Category Archives: oer

Cooke Report to Denham

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Ron Cookes recent report to John Denham MP On-line Innovation in Higher Education is an interesting and thought provoking current “must read”.

The report identifies priorities for action to ensure that

UK Higher education remains worldclass and ¦ at the cutting edge of the global ICT economy

and also calls for a clear long-term vision to achieve this goal. Cooke outlines requirements and recommendations for three areas that require greater strategic direction; Learning and Teaching, Research and Innovation and Management and Administration.

The section on learning and teaching is of particular interest as it places considerable emphasis on the growing importance of open educational content. Indeed the reports first recommendation calls for:

A new approach to virtual education based on a corpus of open learning content: the UK must have a corpus of open access learning resources organised in a coherent way to support on-line and blended learning by all higher education institutions and to make it more widely available in non-HE environments.

An admirable goal indeed, however I am less sure about the need for

…national centres of excellence to provide quality control, essential updating, skills training and research and development in educational technology, e-pedagogy and educational psychology.

Should we not be focusing on the ability of ICT and in particular social networking technologies to disseminate expertise throughout the sector rather than centralising it at a number of exemplar institutions? I also rather non-plussed by the suggestion that

¦a national centre of open access course materials, for example through the Open University, is a potential model worth considering¦

Dont get me wrong, I think the OUs Open Learn project is a world-class initiative and one that we should all look to and learn from, however the OU business model is somewhat unique in the UK and what works for the OU will not necessarily work for other HEIs.

In contrast I am particularly encouraged by Cookes call for all HEIs to develop a strategic approach to information management:

Information resources are expensive and need to be managed as strategically as financial and human resources to improve the effectiveness of institutions.

In addition the reports emphasis on the importance of developing literacy and technology skills for both staff and students is highly commendable. Technology focused staff development initiatives seem to me to be lagging further and further behind technological innovation. Any initiatives that could help to bridge this gap would be a major step in the right direction.

While I agree with most, if not all, of Cookes recommendations there seems to me to be a strong, and perhaps somewhat dated, centralising theme running through the report. This is evidenced by the call for national centres of excellence and œcurated and organised collections of open learning content. The report also makes some questionable statements about repositories, for example:

¦it should not cost more to make course materials openly available on professionally managed repository platforms.

And rather worryingly, although the report includes an appendix of significant JISC programmes there appears to be no mention of Jorum and the potential strategic role it could play in facilitating and curating a UK network of open educational resources. Perhaps I missed a footnote somewhere.

I havent commented on the Research and Innovation and Management and Administration sections of the Cooke report as these really arent my areas of expertise however there are a couple of points relating to the interface between research and teaching and learning that are worth highlighting:

in research led universities there is a need to link effectively research resources with learning and teaching.

It is taken for granted in the research process that one builds on the work of others; the same culture can usefully be encouraged in creating learning materials.

So, a thought provoking and encouraging report overall but perhaps one that needs to widen its vision somewhat.

OER Programme Scoping Session at CETIS Conference

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My colleague Li Yuan has now uploaded the outline for the OER Programme Scoping Session at this months CETIS Conference which takes place in Birmingham on the 25th & 26th November. This is your chance to comment on and provide input to the forthcoming £5.7 million JISC open educational content programme. The session will include three short presentations covering an over view of the JISC programme by David Kernohan, technical infrastructure for OER by Amber Thomas and opportunities and challenges for higher education by Li. These presentations will be followed by an open discussion which I’ll attempt to chair :-} Given the level of blog traffic and discussion that OER has generated over the last few weeks alone this could be a lively debate!

There are still a few places available at the CETIS Conference so if you’d like to come along and add your voice to the discussion you can register here

OEC / OER / OCW – catalysts for change?

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Scott Leslie’s timely and thought provoking blog post on Planning to Share versus just Sharing has already generated considerable comment and discussion on Scott’s own blog and on other blogs including by colleague Sheila’s Work Blog and Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector. While I wholeheartedly agree with the issues Scott raises I’m inclined to argue with the following comment from Jim Groom.

You nail the inanity and paralysis that pervades the whole conversation around sharing at an institutional level perfectly. I wonder how many big universities are joining OCW and the like because it is a good PR move, or the thing to do currently.

I think institutions can and do have valid reasons for launching OCW / OEC / OER (pic yer acronym!) initiatives that are different from those of individuals. I also think that good PR is arguably a valid reason for institutions to invest in opening access to educational resources. Institutions are business after all, as businesses they need some form of PR and if the route taken also opens access to resources that can then be used by others surely that’s so much the better?

Or perhaps not. This point is being hotly debated over on Abject Learning where Brian Lamb asks

…higher education is still conducting its business as if information is scarce when we now live in an era of unprecedented information abundance.

…if we live in an era of information abundance, why is the primary drive around OERs the publication of more content?

The discussion that follows suggests to me however that there is considerable ambiguity regarding what we mean by “content.” This from Laura:

higher ed *is* so focused on content. Faculty at many places do not get tenure from providing an education for their students, but from producing content (usually for certain journals or publishing houses) and this is what we need to get away from I think. We need to shift the focus away from producing content and back to education, writ large. For that focus on content also leads to the content-based class that’s all about “covering content” rather than encouraging thoughtful discussion, even about content-rich topics like biology or physics.

Tbh I think this is a rather spurious argument. The kind of content Laura seems to be referring to is scholarly publications. The drive to publish can certainly distract from the practice of teaching but does it really lead to content driven education? Maybe I was just lucky but I never felt my higher education was just about “covering content”.

Interestingly one of the most astute comments in this discussion comes from the same Jim who I’ve already quoted above (my emphasis btw):

I think it is the discusion and interaction that is still missing from the OER/OpenEd movement.

What universities need to be thinking about is ways to use syndication and open architecture to provide mechanisms of sharing and bringing together the various resources and inquiry around such a topic

Universities and colleges can seize the opportunity to frame these spaces for they have the unbelievable intellectual resources to help manage these distributed discussions, and interrogate the information that is already out there. The value of the institution is not based in content per se, but in framing the discussion and thinking about that content, and that’s why thinking about open models of self-organization around these ideas for universities is an important next step, for they pay for the intellectual capital of scholars, and those individuals are one key way for making those resources, objects, or things animate into something special.

I also particularly liked Marion Jennsens comment:

“…higher education is still conducting its business as if information is scarce…”

That is because they still have the one thing that IS scarce, and that is certification.

It seems clear to me that OER / OEC / OCW is curently acting as a catalyst that is surfacing a wide range of issues relating not just to “content” but to individucal practice, institutional culture and the current paradigm of higher education in general.

Given that JISC is about to pour £5.7 million into opening access to educational resources at institutional, subject and individual level it’s going to be very interesting to see how these debates develop.

Exclude teaching and learning materials from the open access repositories debate. Discuss.

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Much of last week’s meeting of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group was taken up with a discussion of the findings of the Repositories Roadmap Review which is being undertaken by Rachel Heery. The Review, which is not yet public, sparked a lively discussion during the course of which Andy Powell put forward the suggestion that teaching and learning materials should no longer be included in the same discussions as open access scholarly works as the issues relating to their use and management are just so different.

As one of the small quota of œteaching and learning type folk on RPAG I was inclined to cautiously agree with Andy. Many of us who have an interest in the management of teaching and learning materials have been frustrated for some time that repository discussions, debates and developments often focus too much on scholarly communications and research papers while neglecting other resource types such as teaching and learning materials and data sets. Im sure Im not the only one who feels a bit sheepish about having to jump up at regular intervals and say œbut what about teaching and learning materials? There has in the past been a tendency to assume that Institutional Repositories set up to accommodate scholarly works could also provide a home for teaching and learning materials in their spare time. And this despite the fact that theres considerable debate regarding how effectively learning object repositories can manage teaching and learning materials, never mind capital I capital R Institutional Repositories!

In the past Ive suggested that the language and discourse of the Open Access movement œdoesnt fit teaching and learning materials. In a written contribution to the discussion Andrew Rothery of University of Worcester went further to suggest that:

the concepts and values around open access, archiving, metadata, sharing, and publishing dont really fit.

and that the whole model of formal institutional repositories just doesnt support teachers day to day practice.

So whats the answer? Id suggest that we need to begin by asking a lot more questions before we can start coming up with answers. Questions such as:

What to teachers actually do with their materials? Where do they currently store them? How do they manage them? How do they use them? Are there things teachers cant do now that they would like to? How do learners interact with teaching materials? Are there personnal, domain and institutional perspectives to consider? And how do they relate to each other?

We need a discussion that is focused squarely on the requirements and objectives of teachers and learners not one that is an addendum to the, admittedly worthy, open access debate.

A word of caution though¦. My one concern is that if we exclude teaching and learning materials from œrepository debates, and indeed JISC funding programmes, will we stop talking about them all together?

And one last thing¦itll be interesting to see how OER developments influence this debate.