OER Synthesis and Evaluation / OpenPracticesConclusions
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OpenPracticesConclusions

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Saved by Lou McGill
on March 8, 2012 at 11:27:31 am
 

 

 

This briefing paper is split across two pages.

Page 1

What are 'open educational practices'?

Why engage in open educational practices?

OERs and open learning

OERs and open pedagogies or teaching practices

This page

OERs and sharing learning/teaching ideas

OERs and open technologies

OERs and open scholarship

Common issues in open educational practices

Conclusions

 

 

OERs and sharing learning/teaching ideas

The JISC-funded Good Intentions report concluded that informal reuse of learning and teaching materials by other teachers is fairly common. As confirmed by the UK OER pilot phase and in much greater detail by the University of Oxford TALL team in their OER Impact Study, teachers make extensive use of online content, particularly when they are called on to teach an unfamiliar aspect of their subject. However, they generally do not think of this as 'sharing' or feel part of a community of subject teachers as a result. Openly licensed and explicitly educational content (i.e. OERs) may not be clearly distinguished from other types of material.

 

Increased awareness of OERs does lead to new practices, for example restricting searches to openly licensed content, looking for content via subject and institutional repositories first, or re-working content to get around third party copyright restrictions. However, not all these changes are regarded as positive. Some academics found that learning more about licensing and IPR actually made them more anxious about reuse.

 

At present, then, we see learning and teaching materials being most commonly distributed on a produce/release → reuse/consume model rather than a model of sharing and even co-construction. Projects based around subject disciplines where a collaborative ethos already existed were able to build engagement between teaching staff with facilities to comment, favourite, review and rate each other's resources. This was not always an easy process:

A concern was also raised that making materials openly available might open oneself up to negative judgement from colleagues because of the perception of putting oneself forward as a self-appointed expert without adequate peer review. These views illustrate how the topic of licensing touches on sensitive issues of professional identity' (C-SAP expert group in final report)

 

Establishing collaborative communities took time and commitment, and getting community processes recognised and embedded at institutional level was sometimes challenging.

[in our subject area] academics have developed their teaching materials as an individual effort whilst viewing research as a team and community endeavour. Peer review of teaching is also associated in many institutions with capability assessment and HR processes... [And] in our own institution, for example, the repository has traditionally been for research outputs. OER development, release and re-use challenges these distinctions. CPD4HE

 

For enhanced sharing of learning and teaching ideas within institutions, two approaches were recommended by projects. First, OERs should be explicitly introduced to staff through workshops, training courses, and PGCert courses for new teaching staff. Second, institutional processes such as curriculum approval, VLE course approval, and staff appraisal should include consideration of OERs being developed and used.

In our institution a current initiative to take account of e-learning in quality management and enhancement processes offers an opportunity to address OER production and use. The course approval processes ask questions about resources and library support; a specific question about OER use and sources would mean that new courses must consider OERs. OER considerations could also be incorporated into VLE course approval processes (design for openness, for instance), and into events, CPD workshops and training courses. (CPD4HE project)

 

There is evidence that engagement with OER release has stimulated critical reflection and reconsideration of existing practices, particularly focussing on how learning resources might be used in different contexts. Instead of developing resources for one specific cohort or programme, staff had to consider how materials would be used by learners studying in very different settings. New kinds of conversation about the learning experience took place as a result.

When we are thinking about what works best as an OER, we are invariably asking questions about our discipline and how we think about teaching and learning.(C-SAP)

By engaging with OER creation and sharing... we effectively open a door into this hitherto secret garden of art and design educational practice. (ALTO project)

 

OERs and open technologies

UK OER projects were required to deposit records in the Jorum open repository and many also used open institutional repositories to host their original materials. Projects found that open platforms and services such as twitter, youtube and slideshare were critical to making OERs discoverable. OER practitioners are now looking for technologies of open sharing that are extremely useable by mainstream academics.

The importance of Google and other popular commercial sites cannot be underestimated; both in terms of the resources they produce and the expectations that they provide the user. OER repositories are judged in this light and, when this is coupled with an assumption that copyright is of little significance, accounts for the low use of such repositories.(C-SAP)

'It needs to be as simple as right-click, save' (PORSCHE project)

 

OERs and open scholarship

The UK OER programme has to date identified few links between OER and open scholarship. However, the forms of collaborative knowledge-building described in the previous sections blur the boundaries between learning and research. From other programmes, for example the Exeter Cascade and Vitae projects in the Developing Digital Literacies programme, and from the JISC research data management programme, there is evidence that open scholarly practices are popular among early career researchers, and that this is filtering through into teaching approaches that make use of open data (for example to allow practice with data analysis and interpretation) and open access publications.

 

Digital reputation management is a skill required both by researchers seeking funding and by students seeking work. Social networking facilities such as commenting, reviewing, rating and referral are increasingly used to support scholarly exchange: it will be interesting to see whether this lowers the threshold of participation in scholarly communities for students who have acquired these habits in non-academic contexts.

 

Common issues in open educational practices

There are different cultures of openness at different institutions and in different sectors (see the Open practice across sectors briefing paper on this site) but we can identify some common issues that arise across all the different practices we have described. Addressing these issues in a conscious and strategic fashion is likely to help institutions move towards more open practices in a managed way.

 

Legal and contractual issues (see also Phase2 Development and Release Issues): this includes managing IPR, managing consent, and open licensing. How free are members of staff to openly release research and teaching content? What policies, advice and support are in place to help them? Although many excellent resources have been developed by JISC Legal and Web2Rights, and are summarised in the OER infokit, we have seen that local expertise is valuable in applying these principles to specific contexts.

 

Technical and data management issues (see also Phase2 Development and Release Issues): this includes hosting and management of open research/educational resources e.g. in open repositories; access to third party services/applications to support educational and scholarly interactions; exposure of institutional data where appropriate to support interoperability and open sharing across institutional boundaries. The OER infokit and Open Data infokit describe some of the technical challenges in different areas of the open landscape. However, all agree that managing data and information systems for open access requires strategic oversight and joined up thinking.

 

Cultural inertia/cultural change (see also Phase2 Practice change and Phase2 Cultural Considerations): open practices challenge existing cultures of academic institutions and subject areas, while at the same time upholding some values that are very long-established (such as public access to knowledge, transparency of research methods, and open peer review). The JISC round-table debate on open access recently concluded that a mixed culture of open and closed practices would be a reality for some time to come. The picture is the same in open educational resources and open research. Some institutions and subject areas are embracing the open agenda wholeheartedly while others remain sceptical, for reasons that may be historical or cultural, or may simply reflect the personal views of key players. It seems likely that the benefits of 'opening up' will accelerate as the volume of available resources grows, and that there may be a tipping point beyond which open access becomes the norm and special processes will have to be applied to keep learning, research and knowledge transfer materials in a closed environment. But we are some way off this yet, and work is still needed to define and communicate the benefits.

 

Roles, responsibilities and rewards (see also Phase2: impacts on staff): open practices demand new kinds of expertise and this expertise needs to be rewarded, whether through financing of new roles or recognition for new skills that existing staff have developed. Open practices often cross boundaries between academic and para-academic roles, and can have powerful consequences for how academics perceive and play out their identities. How are staff recognised for their contributions to open learning materials or open research? Are staff confident that the impact on their reputation and career will be positive?

 

These issues are strongly tied up with – indeed are manifestations of – cultural attitudes to the open agenda. After struggling to put their work on a sustainable footing, many UK OER projects concluded that for open release of educational materials to become mainstream, there would need to be significant changes in the rewards associated with teaching and learning. If this conclusion seems to pit teaching against research, there are tensions within both area of academic life between an ethos of public access to knowledge (and a history of public funding) and a requirement on institutions to make best use of their knowledge resources.

 

In concluding this brief review of issues, we need to note that the needs of different stakeholders in open practices can be at odds. One effect of openness is to uncouple people in time and space, making connection easier, but complex negotiation of needs, understandings and perceptions more difficult. This is true for learners and teachers, for institutions and (potential) students, for researchers and stakeholders in their research. Different stakeholders also have different priorities and motivations. While for staff personal recognition and reward is key, student motivation to engage with open materials is more about the quality of their learning experience and the relevance of the resources to their learning goals. Resources designed for HE students may not be useful to the public in general. Resources made accessible to learners in informal contexts by including pedagogic support are made less valuable to teachers who want to repurpose them in different pedagogic contexts. Open scholarship has its equivalent compromises.

 

Conclusions

Questions and contradictions remain inherent the idea of openness. Is availability on the open web ('in the wild') paradigmatic of open practice, or are the participative practices of communities to be preferred because – despite requiring authentication to enter – they appear to be more sustainable? Do open pedagogies necessarily depend on open content, or might they revolve around learner-generated content, securely sequestered behind a firewall? How do the common values of public knowledge play out in research communities with very different investments in their data? Whatever the perspective, it is clear that 'open' is not a single quality that educational practices have, or lack.

 

In summary, although educational resources are an essential feature of the digital landscape, and one that students need to engage with, it is not clear that educational practitioners should focus primarily on producing/releasing open content if they want to enhance access to educational opportunity and public knowledge. Releasing educational content under open licence demands some confidence and expertise. The UK OER programme has highlighted legal, technical and pedagogical considerations that may seem insurmountable to individuals, particularly in the absence of strategic institutional support. OER may not, therefore, be the first sign of openness in educational practice. Other practices may have more immediate pay-offs and a lower adoption threshold, while OER development continues quietly as – for example – materials developed for virtual learning environments become more 'open-ready' through better practices of content design.

 

We believe that future funding should address open content development and management within the wider landscape of open educational practices. For some subject disciplines, for some learner markets, and for some institutional business models, OERs will prove a worthwhile investment on their own. For others there will be more significant benefits from the use of open tools and environments, open publishing models, open pedagogies, and open research/scholarship approaches. Central funding alone will not open up valued knowledge for public use, nor will it reverse the marketisation of some knowledge services, but it can provide examples of local benefit and allow knowhow to be shared.

 

The open education movement remains an emergent phenomenon, tragically coincident with an abrupt fall in the funding available to education across the Western economies, and in the UK with a deeper convulsion in the funding regime that makes institutions reluctant to invest in new practices that do not produce immediate returns. The benefits of open educational practices are uneven, slow to emerge, and dependent on other factors. The greatest potential benefits are communal rather than tied to the competitive advantage of individuals or institutions. It remains to be seen whether the gaps in our understanding of open practice will be filled in the coming years, and whether the emerging practices of open knowledge sharing become mainstream enough for the true benefits to be felt.

 

 

 

 

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