OER13 Lightning Talks

Writing in Booksprints

Presenter and authors: Phil Barker, Lorna M. Campbell, Martin Hawksey, CETIS and Amber Thomas, University of Warwick.
Session: LT50, #abs50

A booksprint is a facilitated, highly structured intensive writing process.  This booksprint ran for two and a half days, involved four people and was facilitated by Adam Hyde.  The aim of the sprint was to produce a synthesis and summary of the technical outputs of the UKOER Programmes  Once a chapter is written it’s passed on to another author, not for editing but co-creation.  The initial author does not “own” the chapter.  During this sprint each chapter was re-written by three authors.  The team used Booki.cc open source authoring platform to facilitate the collaborative writing. Booki is much like other collaborative writing applications but incorporates additional tools for ebook creation.   By the end of the two and a half day sprint the team had written a 22,000 word book.  Some of the authors were concerned that the quality of the writing would be compromised but this does not seem to have been the case. Colleagues who have read and reviewed the book have all responded positively to it.

Phil Barker - Writing in Booksprints

Booksprints are ideal for people who have a shared conception of a topic and want to present it together, or alternatively want to present different aspect of a topic.  The content has to be material that is already known to the authors. This is not unlike the situation lecturers are in when they are producing course materials.  Booksprints could be an excellent way to produce educational resources as it’s an inherently open approach to content production.  We talk a lot about sharing educational resources but we don’t talk nearly enough about sharing the effort of creating those resources.  In order to produce really high quality resources we need to share the task of content creation

Into the Wild – Technology for Open Educational Resources can be downloaded free from CETIS Publications.  A print on demand edition is available from Lulu.

For further information on booksprints, see booksprints.net

Libraries, OA research and OER: towards symbiosis?

Presenter: Nick Sheppard, Leeds Metropolitan University
Session: LT73, #abs73

Leeds Metropolitan University have established a blended repository to manage both their research and teaching and learning resources, including OERs. They have been involved in a number of JISC funded projects including the Unicycle UKOER project.  The blended repository was originally based on Intralibrary and they have now implemented Symplectic.  There has been considerable emphasis on developing research management workflows.

Open access to research is changing dramatically in light of Finch and role of institutional repositories and there are synergies with Creative Commons potentially being mandated by Research Councils UK.  Nick also referred to Lorcan Dempsey’s recent posts on “Inside Out” libraries, which focus on the changing role of institutional repositories and libraries.

Nick Sheppard - Closing the institutional UKOER circle

Leeds Met have worked closely with Jorum and Nick said that he believed that the new Jorum API is a game changer which will allow them to close the institutional OER circle.

Why bother with open education?

Presenter and authors: Viv Rolfe & Mark Fowler, De Montfort University
Session: LT77, #abs77

De Montfort have undertake a huge body of OER work since 2009.  OER is incorporated into the institutional strategy for teaching an learning and OER is also is part of  the De Montfort PG cert course.

Despite this, when the team interviewed senior executives about OER, none could name any major institutional projects.  They saw the marketing potential of OER but didn’t appreciate the potential of OERs to enhance learning.  There is a distinct lack of buy in from senior staff and a lot of work is needed to change their mindsets.

Viv Rolfe

Student researcher Libor Hurt undertook a student survey on attitudes to OER.  28% had heard of OERs. OERs are used to supplement lectures and for informal learning.  They are seen as being good for catching up with complex subjects but are less used to study for assessments. Students overwhelmingly share stuff with each other, usually through facebook and e-mail. This is naturally how students work now and could have a major impact on OER down the line.  Students also loved producing OERs, lab videos and quiz MCQs.  However while students are happy to share within the university, they are less happy about sharing their OERs with the public, or those that are not paying fees.  Institutional strategies need to be mindful of this and need to communicate that universities are not giving away whole courses, they are just sharing some of the best bits.  Only a few students cited plagiarism concerns as a reason not to share.  From a student perspective, there is a real tension between paying fees and sharing OERs

It doesn’t matter if everyone in the institution isn’t sharing, as long as there are enough to get momentum going.  However it is important to get senior managers on board, OERs need to be enshrined in institutional  policy.

Taking care of business: OER and the bottom line

Presenters and authors: By John Casey, University of the Arts, Jonathan Shaw & Shaun Hides Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University.
Session: LT112, #abs112

Talking about open in a closed education system is a lightening conductor for many thorny issues – power, control, ownership, identity, pedagogy, technical infrastructure, cultures, policy, strategy and business models.   The OER space is a very productive but scary space.

Media is about coproduction and teaching is itself a form of media production.  Coventry fell into open learning with the #Phonar and Creative Activism #creativact courses which opened up their classes.  Rather than having courses led by individuals, they now have teams of people all thinking and operating in different ways. Professional partners have also shown an interest in participating in these courses.   They are thinking about how they conceive the design process of teaching, and are working with students and professional partners to let content evolve.

Shaun Hides - consequences of oer

OER is a political problem, you need to lobby senior management. OERs don’t just open up content, they change institutional practice.  There are many unintended consequences and we need to deal with new educational and economic models of co-production.

#chatopen Open Access and Open Education

Do open access and open education need to work together more? That was the question posed by Pat Lockley and discussed on twitter on Friday evening by a group of open education folks using the hashtag #chatopen.

Open access in this instance was taken to refer to open access repositories of peer-reviewed papers and other scholarly works and associated open access policies and agendas. There was general agreement that open access and open education proponents should work together but also recognition that it was important to be aware of different agendas, workflows, technical requirements, etc. Suzanne Hardy of the University of Newcastle added that it was equally important to take heed of open research data too.

Although the group acknowledged that open access still faced considerable challenges, there was a general consensus that it was more mature, both in terms of longevity and uptake, and that it was embedded more widely in institutions. Amongst other factors, the relative success of open access was attributed to the fact that most universities already had policies and repositories for publishing and managing scholarly outputs, while few had comparable strategies for managing teaching and learning materials. Phil Barker added that research outputs were always intended for publication whereas teaching and learning materials were generally kept within the institution. Nick Sheppard of Leeds Met also pointed out that most institutional repositories could not handle teaching and learning resources and research data without significant modification. This led to the suggestion that while institutional repositories fit the culture of scholarly works and open access well, research data and OERs are much harder to manage and share.

In terms of uptake and maturity, although there was general agreement that open access was some way ahead of open education, it appears that open data is catching up fast due to institutional drivers such as the REF, high level policy support and initiatives such as opendata.gov. Funding council mandates were also recognised as being an important driver in this regard.

Different interpretations of the term ‘open” were discussed as the open in open access and open education were felt to be quite different. The distinction between gratis and libre was felt to be useful, though it is important to recognise more subtle variations of open.

There was some consensus that teaching and learning resources tend to be regarded as being of lesser importance to institutions than scholarly works and research data and that this was reflected in policy developments, staff appointments and promotion criteria. Furthermore, until impact measures, funding and business models change this is likely to remain the case. Open access and open education both reflect institutional culture but they are separate processes and this separation reflects university polices, priorities and funding streams.

The group also felt that different communities had emerged around open access and open education, with open access mainly being the concern of librarians and open education the domain of eLearning staff. Phil refined this distinction by suggesting that open access is driven by researchers but managed by librarians. However Nick Sheppard of Leeds Met suggested that the zeitgeist was changing and that open access, open education and open research data are starting to converge.

In response to the question “what open education could learn form open access?” one lesson may be that top down policy can help. Although open education processes are more complex and diverse than open access, the success of open access could aid open education.

Pat wrapped up the session by asking where next for open education? What do we do? Lis Parcell of RSC Wales cautioned against open education becoming the domain of “experts” and emphasised the importance of enabling new audiences to join the open debate, by using plain language where possible, meeting people where they are and providing routes to help them get a step on the ladder. There was also some appetite for open hackdays and codebashes that would bring teachers, researchers and developers together to build OA/OER mashups. Nick put forward the following usecase:

“I want to read a research paper, text mined & processed, AI takes me to relevant OER to consolidate learning!”

Finally everyone agreed that it’s important to keep talking, to keep open education on the agenda and try to transform open practice into open policy.

So there you have it! A brief summary of a wide-ranging debate conducted using only 140 characters! Who says you can’t have a proper conversation on twitter?! If you’re interested in reading the full transcript of the discussion, Martin Hawksey has helpfully set up a TAGS Viewer archive of the #chatopen here.

If you want to follow up any of the points or opinions raised here than feel free to comment below or send a mail to oer-discuss@jiscmail.ac.uk

Many thanks once again to Pat Lockley for setting up the discussion and to all those who participated.

Event: Advances in Open Systems for Learning Resources

Interested on new developments and advances in open systems for managing learning resources? Yes? Good! Because CETIS are running an event on this very topic as part of this year’s Repository Fringe in Edinburgh. Repository Fringe 2011 takes place on Wednesday 3rd and Thursday 4th August with the CETIS “Advances in Open Systems for Learning Resources” event on Friday 5th August.

Encouraged by recent initiatives promoting the release of openly licensed educational resources there have been considerable developments in the innovative use of repositories, content management systems and web based tools to manage and share materials for teaching and learning. This event will bring together developers and implementers of open repositories, content management systems and other tools to present and discuss recent updates to their systems and their application to learning resources.

The speakers lined up for this event will cover a diverse range of topics that relate to “open systems”. These include open source repository system software, repositories of openly licensed content, open access repositories, open standards and open APIs.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • Patrick Mc Sweeney, University of Southampton, talking about “Community Engagement in Teaching and Learning Repositories: ePrints, HumBox and OER”.
  • John Casey, University of the Arts, presenting the ALTO OER Ecosystem.
  • Dan Rehak of ADL, outlining progress on the US Learning Registry initiative.
  • Terry McAndrew, University of Leeds, “Getting Bioscience Open Educational resources into ‘Academic Orbit’. Tales from the OeRBITAL launchpad”.
  • Charles Duncan, Intrallect Ltd, will discuss the development of an item bank repository.

More speakers are still being confirmed so keep an eye on the agenda for updates.

Both the Repository Fringe and the CETIS workshop are free to attend and you can register for either or both events via Eventbrite here.

JISC CETIS OER Technical Interest Group

In order to provide a focus for the wide range of technical activities that the UK F/HE community is engaging with in the general space of “open educational resources” CETIS are establishing an OER Technical Interest Group. This group will provide a forum to explore a wide range of technical issues relating to the creation, description, dissemination, aggregation, discovery, use and tracking of open educational resources. In addition, the group will help to surface and identify current and best practice in these areas.

Who is the OER Technical Interest Group for?

Anyone with an interest in technical issues relating to open educational resources and the wider areas of open education and educational resource management in general. Participation is not restricted to JISC HEA OER Programme projects, we would welcome and encourage participation from outwith the UK and from across the educational sector including schools, colleges, work based learning, life long learning, etc.

How do I participate in the OER Technical Interest Group?
To join the group just add a comment below to identify yourself, sign up for oer-discuss@jiscmail.com and look out for blog posts and tweets tagged #oertig

Rather than create a new mailing list, the OER Technical Interest Group will initially use the recently launched JISC oer-discuss list. An additional technical list will be established at a later date if necessary.

What will the OER Technical Interest Group do?

  • Together with UKOLN’s DevCSI initiative the group will run an OER Hackday on the 31st March / 1st April 2011 at Manchester Conference Centre. For further information and to sign up for this event visit http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/devcsi/oer_hackdays/
  • Provide a forum for the forthcoming JISC CETIS OER Mini Projects. JISC and CETIS intend to fund a series of OER Mini Projects in 2011 to explore a range of specific technical issues already surfaced by the JISC / HEA OER Programmes and recent CETIS events including #cetisrow and #cetiswmd. All participants will be eligible to apply for Mini Projects.
  • Engage with and disseminate initiatives and activities outwith the UK F/HE sector including Creative Commons, OCWC and the US Learning Registry.
  • Run a series of public events over the course of 2011 building on past CETIS events such as #cetisrow and #cetiswmd.
  • Provide a forum to raise and discuss technical issues.

What kind of technical issues will the OER Technical Interest Group explore?

The group hopes to explore a wide range of technical issues including but not restricted to:

  • Feed deposit
  • Web search log analysis
  • RSS end point registries
  • Use of open source repositories for managing educational resources.
  • Tracking open educational resources.
  • License encoding.
  • Self description and embedded metadata.

Further information about CETIS OER Technical Interest Group projects and activities will be posted on the CETIS blogs and circulated through the usual channels. If you are interested in participating please add your name below along with any comments or issues you would like to see the group explore. Thanks,