Back to main report

Back to Evidence - main page

See also 

Evidence - Adoption of open practices

Evidence - Enablers and Barriers

Evidence - Practices of different stakeholders

Culture and practice 

Evidence - Open partnerships

 how practice is changing among OER stakeholders (teachers, learners, support staff, other sectors), and how practice change is being enabled and supported

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)

 In what ways has engaging in open partnerships across institutions, organisations or sectors,affected the practices of your stakeholders?

• From the outset the intended audience for the BLOCKeD workshops was beyond the innovators who have been responsible for much existing work in this area.  Despite the scale of such innovation, it is clear that learning and teaching in the sector remains stubbornly untransformed.  Early analysis of contributions to the BLOCKeD workshops suggests that the majority of the self-selecting participants are either innovators or enthusiastic early adopters.  Publicity for future workshops will further emphasise the intended target audience  (BLOCKeD Interim Report)
•  OER/P engagement provides a source of ‘systemic disruption’ in our institutions which has powerful effects in a number of related dimensions:
  •    Teaching, disciplinary and institutional cultures - in relation to transparency and accountability
  •    IPR awareness and policy
  •    Technical Infrastructure
  •    Management structures
  •    Pedagogy
  •    Marketing
  •    Institutional Strategy
  •    Digital Literacy
  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)
• Intra-institutional collaboration is satisfying and rewarding but rare for part-time tutors - 
  All of the project partners noted how satisfying it was to bring colleagues together to work on the project. Language tutors across different departments (and even in the same department) do not often meet, and hourly-paid tutors are usually present in the department only to teach their classes. (FAVOR Final Report)
• In our evaluation, it was interesting to see multiple tutors reporting that they felt participating in open practices improved their teaching  (SESAME Final Report)
• We encountered great enthusiasm and interest from our part-time tutors in professional development opportunities and one of the most significant attitudinal changes identified between our baseline and final tutor survey was an increase from 51.8% to 75.0% of respondents who felt producing OER was “good for their professional development”. (SESAME Final Report)

OMAC strand specifically

How has OER release affected the practices of staff running HEA accredited courses or schemes of professional development that meet the UK Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning in Higher education (UK PSF)?

• The concept of ‘Discipline-orientated academic development’. Whereas the HEA Subject Centres (with which I was closely involved) provided discipline-based academic development and educational developers in institutions deliver ‘generic’ programmes; the concept of discipline-orientated academic development brings these two together and gives a framework for institution-based educational developers to account for and support the multi-disciplinary audience they have for their activities. The materials produced by this project will provide a wide array of activities that can be used in accredited programmes or even just short workshops that will enable this discipline-orientated academic development to take place. (Academic Practice in Context Interim Report)