReACTOR Final report) 
• The Fusedworks team brought forward experiences from the previous OER phase 2 project but continued to learn about OER commissioning processes, aligning curriculum needs with wider sector requirements, developing OER for mobile platforms, engaging and nurturing stakeholders, relationship management, balancing stakeholder needs and expectations, working in collaborative partnerships and project risk management. (ReACTOR Final report) 
• It is hoped that our positive experiences of working with partners like sector skills councils and private companies may encourage other educational institutions to realise the potential benefits of taking this approach. This does require significant effort and it can be challenging to manage expectations to balance the needs of curriculum with the needs of industry partners. We feel that the benefits are worth the effort involved as it may help to align curriculum needs with those of employers. (ReACTOR Final report)
• In this respect it has achieved success in acting as a lightening rod around which a number of diverse discussions have begun in areas including IPR policy and awareness, digital literacy, developing staff skills in instructional design, bridging the gap between managing learning resources (as OERs) and research data and outputs in HE, and exploring personal and disciplinary differences in educational philosophy. ALTO final report
• The growing amount of openly licensed content helps provide an efficiency and value for money argument, which is important in the current economic climate.  ALTO final report  
• This disruptive effect is potentially very useful to those involved in instigating and managing change in educational institutions. Linking OER/P engagement to change management is a useful strategy to employ and some studies and toolkits to support this would be useful (linked to previous work). (ALTO Final Report)
• IPR policy review underway to accommodate OER/P engagement – interim report sates that there should be a ‘presumption of openness in academic activities’ (ALTO Final Report)
• Senior management have requested a policy statement to be drawn up to encourage OER/P engagement by staff and students
• Senior management are actively exploring joining the OCWC (ALTO Final Report)
• Internal course handbooks are being redesigned into one consistent and simple format based on the ALTO UK Open CourseBook format (ALTO Final Report)
• CLTAD (Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design) the project host organisation at the UAL has developed a postgraduate study option in  ‘Open Educational Practice’ for the UAL Continuing and Professional Development Framework and PG Cert. in HE Teaching – available to UAL staff and ADM teaching staff in the UK (ALTO Final Report)
• CLTAD management have realised that OER/P engagement is a powerful educational development tool as it promotes deep reflection and are incorporating it into their strategic planning priorities (ALTO Final Report)
• The UAL is switching to a new VLE (based on Moodle) and it is being proposed, as a result of ALTO UK project, that the default ‘share’ option will be open. This means that the contents of all the courses will be open to all the staff and students – this is a large step for a highly collegiate institution like the UAL. (ALTO Final Report)
• As a part of the new UAL Moodle development it is proposed to encourage teachers to use the UAL learning resource repository (Filestore) to store their course content in and reserve the use of the course space in Moodle for student activities and teaching activities, this is quite a radical step (ALTO Final Report)
• The new VLE and the e-Portfolio system are being integrated with the UAL learning resources repository system. This will provide the ability for teachers and students to select relevant resources and release them to the world under a Creative Commons licence from within the VLE and e-Portfolio systems – thus lowering the threshold to OER/P engagement. This is as a result of the ALTO UK project being involved in the system design discussion at an early stage. It was also supported by the work of a JISC OERRI  project ‘Portfolio Commons’ that developed the use of the SWORD protocol to implement this . (ALTO Final Report)
• •    We will organise meetings with senior management at SHU (heads of Learning, Teaching and Assessment and Deans of Faculties) to brief them on issues emerging from the project and benefits of embedding OERs at institutional level
  •    We will explore the possibility of embedding resources created within the project as part of PGCE curriculum at participating universities
  •    The Faculty of Development and Society at Sheffield Hallam University has made a commitment to support an institutional OER project as part of its Learning, Teaching and Assessment strategy  (DeFT Final Report)
• All of the project coordinators reported an improved understanding of the of the issues facing part-time hourly paid tutors challenges and issues which part-time language tutors in HE face. They were all impressed with the enthusiasm and professionalism of the tutors and have reported their intention to find ways to continue working together and to find opportunities to engage tutors in the academic life of their institutions - beyond simply teaching. (external evaluator’s report) (FAVOR Final Report)
• Enhanced collegiate feelings and connections made (FAVOR Final Report) 
• Re-consideration of practices and policies (FAVOR Final Report) 
• Increased engagement with open practice from other staff (FAVOR Final Report) 
• Raised profile of language tutors’ work (FAVOR Final Report)
• Work on Great Writers Inspire has had unforeseen benefits across the University:
• Ebooks within the OTA are disseminated to a wider audience. The project has also facilitated improved display and download options (e.g. a Kindle version was not previously available).
• Texts within the Bodleian Libraries Google Books collection are made available to a wider public audience (only otherwise available through an internal-facing library catalogue system).
• Several Bodleian Library talks were recorded and made available by the project, reinvigorating their podcasting activities and making these talks available for reuse globally. (Great Writers Final Report)
• We anticipated that, once completed, the project would enable us to be more effective by offering considerably more to our students and the wider world with minimal extra resource required from the Weekly Classes Office. This certainly has been a major achievement of the project. Previous attempts to design sustainable online provision for the Weekly Classes programme had failed from being too costly to implement, whereas with the pump priming from the Sesame project we have developed tools and processes that will allow the Department to support this provision at a cost we are confident the programme can sustain. (SESAME Final Report)
• the project has raised the profile of OER such that the subject is discussed frequently at the Department’s academic committees, and this enhanced profile has led to requests for more effort in this area.  (SESAME Final Report)
• Finally the site has been designed to increase efficiency going forward, resources can easily be used in multiple courses, and courses themselves can be reused and updated year-on-year, as required. At an individual resource level the project has implemented a simple online mechanism to allow users to report out of date or inaccurate resources allowing us to track the currency of our provision for minimal resource. (SESAME Final Report)
• To complement our library provision, this project has enabled us to make available easily accessible online resources and to improve the skill set of many of our tutors, staff and students to better prepare them for future engagement with technology in their teaching and learning. (SESAME Final Report)
• At a programme level, the project has also had an impact on the evolution of the weekly classes more generally enabling the programme to use technology effectively to support the delivery of its courses. From book boxes to online courses, the programme has had to adapt to meet the demands of current and future students as well as meeting the challenges necessitated by the changing funding regimes in higher education. The Sesame project has enabled us to provide a resource for our existing students, and at the same time support our mission of opening Oxford scholarship to a greater degree than ever before, thus acting as an enhancement for continuing education more generally. (SESAME Final Report) (SESAME Final Report) 
• From the outset, the Sesame site (http://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/) was designed as a portal that could support OER from a wider range of Departmental activity than just the Weekly Classes programme, and extending this work remains a key aim of the Department. This broader commitment was evidenced during a recent Departmental review. The Departmental reviews occur approximately every six years and in its response to the 2012 review, the Department cited the production and use of OER as a key activity in the Department, bringing the project’s work to wider attention within the University at Pro-Vice-Chancellor level. (SESAME Final Report)
• The HALS project has continued to raise awareness of open education across De Montfort University and continued to spark discussion around open practices and the use of electronic learning resources. HALS has involved academic staff and students, as well as university services and senior management. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• The Faculty of Health and Life Science programme teams and students have an abundance of good-quality electronic teaching materials available for use as part of learning and teaching. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• The Centre for Open Education at De Montfort University will continue to grow open educational practices and be involved in activities to embed OER within curricula. The centre will provide a hub for research and publication around OER. (HALS OER Final Project Report)
• The work to convert four of the newly created sustainability modules into iBooks and eBooks also has potential future impact. Feedback has resulted in requests for additional books in other areas of the University. The Marketing and Communications department is also now assessing the viability of producing a prospectuses iBook. From an OER perspective, eBook production also offers a way to enhance the Nottingham OER publication model as well as supporting reward and recognition in relation to OER. Currently, the OER model at Nottingham focusses on converting resources that are actively used within the University into OER and releasing the materials on the U-Now website in reusable formats. This is a mature publication model with over 70% of schools now having an open publication presence. By also offering to convert the OER materials created following the existing process into iBooks and eBooks it is likely to augment the popularity of publishing OER, with academic authors receiving an ISBN publication in return for submitting module material. This has direct links with reward and recognition where academics gain a diverse publication profile through involvement in OER. Not all materials will be appropriate for iBook and eBook conversion, but this opportunity will be explored by the Open Nottingham team over the period of 2012/13. (PARiS Final Report)
• For the Ear Foundation strand, future impact includes the potential for the Foundation to continue opening up content, and to leverage OER content to support commercial publication.  (PARiS Final Report)
• The project has brought forward questions within the University on what should be copyright and what could be made available for open use. How video material could be better stored and catalogued in a repository is now recognised as an area for action by the University.  (Future in business Final Report)
•  During the project we realised that although the University has a strong interest in social enterprise this was not being reflected in our material.  Realising this we moved to bring the views and insights of a key local social entrepreneur and one of our interns running a small social enterprise into the project.  The project now represents this small but important element of enterprise and so engages with students for whom this may be an importance aspect of their business career. (Future in business Final Report)
• Knowledge of OER’s has spread as more colleagues in the Southampton Business School have made contributions through filming and in giving advice to the team.  (Future in business Final Report)

 

Broader impact

• The rising tide – there is a series of very large organisations e.g. News Corp – via  Amplify; Coursera; Kahn Academy etc etc - often funded by the largest player in the web (e.g. Google) which are moving quickly into the field of education – often using Open Resources as a lever. This change will profoundly affect the nature of the voluntary educational landscape – which in turn will significantly impact universities. There is an approaching transformation of the higher educational landscape – either directly through approaches like ours, or indirectly by virtue of the profound transformation of the expectations and assumption of participants in (higher) education. Given the direction from which this tide is coming and the strength of those driving it a simple response would be that we must ‘learn to swim /surf’, rather than running. Put otherwise, we can indeed must acknowledge and anticipate this large-scale trend and actively manage our position with reference to it.    (COMC Final Report)
• The adoption curve / the unevenly distributed future  -  there are specific challenges and difficulties engendered by the fact that even within one department there are large variations in the awareness, acknowledgement and engagement with the ‘Open’ agenda. Therefore, as each individual/group is at a different point on the adoption curve it is actually quite difficult for colleagues to easily share information and mentor/support each other.       (COMC Final Report) 
• There is relatively little sense of wider awareness of the emerging issues posed by Open Education in the HE sector – by which we mean the broader implications indicated above - as well as the specific ones raised by Open classes. The new economic/cost Models are not at all developed within the HE sector. There is very little discussion of this, or of the potential impact on HE of the proliferation of new, distributed educational resources and their largely ‘non-educational’ sources. This constitutes a significant risk, both to the near-term development of OER/OEP and to the medium term development of HE.    (COMC Final Report)