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Summary of Key lessons learned

This page provides a summary of the key lessons learned during UKOER phase three. For more detailed discussion of lessons learned with excerpts from projects see each of the following sections:

Culture & Practice | Releasing & Using OERs | Processes for Sustainability | Impact & Benefits

 

 

1. Culture and Practice

In the past, many sharing and technology change projects were hampered by the attitude of participants, and while negative views of open practices are still the case for many, this is rapidly changing with tutors and senior managers becoming more receptive to open practices and using technology. This shift in attitudes is a major opportunity for projects in this area. However, working with OER [Open Educational Resources] and open practices is not a straight forward process with issues remaining in communication, training, legal, procedural, practical and infrastructural areas. Even for an experienced team such as TALL, working in an institution with a long track record of releasing OER, there were few shortcuts. All of this activity is substantial and meant that the project was not able to leapfrog or simplify many of the stages every OER project has to engage in.  (SESAME Final Report) 

 

1.1 Open Educational Practice (OEP)

• Phase three projects routinely used the term 'open educational practice' with stakeholders and highlight changes in teaching approaches - describing the way open practices impact on pedagogic design and student involvement
• Engaging with OER can have significant impact on educational practice for a range of different stakeholders and this is dependent on the starting point of individuals or communities and their openness to change
• Whilst there is evidence that institutions involved in several phases of UKOER activity have increased awareness and competencies of staff and developed infrastructure to support open educational practices, there is less evidence that this is transferable outside individual institutions
•  Practices are often context specific and interesting lessons have emerged in relation to subject discipline-based practice or around specific groups of practitioner
• Students engaging with OER through project activities revealed increasing awareness of the potential of OEP and appeared to embrace the opportunity to engage in a variety of different ways
• Part-time tutors are practitioners with unique experiences of, and relationships with, their institutions. Engaging with OER and OEP provided new ways to enhance their teaching and professional practices. As in both previous phases of UKOER the notion of allowing people to engage initially in a staged, non-threatening way proved particularly effective with this group
• School teachers (as professionals and students) described a culture of sharing as an 'essential part of their professional identity' but also reported fears of their practice being judged as 'not polished enough' and not being widely aware of or using OER (DEFT final report)
• Open courses, and the rise in interest in this area through the MOOC phenomenon, are bringing a disruptive element to the educational landscape. Opening up existing courses can  provide an excellent opportunity to investigate these aspects and transform existing practice. Experimental approaches could lead to the development of alternative models to MOOCs.
• We have evidence that adopting an open course approach can have significant positive impact on the student experience and a transformative impact on how educators perceive their roles.
• Collaborative approaches  and collective action offer successful strategies to support open education practices

 

1.2 Barriers and Enablers

• Legal constraints around third-party content remains the biggest barrier to both release and use, particularly when re-purposing existing resources created with no regard for open licencing or legal sharing
• Misunderstandings persist about legality of content generally available on the web (in contrast to resources being properly licenced for open use)
• Time constraints remain a significant barrier in both using (re-using and re-purposing) and developing OER
• Concerns about pedagogic fit were highlighted for teachers who felt that creativity may be stifled by reliance on 'off the shelf' resources
• Other barriers such as digital literacies and staff insecurities were increasingly identified as areas which could yield significant impact if addressed and improved through appropriate institutional or community support 
• The complexity of creating and using OER is a barrier for staff without the appropriate support that a funded project can offer
• Individuals appear to need significant support in identifying and adapting existing OER for their own context and although resource banks and community supported initiatives can help with this, institutional support mechanisms may be needed to encourage longer term changes in practice
• One aspect to emerge during this phase has been the impact that having a sense of security can have on openness to sharing,  both in relation to being secure in their own ability to produce content of a high enough quality and of having job security
• For individuals the 'feelgood factor' continues to feature as an important enabler
• The use of champions to take the message forward within related practitioner communities provides opportunities to increase understanding of challenges and provides reassurance to colleagues
• Some academics see OEP as an opportunity to publish more widely
• Financial reward proved to be an enabler for some practitioner groups (Part-time tutors) and also for students. Many projects offered students opportunities to be involved in project activities (including testing, evaluation, and contributing to development of OER)
• Students gained valuable experience and opportunities to develop work-based competences
• Institutional enablers included the provision of flexible approaches and the need to offer time saving opportunities elsewhere
• institutional policies and procedures are needed to support OEP. This may be of particular importance for organisations from other sectors that have not previously addressed issues around OER
• New policies can act as an important signal to staff that this is being supported at a high level in the institution, whilst adaptations to existing policies can indicate a preference for embedding OEP into everyday practice 

 

1.3 Open Partnerships

• Encouraging open partnerships within an institution is a challenge which requires significant change in both culture and practice for both support teams and subject based faculties
• Focusing OER activities within one faculty or department can often be easier to manage because there may be at least some agreement of accepted pedagogic approaches and intentions, and a chance that a culture of sharing may also exist to some extent
• Establishing open partnerships across institutions, particularly with partners from other sectors is challenging and time consuming but reaps substantial reward
• Whilst partners may be convinced of the potential benefits of open practice to support learning, their own organisational infrastructure, cultures and practices may be difficult to alter
• Projects worked with an impressive array of external partners, from commercial publishers and companies to 3rd sector bodies and they had to invest considerable time and energy to begin the process of awareness raising and eliminating some of the barriers
• The initial groundwork made during this phase is impressive but may require ongoing support (particularly funding) to maintain momentum and real long term change in practice with these partners

 

1.4 Practices of Different Stakeholders

• Involving stakeholders in ongoing research and evaluation activities improved engagement and provided tangible ways for partners to contribute
• Taking a digital literacies focus proved to be very effective for engaging staff and students with OEP
• Part-time tutors could not easily attend attend face to face meetings, so utilising existing frameworks, support systems and events proved useful
• Individual visits to each partner site was a necessity for projects working with private companies to establish relationships, document protocols and perceptions (benchmarking) and to identify any specific challenges
• Tapping into existing networks has always been an efficient strategy, with regional networks proving useful for a few projects
• Involving a diverse range of stakeholders provided opportunities to explore attitudes to sharing, releasing and using open content across institutions and highlights particular strengths or barriers affecting some stakeholder groups
• Partnerships usually provided mutual benefits, particularly in endorsing the quality and value of the OER and helping to disseminate or encourage use
• Project activities helped to provide some of the infrastructure to further open sharing and support useful ongoing partnerships
• OER and OEP have also emerged as a useful mechanism to encourage dialogue between organisations that should perhaps already have been working together
• Impact on specific aspects of stakeholder culture relates to how far the organisations (or individual within it) had already engaged with or embraced the notions of openness
• Projects reported significant change in practice for those directly involved in the projects, and long term sustainability and embedding depends to a large extent on those individuals or communities cascading their practices further within their own organisations
• Adopting and supporting Communities of Practice (CoP) approaches supports sustainability, either through focusing community activities around a resource bank or providing other community support activities.

 

2. Releasing and Using OER

Likewise it is also important to consider the OER freedoms (c.f. UNESCO Access2OER report). In that framework, there are three essential freedoms inherent in “open”, which are legal freedom, technical freedom, and educational freedom. Legal freedom embodies licensing, and is the main OER freedom recognised. Technical freedoms include the freedom to access easily, to download, to disaggregate easily, etc. Finally, educational freedom captures whether the resource is sufficiently open for it to be adaptable to various circumstances, and easy to understand and localise. It is also instructive to recast the notion of “access” in terms of “inclusion”, to consider how these OER freedoms facilitate an inclusive approach to OER. These OER freedoms build on each other. Legal freedom is needed to exercise technical freedom, but legal freedom is not sufficient to give technical freedom. Similarly, educational freedom can only be exercised once the conditions of legal and technical freedom have been met, at least to some extent. Overall, this threefold “freedoms”-based approach to OER enables users to take ownership, to change and adapt, and thus to participate as fully as possible and develop their own capabilities.(ORBIT Final report)

 

• OER release in a variety of formats and across multiple platforms improves discoverability and accessibility and allows presentation at different levels of granularity
• Providing alternate pathways through the material increases potential use by different groups
• Participatory development of OER through open platforms offers an agile approach encouraging community engagement and early feedback
• Collaborative development and sharing can ensure that OER are pedagogically appropriate.
• Involving external partners enhanced quality and accessibility of the OER and led to increased understanding across sectors of how OER and OEP can support learning in particular subject disciplines or professional areas
• Open textbooks/eBooks emerged during this phase as a significant format offering personalisation opportunities for users, publishing  opportunities for authors and taps into the current interest from commercial publishers and students
• Designing OER for use on mobile devices is still challenging due to different fluidity, resolution, graphic quality and general working compatibility
• Commercial publishers were keen to be involved and new collaborative partnerships have begun to investigate some of the tensions between OEP and commercial publishing - work is at very early stages and may need additional investment to work through some of the challenges highlighted during project activities
• Involving intended user groups in the development and testing of OER can ensure that they are pedagogically and technically accessible
• Some projects attempted to re-use OER developed during earlier phases of the programme and discovered difficulties as not all of that content was accessible, either due to format choices or barriers of the platform used
• OER producers often have to make compromises when releasing content, for a variety of reasons, which impacts on long term accessibility and re-usability
• Accessibility is not simply a matter of technical interoperability or appropriate licencing, but is a complex mix of factors which requires consideration, experience and time to get right - OER also need effective descriptions, appropriate pedagogic wrappers, helpful and alternative navigational mechanisms and signposting
• There is a general acknowledgment that making OER available as small 'chunks' would enhance re-use and re-purposing
• To encourage discoverability projects tend to focus on appropriate tagging, SEO rankings, effective use of social media, marketing and supporting discovery through community networks
• Making OER available through multiple platforms has led to a high dependence on open feeds and metadata  - this needs to be available to many different systems, services and users and also requires appropriate licensing to ensure discovery and use
• Capturing and managing Paradata (activity data about a learning resource) has continued to feature as an important activity during this phase. Paradata complements existing metadata by providing an additional layer of contextual information and additional information about user activity can help to feed into evaluation activities.
• Whilst most projects were collating a range of existing materials from a variety of sources and stakeholders, some made specific efforts to work with existing OER with varying degrees of success
• Releasing OER for wide-scale use in a global context is often only one of several motivations for OER development. In fact, most UKOER projects had primary intentions to release for a quite specific audience, either in a particular discipline, course or stakeholder group. Projects often focus on requirements of their intended audiences which has an impact on the OER content, presentation, organisation and hosting arrangements. This approach is particularly valid for release by educational institutions, and ensures senior and academic staff buy-in. This can actually have negative impacts on wider use and does result in some OER being less accessible, which presents a very real tension for funders of OER initiatives.
  

Examples of the ways on which this can affect use, re-use and re-purposing include:

• OER to support specific courses which reflect course structures and are difficult to re-use in other contexts
• OER which include references to specific laws or regulations that  are not relevant in other countries
• OER which include specific pedagogic approaches or language that might not be relevant in other context
• OER primarily developed for use within one institution but made open more widely may be less usable in other contexts than anticipated
• OEP and OER can be adopted to support 'endangered subject areas'. - such as practice based art and design subjects, and less widely taught languages 

 

3. Processes for Sustainability

As the programme drew to a close Phil Barker from JISC CETIS posted a message to the UKOER Programme oer-discuss mainilng list asking the following question

But what now? The programme has always aimed at sustainable release of resources, change of culture and practice, not just a short burst of activity leading to a one-off dumping of resources. What will happen over the next few years by way of sustained release and which practices are sustainable? Also, of course, from a CETIS point of view, what technologies can help?

This prompted a a seemingly simple question about continued use of the ukoer tag, which developed into the great ukoer tag debate (see the blog post by Lorna Campbell from JISC CETIS) that highlighted the strength of the UKOER community and raised questions about how that community might continue to work together beyond the funded period. This community existed to some extent before the programme (following JISC funded work on repositories, metadata and learning resources and activities, and also from work done by HE Academy Subject Centres) and is in many ways a natural grouping of individuals with expertise and interest in these areas.  The UKOER programme did help to draw together these communities in a new way, partly through the approach to project support that meant much of this expertise was available to projects throughout the programme via the support teams (JISC Cetis, JISC Legal, Jorum team, SCORE, Evaluation and synthesis team, Web2Rights Team). However, the Community has grown as project members have developed their own areas of expertise, brought new insights and viewpoints and been very open to sharing their own practices. This is quite a significant outcome of the programme. 

 

3.1 Institutional Processes

• Existing institutional policies for IPR, Teaching, learning and assessment, quality and marketing may need to be adapted to incorporate OER and OEP into institution-wide practice
• Some institutions have chosen to develop policies specifically on OER or OEP  which can take a long time to develop and usually involve cross-institutional effort - this kind of document gives out clear messages to staff that OER release and use is endorsed and also makes sure that appropriate attention is paid to the institution's reputation and values
• Staff development activities need to focus on raising awareness of benefits, allaying fears of academic staff, ownership and IPR, and technical skills
• Integration OEP into digital literacy activities for staff and students helps sustainability
• Institution-specific guidance documents will be needed to support staff but an be adapted from the range of content already produced by other institutions (made available through the OER infoKit)
• Institutional infrastructure needs to support OEP and embed changing practices
• Collaborative and partnership approaches need to take into account different work practices and cultures and compromise may be required
• Careful nurturing  is needed to maintain commitment levels and interest of partners, and having clear roles and responsibilities helps this
• Some external stakeholders struggle to grasp the notion of OER, especially when they come from the private or public sectors and are unsure of the validity of releasing open resources in the longer term (after project funding ends)

 

3.2 Legal issues

Institutions across the UK and students around the world are poised to take widespread advantage of the culture of open academic practice and massive open online courses (MOOCs). As independent and open access publishing channels are embraced (e.g. Saylor Foundation, 2012; Apple Computer, 2012), journal and textbook publishers are looking for new business models to maintain profit margins and the investment in high quality products from respected authors. The use and re-use of third party resources in education is complicated by legalities of copyright, performance and consent where the law (under review) is out of date in our technological world, consuming more in transaction costs and legal uncertainty than the resources themselves. Institutions are running legal risks as they seek to fulfil their 'offer' to students. Meanwhile learners are accessing free content from all around the world. Should every institution seek to share their learning resources? Should we all use the content provided by MIT and simply accredit it? Could the cost of, say, a medical degree be reduced by accrediting open learning as part of (or prior to) the course? Can we justify the price of our courses for supporting the 'process' of learning? (PublishOER Final Report)

 

• Despite being in the 3rd year of the programme projects still underestimated how much time legal aspects would take, how challenging it was to deal with at an institutional level or how this can impact on the number of materials actually released with an open licence
• Clearing third party content for inclusion in OER remains the most significant challenge for projects, from those working with commercial publishers to those wanting to release simple powerpoint presentations from individual academics
• Often the time and effort to establish provenance and gain clearance for existing materials means that it would have been easier and more efficient to produce resources from scratch 
• Most projects adopted a CC-BY-SA licence although several chose to release some or all content as CC-BY-NC-SA - partner institutions or institutional restrictions sometimes affected licence choice 
  

 

3.3 Sustainability

• Establishing and embedding new curriculum development processes and partnerships within institutions supports sustainability, and these can also incorporate input at various stages from external partners

• Activities to support the embedding of open practices can be summarised as:

• securing senior management support
• linking to institutional vision, strategy and policies
• ensuring that institutional infrastructure supports open practices (including adequate resourcing - particularly acknowledgement that time is a significant factor, technologies to support open release)
• raising awareness of the benefits of open educational practice for all stakeholders
• supporting staff to reconsider their existing practice and providing staff development opportunities to support practice change
• providing some reward and recognition - for example linking to performance review or Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
• new processes to support open practices and articulating new workflows
• providing new conceptual frameworks to support open practice
• providing guidance and resources such as toolkits
• creating new roles or changing existing  roles and responsibilities
• cascading new practice throughout an organisation - through champions, training and awareness raising events
• incorporating open practices into digital literacy  activities
• providing guidance and support to address IPR issues and challenges

 

4. Impact and Benefits

Great Writers inspire has had a significant impact within the Faculty of English as demonstrated by the commitment of the academic leads, the support of a large group of academic contributors and the extensive involvement of the graduate student community. The site provides a single access point to a range of reusable literature resources which are otherwise not easily available in one location. Through their involvement, academic contributors have disseminated their work to thousands of people; something they would find impossible through traditional publishing channels. (Great Writers Final Report)

 

4.1 Benefits of involving external stakeholders

• establishing partnerships that can be ongoing in relation to OER but also in other contexts
• exploring issues of trust, ownership, and rights with other agencies can improve institutional awareness of their own issues and challenges in this area
• new levels of understanding around how external bodies can augment and support curriculum development
• additional content to integrate into learning and teaching materials
• developing sustainable community approaches - either through the provision of supporting technology or networking opportunities
• new understanding around OER release and use through evaluation with external partners - passed on to the wider community through standard research mechanisms, events and publications
• providing opportunities for staff and students to engage with key agencies or groups that may enhance their own learning or future opportunities

 

4.2 Benefits of OER

Learners can benefit from:

• enhanced quality and flexibility of resources
• seeing/applying knowledge in a wider context than their course would otherwise allow, e.g. international dimension
• freedom of access (e.g. at work/home/on placement) and enhanced opportunities for learning
• support for learner-centred, self-directed, peer-to-peer and social/informal learning approaches
• skills development (e.g. numeracy) through release of generic OER that can be re-used and re-contextualised in different subject areas
• the opportunity to test out course materials before enrolling – and compare with other similar courses
• opportunities to be involved in OER initiatives either through contributing towards OER development, testing or evaluation, marketing activities, acting as an ambassador for OER with other learners or staff
• authentic or 'real-life' learning experiences through OER that link to employer or professional sector activities

 

The OER originator can benefit from:

• student/user feedback and open peer review
• reputational benefits, recognition
• benefits (efficiency and cultural) of collaborative approaches to teaching/learning
• opportunities to work across sectors, institutions and subject disciplines
• increased digital literacies (particularly around IPR)
• reaching a wider range of learners

 

Other staff/users can benefit from:

• availability of quality peer reviewed material to enhance their curriculum
• collaborative approaches to teaching/learning (CoPs)
• professional/peer-to-peer learning about the processes of OER release
• increased dialogue within their organisation or with other peers in the sector and globally
• preservation and availability of materials for endangered subjects
• open access to legacy materials

 

Educational Institutions can benefit from:

• recognition and enhanced reputation
• wider availability of their academic content and focus on the learning experience (linking to widening participation agenda)
• increased capacity to support remote students
• efficiencies in content production (particularly around generic content that can be used across subject areas)
• new partnerships/linkages with other institutions and organisations outside the education sector
• increased sharing of ideas and practice within the institution, including greater role for support services
• a buffer against the decline of specific subjects or topics (which may not be sustainable at institutional level but can be sustained across several institutions through shared resources)
• supporting sustainability of legacy materials
• increased understanding of IPR
• new relationships with students as they become collaborators in  OER production, release and use

 

Other sectors can benefit from: (eg, employers, public bodies, private bodies, 3rd sector)

• access to re-purposable content
• input to scoping, development and endorsement of OER in their focus area
• new potential partnerships with content providers and other sectors
• upskilling - increased understanding of IPR, curriculum development and learning technologies
• understanding of customer needs (for example, commercial publishers  finding out what kinds of OER and learning resources are wanted by teachers and/or learners)
• understanding that OER can be matched to existing organisational strategies or linked to their own marketing and reputational efforts
• understanding that their resources can have significant benefits in an educational context

 

4.3 Impact on Staff involved in projects

• Academic staff have had to reconsider their own practice around the use, creation and re-purposing of learning resources
• Academic staff have also been involved in conversations with other stakeholders that have had an impact on curriculum development and on the kinds of resources they release
• Academic staff have worked with technical teams to consider new ways to make their resources open, discoverable and accessible
• Academic staff involved in the provision and support of open courses have had to reconsider their own, and student's roles in the learning and teaching process. New roles have emerged around curation and the move from a didactic broadcast model to one of participation and collaboration
  
• Improved digital literacies, particularly around IPR and licencing and technical skills
• Enhanced professional profiles of academic staff
• Increased access to a range of OER -  It is interesting to see the wide range of subject areas covered by all phases of the programme
• Potential for linking OER to academic research activities  

 

4.4 Impact on Students

• Opening up existing courses can transform the student experience where collaborative content production and open participation with a range of practitioners and scholars enhances professional networks, stimulates creativity and provides opportunities for peer review
• Students are an important stakeholder group as intended recipients of OER and increasingly as co-producers or collaborators in production and release. Many projects employed students or had volunteers in some capacity to support the projects, most often as evaluators and co-producers, but also as interns involved in marketing, dissemination, and design. The latter provided excellent work-related experiences for the students as well as mutual benefits for the projects
• Linking OER to digital literacy also emerged as an important focus with students. Student awareness of OER increased, as well as their understanding around content creation, appropriate licencing and the value of open sharing
• Some students have concerns and misunderstandings around OER - fears about OER replacing face to face contact or about having paid for something that others can access for free
• School students raised different kinds of issues in relation to contributing to production of OER - logistical and ethical issues around e-safety and e-safeguarding requiring parental permissions

 

 

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