Li’s work blog

Amber Thomas, David Kernohan, Mark Stiles, Tom Franklin, Chris Pegler, Liam Earney and I will present a symposium, entitled “OERs matters – vision, reality and uncertainty” at ALT-C on 8^th September. In this symposium, we would like to explore a number of key issues related to the rapid development of OER initiatives, including whether:

• only prestigious institutions can make a business case for large scale OER initiatives?
• the learner can gain rich learning experiences as much in OERs as they would in more traditional settings?
• publicly-funded OER repositories are still needed even if everything is available on Youtube/slideshare/Flickr etc?

The symposium will be chaired by Oleg Liber, Director of JISC CETIS. A debate about the pros and cons of OERs will involve the following prestigious panel:

• Pollyanna Pegler, Academic, who is so keen on learning objects and sharing reusable online materials that she is writing her PhD on this subject. Because she is completely comfortable finding, adapting and reusing online materials Pollyanna struggles to understand the reservations of colleagues who prefer to stick with what they know.
• Professor Ogden Wisden, Academic. As for the idea of Open Educational Resources, he has been laughing at the concept for around 15 years, watching the promoters of self-publication change the name and publish their half-baked concepts unsuited to proper teaching.
• Quentinna Yan, Teacher, a self-motivated, keen learner, she is loyal user of MIT and OpenLearn and has studied a number of courses provided by those universities without any fee. She enjoys teaching herself everything she needs to know by using OERs and doing her learning when and where she wants.
• Professor Will Pileham-Highe PVC. He is sceptical that a move into OER would offer a realistic return on investment in his university. He is very concerned about recruitment and retention and is unsure of how OER might help him achieve his goals.
• Joe Zawinul, Government. His responsibilities cover the use of technology to save universities time and money, and he believes that sharing academic materials online would make it cheaper and provide better results than traditional lectures and tutorials.
• A representative of a commercial publisher, who is under the pressure of meeting sales targets, re-aligning business models, negotiating rights frameworks and developing innovative online services for the digital age. For him, OER might be great, if you can find a way to play the game without losing money.

We would like to invite you to join the symposium and participate in the discussion to share your thoughts and ideas. We hope that the debate will help to clarify some of the most common concerns on OER initiatives. We will also challenge the participants to think more deeply about the impacts of OERs in HE, as well as further explore and discuss these issues in the OER pilot programme.

At the CAL 2009 conference in Brighton last week, I gave a presentation entitled “Developing a Framework for Understanding and Evaluating the Impact of Open Educational Resources”. This presentation was partly based on Adam’s blog about Open Educational Resources and the Zachman Framework as well as some of the latest thinking and discussions on the rapid development of intuitional OER initiatives internationally as well as JISC/HEA pilot OER funding programme with colleagues at CETIS. Given the complexity of the OER initiative itself and the nature of the transformation process of the OERs, we need a more structured way to capture different views and expectations from various players involved in the OER development process and a useful tool to examine institutional strategies in relation to OER approach and their impact on current and future practice in HE.

Zachman framework is the most widely known framework in the Enterprise Architecture context and it is designed to address the complexity and transformation process in enterprise architecture and examines the key business, information, application and technology strategies and their impact on business functions. Applying the Zachman approach, I derived an analytical framework for OERs and it is illustrated below:

In the table, the four rows present different points of view from various players related to OERs, namely: the planner, owner, designer and user. The information provided in each cell could become knowledge to help us share and understand different perspectives from different players in the process. For example, the motivation factor, requires the planner, owner, designer and user to come up with answers to the “why” question, i.e. why is there a need for OER? Why are the various choices made? It concerns the translation of goals and strategies into specific ends and means.

In the first row, the planner identifies the education vision and mission in relation to OER in general. In the second row, these are translated into the specific goals and objectives that apply to an institution’s operation. In the third row, they are converted to technical capacity and constraint. Finally, in the fourth row, they become specific project functions which meet the user’s needs and interests. The same process applies to the other questions.

The major implication of the framework is its explicit recognition that OERs are developed by distinct groups with different point of views. These views include a social policy perspective, an organisation and business oriented perspective, a technical perspective and a social cultural and pedagogical perspective. It is important to bridge the gaps between the perspectives and this is the key towards institutional transformation. Therefore, from the beginning, we should be recognizing these are different views and expectations; from the beginning, we should be dealing with multiple players, locations and requirements and so on As a result, a shared perspective of OER can be produced answering “why, what, when, where, who, and how” at the planning stage of the programme. The framework also allows ownership of activities and data to be established, and these should be traced throughout the programme and appropriately integrated in the development process. Furthermore, the framework provides a potential mechanism for a detailed analysis of the OER programmes. It can provide a rich picture of what it is the programme about so that we can construct our explanations of an OER initiative in the appropriate context and find out what works for whom in what condition.

The UNESCO Open Educational Resources Community launched a discussion on access issues regarding OER from 9 to 27 February. The first week’s discussion focuses on identifying and classifying the main barriers in accessing OER. A range of issues have been mentioned so far, including access in terms of:

· ability and skills; (Does the end user have the right skills to access?)

· file formats; (Are the file formats accessible?)

· local policy / attitude; (Do attitudes or policies pose barriers to using OER?)

· languages; (How well does the user speak the language of the OER?)

· disability; (Does the OER meet WAI accessibility criteria?)

· licensing; (Is the licensing suitable / CC?)

· awareness; (Lack of awareness is a barrier to OER.)

· discovery; (If the OER is hidden, not searchable, not indexed, it’s hard to find.)

· infrastructure; (Lack of power/computers makes access hard.)

· internet connectivity / bandwidth; (Slow connections pose a barrier to access.)

In the second and third weeks, participants are invited to share their experiences in working around these issues and to discuss possible solutions. For further information on Access2OER and participation in the discussion, please visit http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Access2OER.

If I could use two sentences to describe what I have understood about the JISC/HEA Open Educational Resources Programme at the briefing meeting in Birmingham last week, these would be:

1. the programme will make a wide range UK HE educational resources freely available with minimum technical requirements and by using various platforms and tools; and
2. the programme will look for culture change, sustainable processes and institutional policies.

This one year pilot programme is to explore what works, what doesn’t work and to seek best practices in promoting free accessing, reusing and sharing educational resources. Further information about presentations and discussions on the breifing day are avalailbe at Lorna’s blog. It is clear that proposers are not only being asked to set a goal of publishing (x) number of open courses on (x) platform, they are also required to go deeper into thinking of and planning something more than content.

I don’t really know how potential bidders will actually plan something to address issues beyond content but I would like to share some initial thoughts and reflections from the meeting:

Firstly, OER and the culture of sharing. It is clear that simply publishing teaching materials online for others to have free access will not be enough to change cultures and teaching practices. The value of OER will not be best achieved through static resources, but rather through their potential to engage a wide range of educators and learners to share ideas and expertise, and collaborative knowledge building. Therefore, institutions should not only require staff to develop content for the use of others, but also encourage them to use content created and modified by others in order to improve our collective knowledge and improve the quality of teaching and learning at universities as a whole. I think a culture of openness and sharing will only emerge when OER has embedded and become an integral part of teaching practice and learning process in HE.

Secondly, sustainability and community building. One question was raised at the discussion concerning the situation in which a person involved in an OER project moves from one university to another - who would continue updating the content? One participant suggested that if the content was on open domain then he/she should be able to continue working on such content no matter which university he/she would work for. This suggests that when institutions think about how to sustain the OER they should not only focus on further funding for the project but also on the need to explore the opportunities for community building. It is important that institutions should invest in people who produce and use the content, as well as establish a new kind of shared ownership of learning material with a grassroots community to keep content alive and updated.

Finally, IPR and copyright policy. This is something that everyone is talking about. Many questions and issues were raised at the meeting. One of the participants asked a question: Could there be a standard institutional IPR and copyright policy which supports OERs so that institutions only need to sign an agreement? It seems a good idea but it is not practical or possible to do so at the moment, at least for this programme. Therefore, institutions will need to review their policies and make their own decision on how to support free and open access to teaching and learning materials. Clearly, an institution will need a deep commitment to openness and a strategic approach in order to make teaching and learning resources truly open and shareable and bring the desired changes to teaching and learning practices.

If you are interested in the JISC/HEA OER programme or would like to share your thoughts and discuss some issues related to OER projects, please join us at the CETIS OER/OU OpenLearn meeting at Open University on 27th February. Further information and online registration for the event is available at http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/events/register.php?id=164.