Category Archives: Higher Education

Open for Access

It’s approaching the end of the month and my curation of the Open Scotland account. There’s so much I planned to write but find myself running out of time. Before I go, let’s return to the Scottish Open Education Declaration. The declaration recognised the potential of open education to “expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens”. This is where I see my own open practice situated so let me tell you a little about how I use OER in widening access.

The Open University has an open admissions policy, which means students don’t need to have prior educational qualifications to study for a degree with us. This was pretty radical in 1969 and I’d argue still a powerful counter to prevailing neoliberal narratives about ‘standards’. Our university is explicit about its social justice mission to make education accessible to all. To help fulfil this, we make a percentage of all our content available for free on OpenLearn. OpenLearn allows us to engage with learners who may be very distant from higher education. It means we can begin where they are at, with the subject that interests them, at the level they are ready to learn and at their own pace. But OpenLearn is a beast – after 14 years and thousands of OER, from one minute videos to 100 hour courses, the choices can be overwhelming. Where to begin?

Over the years the OU in Scotland has developed a model called open learning champions. We have worked collaboratively with community and third sector organisations to develop a network of ‘champions’ who can support potential learners to access online learning, develop confidence and build digital skills. How they do that depends on their role and the relationship they have with learners. Some will get learners started and leave them to explore for themselves, others will provide 1:1 support to undertake a course, some champions have taken an OER and run it offline with a group of learners or used a blended approach with some online learning and some group work. We have also worked with third sector organisations to co-create OER with learners, using our OpenLearn Create platform.

“Most of my learners don’t have a computer or a laptop at home, so they use a tablet or a public library. That digital divide means they need support to get started, but once they get to a certain level OpenLearn is something fun and engaging that helps increase their digital skills but not in a boring IT class. Doing a wee thing in a subject that interests you makes you more comfortable in the digital space.” community engagement worker / open learning champion

The model has evolved as champions tell us how they use OER and then we incorporate the case studies into our workshops for new champions. We currently have just over 300 champions working with learners who are disabled, care experienced, refugees or asylum seekers, carers, adult returners… groups that may not otherwise have engaged with us but have existing relationships with our champions.

“As we go through the course, we identify what people are interested in and explore resources on OpenLearn, making sure it’s at the right level and length for the learner. Delivering the course this way encourages peer support and fosters relationships. The group gives them confidence, builds resilience and provides a supportive environment.” carer development worker / open learning champion

To support people on their learning journey, we’ve developed Open Pathways, a guide for navigating OpenLearn, OpenLearn Create and FutureLearn platforms that enables learners to plan their online learning and into formal study if that’s where it takes them. Our open entry policy makes the OU an attractive option for people who left school early or have been out of education for a while. The flip side of this is retention, which is a bigger issue for us than other universities, so a core aim of our access work is to set people up for success. Open Pathways enables them to practice self-directed learning with lower stakes, building their study skills and confidence so they are ready to succeed in higher education.

This isn’t all about the OU. We know that other institutions in Scotland are using OER to support their access and participation activity, and I had hoped to chat to colleagues in the sector to share some of their innovative practice but just haven’t managed it this month. I’m aware that Fife College uses OER to ‘keep students warm’ between their enthusiasm at registration and their course start date. The University of Edinburgh uses OER as part of their community outreach. If you or your institution are using OER for access and outreach, I’d love to here about it. Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter.

@Gill_ie

Gill Ryan

Access, Participation and Success

Open University in Scotland

gill.ryan@open.ac.uk

 

25 Years of Ed Tech

When I signed up to curate the Open Scotland blog, I hadn’t thought of the possible perks but getting a sneaky peek of Martin Weller’s forthcoming book 25 Years of Ed Tech has definitely made it all worthwhile. It’s a look back over a quarter century of educational technology and is also very much in keeping with this month’s reflective theme.

While Martin and I both work for the OU, it is a very big university and we don’t actually work together. I managed to blag it the old fashioned way – by asking nicely on Twitter. You won’t have to wait very long for your own copy as it is due out in February, published by Athabasca University Press, and will be made available with a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence (of course).

Weller, M (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca University Press. Alberta

TLDR: 25 Years of Ed Tech is a must read for educators and prospective open practitioners. I found myself wishing I’d had it as a source during my MA in Online and Distance Education studies so I can see it becoming a core (open) textbook. It will also help prepare us for a more critical relationship with educational technology.

Any summary of 25 years is bound to be subjective and you may find yourself quibbling with some of the dates he has assigned to each technology or trend. Weller has chosen the years based on when they became significant for him or when they reached a tipping point of adoption within higher education. The 25 years cover 1994 – 2018 and some of the later entries may sound familiar from his EdTechie blog posts. Aiming for one technology per year (though some years have many sub-headings!) this is a wonderfully succinct yet wide-ranging back story to the canon of Ed Tech – a counter to the sector’s tendency towards ‘historical amnesia’. There is a focus on higher education but even if you work in a different educational context, or have not embraced online education, you will find this an accessible and interesting read.

It begins with the nascent forums of online bulletin boards, moving on to the uptake of the internet and how its design as an open system enabled all that subsequently evolved. In that sense, much of the history of ed tech intersects with that of open education. It’s not surprising that the OU was an early adopter of the possibilities for ‘e-learning’ and Weller was part of the team that created the very first fully online undergraduate module (in 1999). Early predictions were that this way of teaching would spell the end of teachers but the larger scale of the course meant that more tutors and facilitators were needed. What changed was the pedagogical approach, from a ‘sage on the stage’ to a ‘guide on the side’ (King 1993).

In some cases, the technology has matured and been mainstreamed while others have come and gone – either morphing into a different technology or failing because the world wasn’t ready for it yet. What’s interesting is the interconnectedness of many technological innovations and the discussions within the EdTech community which led to their evolution. Learning objects (2000) required content but not context which made it difficult for educators to share and reuse them. The discussions on LOs led to the development of open educational resources (2004) – with their own rules for sharing and platforms to enable that – but there was a lag before the technology caught up. The ideas behind constructivist (1997) and later connectivist (2010) learning needed Web 2.0’s social networks (2006). In the meantime, the sector was building a shared vocabulary and standards for ‘open’.

For all its relative successes – the OU’s open platform OpenLearn had 8.9 million visitors last year – Weller argues that OER still haven’t gone mainstream, with levels of awareness among educators in the UK sitting at 10-20%. While it may not have been transformative in the way it was predicted in 2004, OER can be seen as a gentle shift in the tectonics of education that has moved gradually but consistently so that the old arguments that kept knowledge behind the gates of the academy and publishers’ paywalls no longer hold. This is particularly evident in the US, where the Open Textbooks movement (2013) is a direct challenge to the end-stage capitalism hegemony that encourages students to donate their blood in order to pay for textbooks in the hundreds of dollars.

In 2012, the so-called ‘Year of the MOOC’, it was predicted that MOOCs would disrupt higher education in the way Napster did the music industry. [As an aside, music artists whose songs are downloaded from sites like Napster and iTunes get less than 10% of the cost, with record companies receiving more than 50% and Apple the remainder. Plus ça change.] MOOCs are free and accessible with the potential to democratise education, but they remain plagued by low completion rates (<10%), are accessed predominantly by learners with high prior educational attainment, and have been accused of replicating old-school ‘sage on the stage’ pedagogies to achieve scale. It can be argued that they are in the post-hype maturity stage and the model is still evolving. If you’ve never done a MOOC, or are interested in one that explores online and open education, Weller is behind The Online Educator course which is running on FutureLearn in February.

Along the way, Weller acknowledges when he has called it wrong (announcing “the VLE is dead” in 1997 was premature) but he was an enthusiastic adopter of blogging (2003) which he suggests has developed in a way no other technology has. It is now an almost obligatory open practice, allowing academics and practitioners to share ideas, connect with a wider audience and evolve the concept of a learning community. Twitter and social media (2009) have amplified this but not without exposing us to the uglier side of our connected world. Weller recalls a brief, utopian time before the online environment became so toxic and acknowledges the risks of harassment, misogyny and racism. As these risks fall disproportionately on women, people from minority communities and indeed the majority world (aka the Global South), I feel he could have cited some of the voices with lived experience of this. I’m put in mind of sava saheli singh’s Fallacy of Open.

Digital badges make an appearance in 2015. I’ll be blogging about these later in the month so don’t want to say too much but suffice to say they are another example of an idea that promised much but has yet to be widely adopted in the UK. They’re also another example of how ed tech evolves “when other technologies make the environment favourable for their implementation”.

The book rounds off with a “dystopian turn” and Weller sounds a note of caution against the dark side of edtech – uncritical adoption of technology that puts our students’ data and privacy at risk – and reminds us of our duty of care. He also offers educators some rules for engaging with technology. I’m not going to tell you what they are – you’ll just have to download the book! While you’re waiting, Weller acknowledges some of the non-male voices that often get missed in ed tech creation stories so take the time to explore some of them: Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Robin de Rosa, Audrey Watters and Open Scotland’s own Sheila McNeill. I’d also recommend Donna Lanclos’ work on strategic refusal of ed tech.

Gill Ryan

@Gill_ie

Developing a Framework for Open Educational Practices at the University of the Highlands and Islands

Public Domain Image, Pixabay

The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is a tertiary, geographically and digitally distributed university that comprises thirteen Academic Partners including FE and HE focused colleges, and specialist research institutes. Within the Highlands and Islands region, the university covers a geographic area that is approximately the size of Belgium and provides local access to Higher Education in geographically dispersed rural locales, and well as within the urban centres in the region. Due to our geographically dispersed nature we have a comprehensive and robust technology infrastructure supporting our learning, teaching and administrative functions.

Sharing and collaboration across the university is essential in the above context and this is achieved in many ways using a variety of technologies, some more ‘open’ than others. The UHI Toolkit, a lightweight repository using a restricted Dublin Core architecture is used for sharing learning and teaching materials internally; the streaming service is used for sharing lectures, webinar recordings and videos publicly (see here for an excellent keynote on open educational practice).

Open educational practice at the University of the Highlands and Islands is not new and indeed there has been activity in some areas in previous years with a well-established open access policy and institutional open access repository (PURE). In addition we are an active member of the OERu, were involved in Open Education Practices Scotland (OEPS) and colleagues are actively involved in the open Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice (JPAAP) as editors, reviewers and contributors . Other initiatives in the university such as the Jisc funded eTextbook Institutional Publishing Service (eTIPS) project, whilst focused on producing low-cost etextbooks, have provided us with processes and knowledge that are adaptable and will enable us to develop our open practice going forward.

Developing the framework

To focus, consolidate and enhance our open educational practice we are currently putting together a ‘Framework for the development of open educational practices’. The framework will provide a 3-year route map for increased activity in 6 areas:

  • Open textbooks
  • Open educational resources
  • Open pedagogic practices
  • Open learning opportunities
  • Open scholarship
  • Open educational research

Year 1 is now underway, kicked off on the 20th November with the ‘Open all ours’ event, a series of workshops and presentations including an excellent keynote by Lorna M. Campbell from the University of Edinburgh OER service. The focus of year 1 is on benchmarking, building relationships, raising awareness and undertaking the preparatory work for year 2. In Year 2 we will be implementing new systems and policies, running pilot projects and increasing the engagement with open practices across the 6 areas identified. Year 3 will evaluate the impact of years 1 and 2 and build on the initiatives and practices already established.

Pulling together the framework has been a learning experience, not least understanding the impact of all the relevant declarations, government policies and institutional strategies. Most readers will be familiar with UNESCO and the 2017 Ljubljana OER action plan and subsequent OER recommendation, perhaps less of you will be aware of the Scottish Funding Council’s (SFC) College and University Sector ICT Strategy 2019 – 2021 and fewer again of the University of the Highlands and Islands Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy (LTES). Each of these in their own way influence and support open educational practices across the university.

The university’s LTES has 12 values, one of which is ‘harnessing open education approaches’ with the aim of:

“Developing online and other open education practices and approaches to support and enhance learning and teaching, to use, create and share open educational resources, and to widen access to education including within our local communities.”

Reflecting on feedback from the first draft of the framework it is evident that the view from inside the institution differs in some ways from the external perspective. A simple example is the use of the word ‘delivery’ when talking about education. Until it was pointed out I hadn’t really considered the connotation, that of one-way traffic. Other areas where there were differences was in the breadth of coverage of open education and what definition to use, who should be engaged across the university (don’t forget the student body), the importance of collaboration and co-creation, whether we should have an institutional repository, quality assurance processes and the importance of staff skills to the overall success. Suffice to say it was worthwhile having internal and external reviewers as this has given a breadth and depth that may otherwise have been missing.

The framework has now been approved for distribution as a consultation document by the university Quality Assurance and Enhancement Committee and Academic Council and will be made available to the wider university body at the university learning and teaching conference on the 22/23 January 2020. Once fully accepted by the university we will of course publish it as an open resource under a Creative Commons license.

Author information: Scott Connor is the Educational Development Leader (Flexible and Open Learning) at the University of the Highlands and Islands Learning and Teaching Academy.

Action Lab on Open Education Policy Making: Open Scotland Update

This short update on open education developments in Scotland was recorded as part of the Action Lab on Open Education Policy Making led by Fabio Nascimbeni, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, and Alek Tarkowski, Centrum Cyfrowe, at the OE Global Conference in Milan in November 2019.

Other resources shared during the Action Lab include:

  1. European Commission Report on Open Education Policies in all EU member states (2017) https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/policy-approaches-open-education-case-studies-28-eu-member-states-openedu-policies
  2. OE Policy Forum report (2019) https://oerpolicy.eu/oe-policy-forum/
  3. Policy Registry of the OER World Map https://oerworldmap.org/resource/?filter.about.%40type=Policy&size=20
  4. Survey on Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education by SPARC Europe https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/8X3DFYW

College & University Sector ICT Strategy commits to OER

The Open Scotland blog has been quiet for the last eighteen months but there have been some significant developments in open education in Scotland in the intervening period, most notable of which is the Scottish Funding Council’s College and University Sector ICT Strategy 2019 – 2021, which commits to the aims of the UNESCO OER Action Plan and the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

The Strategy was developed by the Further and Higher Education ICT Oversight Board, co-chaired by Gavin McLachlan, Chief Information Officer and Librarian to the University of Edinburgh and Dr Ken Thomson Principal and Chief Executive, with input from Jisc, UCSS-ISSC and others.

While recognising that colleges and universities have diverse academic profiles, local contexts and campus infrastructures, the strategy focuses on activities and services, including infrastructure, collections, advisory and production services, that may benefit from being organised at a national level.

The strategy covers:

  1. Skills,
  2. Economic Development and Innovation,
  3. Digital Public Services,
  4. Data,
  5. Information Security,
  6. Infrastructure
  7. Digital Participation and Inclusion

In section 7. Digital Participation and Inclusion the strategy states that:

In line with the UNESCO OER Action Plan, we will promote the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Badging initiatives to support both formal and informal learning that is equitable, inclusive, open and participatory. We are committed to the aims of the Digital Participation charter and the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

The strategy’s aims and objectives for Digital Participation and Inclusion are:

  • make Information Services open and accessible, ensuring they are represented and visible to students and staff at forums and that IS staff are actively engaged in institutional life to better understand users’ needs and requirements;
  • support the use of open licences for all educational resources created with public funding;
  • promote common ICT core skills and online learning (over and above core educational requirements) to develop personal digital skills, embedding relevant elements from the EU and Jisc frameworks to promote the development of learner and staff skills, and
  • involve students in the design and development of student-facing digital platforms, ensuring they meet usability and accessibility requirements, and address the 5 Digital Rights.

Although the strategy stresses that participation in any sectoral or national service is on a voluntary basis, this cross sector commitment to the aims of the UNESCO OER Action Plan and the endorsement of open licenses for educational resources created with public funding represent a significant development for open education in Scotland.

In order to build on the platform provided by the strategy and to highlight the sector wide benefits of engaging with OER and Open Education we are planning to reactivate the Open Scotland initiative in the coming months, so please check the blog for further updates. If you would like to get in involved with the Open Scotland initiative, or to contribute news items or case studies about OER and open education to this blog, please contact lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com or joewilson@joewilsons.net

UNESCO European Regional Consultation on OER Report

A guest post from Joe Wilson, reporting on the UNESCO European Regional Consultation on OER in Malta.

OER CosnultationsIt was a great privilege to be invited as one of 70 participants from 25 countries gathered in Malta to contribute to the UNESCO European Regional Consultation on Open Educational Resources in Malta. This to shape the inputs for the 2nd World OER Congress to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia 18th-20th September 2017. I hope the remaining regional consultations for the Middle East/North Africa, Africa , Americas and the Pacific Region are as productive as our gathering. The consultation events are ably supported by the Commonwealth of Learning and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. You too can take part in the consultation by completing the survey here: http://rcoer.col.org/surveys.html

The theme of the World OER Congress is OER for Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education; From Commitment to Action. This to move the global education system on from the Paris Declaration of 2012 calling on all governments to make a commitment to OER. The aim to use OER policies and practice to meet the United Nations aims of achieving a set of sustainable development goals for Education by 2030.

We were tasked with :

1. Reviewing the progress of OER in Europe since the World OER Congress 2012
2. To identify strategies for maintaining OER
3. Agreeing a set of action points to be presented at the next Congress in September

Our outputs providing strategies, examples and models for the creation of a sustainable open educational infrastructure and mainstreaming open educational resources will be fed into the Congress but will be published here as they are pulled together and there will be a collection of interviews from the consultation events published here.

I was invited as Co-Founder of Open Scotland and I carefully prepared our inputs with Lorna Campbell my co-conspirator and Scottish colleagues from the Association of Learning Technology before setting off.

I’ll share the key parts of my report here and some reflections from the group I worked with who were tasked to focus on the barriers to the creation, sharing, use and re-purposing of Open Educational Resources at a national level.

In terms of Scottish approaches, the formation of Open Scotland and the creation of the Open Scotland Declaration has positioned Scottish Education as thought leaders in building both grass roots support for open educational practice and for encouraging policy shifts at national and institutional level and this is still garnering Scotland and Scottish education with global recognition.

The OEPS project has produced some open assets that could do much to drive open practice across Scotland https://oepscotland.org/resources/open-courses/ While the Open University’s broader offering for learners http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/ offers them access to a rich set of online courses and allows providers the opportunity to build their own courses on the OU platform.

There are some other green shoots around the UK. The continued healthy support across the community for conferences like #OER17 , the FELTAG coalition supporting blended learning and the sharing of developments. Some set backs too, it is hard as yet to see the new Jisc Content and App Store as a serviceable replacement for JORUM.

However, while Scottish Government investment has been made in the Open University led OEPS project and some large global institutions like Edinburgh University have taken up the challenge to embed both open educational resources and a broader set of open educational practices across their operations for the public good and some others notably Glasgow Caledonian University are forging ahead with policies that will support OER, momentum is slow.

Why is the case – these are my own thoughts on Scottish Landscape and updates the last review of Scottish activity from October 2016.

Some of the global arguments for the adoption of open educational practices and resources do not have the same traction in Scotland. Scottish Education is not a text book driven system in Universities, Colleges or Schools – so the economic case for the adoption of Open Textbooks or more open practice around the development and sharing of resources does not have the resonance it might have in other countries where national administration’s buy text books.

The levers in Scotland have to be around our life long learning system, our belief in education as a social good, open to all and around the social benefits of OER to all in the system.

Universities continue to conflate OER with lots of other policy initiatives and developments – We have a MOOC so we must be making and sharing OER ( rarely the case). We have an open research policy and we have policies and practices around open data. ( no realisation that OER is different). There are few formal staff development programmes around the creation, use and repurposing of OER and only a few policy levers to encourage their consideration.

Colleges – Recently regionalised and finding their feet have forgotten traditions of developing learning materials collaboratively and when they remember they tend to do this in closed communities as content clubs. If you do a dig into the public contracts Scotland you can see a growing trend over last six months for Colleges to buy large collections of commercial content. They are trying to make more courses available on line and playing catch up, by buying in the learning content. The entry level and CPD standards for lecturing staff are due to be refreshed but the current standards are weak around developing skills around embedding digital practice and make no mention of OER.

Schools – No real recognition that sharing learning materials is a good thing and to a degree still struggling with the notion that teachers create learning materials. In Scotland we have a superb platform in GLOW a Scottish Schools Intranet with excellent set of tools to support learning but it lacks a learning object repository it is hard to find materials inside GLOW and there is no coherent approach to adopting standard open licencing like Creative Commons. In terms of development there is the recently published Digital Learning and Teaching Strategy this encourages the development of digital skills in both initial teacher training and in teacher CPD for continued registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland but it tends to focus on the use and deployment of technology and makes no mention of content creation or open educational resources.

Third sector and libraries – perhaps most progress is being made here. Libraries and museums are digitising their resources and releasing these into the public domain with open licences. Trade unions and third sector organisations realise that a sharing economy is the most effective way to support their stakeholders. Good signs here that the methods and approaches of the wikimedia foundation are being adopted.

Government, while the government has usefully made a significant investment in the OEPS Project, which it references in any enquiry about the progress of OER in Scotland, it still appears to view activity in this area as peripheral in meeting sectorial objectives.

The broad view of the administration seems to be that policy around open educational practices is not required as initiatives in this space are being driven out by Universities fulfilling their charitable and philanthropic traditions and that there is a lack of an evidence base around the benefits to learners that justifies a policy intervention.

The growing evidence base from other countries and global initiatives is counter to this view. A healthy open educational resource driven system needs both top down and bottom up support. The papers from this consultation and from the World Congress should allow an informed reappraisal of this position.

UNESCO European Regional Consultation on OER, Malta, February 2017

A further report on the Consultation is available from UNESCO here: Ministers, experts urge inclusive access and quality education through open educational resources

An Overview of Open Education Policy and Practice in Scotland

This report, which is based on a paper presented by Lorna M. Campbell, OER Liaison – Open Scotland, at the ALT Conference at the University of Warwick in September 2016, provides an overview of a number of open education initiatives taking places across different sectors of Scottish education throughout 2016. This report was previously published by the Open Knowledge Open Education Group.

Open Scotland

openscot_logo_portrait_rsOpen Scotland is a cross sector initiative that aims to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. The initiative was launched in 2013 and was originally supported by Cetis, ALT, SQA and the Jisc RSC Scotland. Since 2015, the University of Edinburgh has provided a home for Open Scotland, with additional support provided by the ALT Scotland SIG. Open Scotland maintains a blog which acts as a focal point to engage the community and disseminate news and developments relating to all aspects of openness in education in Scotland and further afield.

Scottish Open Education Declaration

Open Scotland also supports the Scottish Open Education Declaration an open community draft based on the UNESCO OER Declaration which broadens the scope of the guidelines to encompass all aspects of open education. The ALT Scotland SIG has contacted previous Scottish Government education minsters, Mike Russell and Angela Constance to raise awareness of the Declaration, and in both instances met with an encouraging but non-committal response. In May 2016, following a Cabinet reshuffle, John Swinney was appointed as the new Cabinet Secretary for Education and the ALT Scotland SIG will bring the Declaration to his attention in the autumn.

Although the Scottish Open Education Declaration has not yet gained traction within Scotland it has generated considerable interest elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Slovenia where the Slovenian government are exploring the potential of adopting it.

Scottish Government

scottish-government-logo-2Although the Scottish Government allocated a substantial amount of funding to the Open University’s Opening Educational Practices in Scotland Project in 2014, there have been no further open education funding initiatives and open education does not appear to be high on the political agenda. At best, open education is seen as being somewhat peripheral to Scottish Government priorities, primarily due to the perceived lack of a statistical evidence base supporting the impact of open education on learners.

Opening Educational Practices inn Scotland Project

oeps_logo_rsThe Open University’s OEPS project, which runs from 2014 – 2017, is funded by the Scottish Funding Council and aims to facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland. The project undertakes a wide range of activities include running workshops and events, providing expert guidance, collating case studies and supporting open practice communities. The project has been particularly successful in engaging with third sector organisations including Scottish Union Learning and Pakinson’s UK. OEPS recently launched a number of open courses developed in collaboration with partners including Understanding Parkinson’s with Parkinson’s UK; My Seaweed Looks Weird, with UHI and the Scottish Association for Marine Science; and Becoming an Open Educator.

Glasgow Caledonian University

glasgowcaledonianuniversity_logoGlasgow Caledonian University became the first university in Scotland to approve an interim open education resources policy in 2015. The policy defines what OERs are, explains why GCU supports their creation, sharing and use, and gives advice on how to cite third party resources. GCU Library is now undertaking advocacy work and providing training to raise awareness of OER and the policy. The University has also recently established the EdShare repository to manage teaching and learning resources; 300 resources have been deposited in the first 6 months of which 40% are open access.

University of Edinburgh

edinburghUniversity of Edinburgh’s has also approved an OER policy, which encourages staff and students to make informed decisions about using, creating and publishing OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience. This policy is underpinned by an OER vision which builds on the history of the Edinburgh Settlement, excellent education and research collections, traditions of the Enlightenment and the University’s civic mission. The University also has an OER Service which undertakes a wide range of activities that support staff and students to engage with OER, and help the institution to mainstream digital education across the curriculum.

opened_tealRather than implement an OER repository, the University of Edinburgh releases OERs through a wide range of platforms, including flickr, TES, YouTube, Sketchfab, Wikimedia Commons and Media Hopper, the institution’s own media asset management platform. These resources are then aggregated into the University’s one stop shop for open education resources, Open.Ed.

200px-wikimedia_uk_logo-svgEdinburgh also recently became the first University in Scotland to employ a dedicated Wikimedian in Residence. As an advocate for openness the Wikimedian in residence delivers training events and workshops to further the quantity and quality of open knowledge and enhance digital literacy through skills training sessions and editathons, and redress the gender imbalance of contributors by encouraging more women to engage with Wikimedia and enhance the coverage of articles about women.

Edinburgh’s efforts in supporting open education were recognized earlier this year, when the University was awarded Wikimedia UK’s Partnership Award for hosting the OER 16 Open Culture Conference, and the Association for Learning Technology awarded the Open Education Team third place in the Learning Technologist of the Year team awards.

University of Dundee

uniofdundeelogo_rsAlthough Dundee has not yet approved an OER policy, the University is hoping to progress to one in the future. Dundee are currently sharing open licensed student developed content through Vimeo and Flickr channels, including a showcase of OER from Masters in Medical Art students The School of Dentistry is also using Sketchfab to share CC licensed dental models developed by students

MOOCs

Many Scottish universities have developed MOOCs which are running on a number of commercial platforms including FutureLearn, Coursera and EdX. Although MOOCs are a significant part of the open education landscape, engaging with MOOCs does not necessarily equate to engaging with open education. Only two universities that run MOOCs have developed an OER policy, however anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of institutions are rethinking their MOOC production strategies with a view to making the process more open and sustainable.

FE Sector

PrintThe FE sector is still bedding down after the upheaval of regionalization and mergers. As a result merging institutional systems and creating shared infrastructure has become a priority, however engagement with open education is low. The Re:Source OER repository previously hosted by Jorum has been moved to a new repository ResourceShare, supported by the College Development Network. However while the sector is accepting of open educational practice and OER in theory, colleges tend to be cautious in actual practice and there is more interest in the walled garden approach to sharing educational content. The is some interest in the Blended Learning Consortium led by Heart of Worcestershire College and a number of Scottish colleges have subscribed to join the closed consortium.

Jisc

jisc-logoJisc announced the retirement of the national Jorum OER repository in 2015 and the service will finally close at the end ofSeptember 2016. Jorum customers have the option of migrating copies of their content from the repository and selected resources are being migrated to the new Jisc App and Resource Store which will host free and open licensed content alongside paid for content. It remains to be seen how receptive the sector are to this approach with some within the open education community cautioning against the risk of open washing.

ALT

alt-logoThe Association for Learning Technology is playing and increasingly active role in supporting open education in Scotland. In addition to supporting the Open Scotland initiative, the ALT Scotland SIG liaises with the OEPS Project, hosts annual events to showcase the use of education technology and open education across sector, brings together policy makers at an annual policy summit and raises awareness of open education at Scottish Government level.

National Library of Scotland

national-library_rsThe National Library of Scotland launched a new strategy in 2015 and continues to review its open licensing policy with a view to making more of the library’s collections openly available. All images up to 1000px, core metadata and OCR scanned resources are now licensed CC BY, unless the library does not own the copyright, metadata supplied to Europeana is licensed CC0 and high resolution images, extended metadata and manually transcribed resources are licensed CC BY NC SA. In addition, the Library is planning to share more images through Wikimedia Commons.

Summary

there is significant engagement with open education within individual institutions across Scotland, the Scottish Government has yet to recognise the value of open education to expand access to education, widen participation, and support social inclusion. However 2017 marks the anniversary of two significant open education initiatives; the tenth anniversary of the Cape Town Declaration and the fifth anniversary of the UNESCO OER Declaration. These anniversaries will be marked by significant global events and it is possible that these can be leveraged to raise awareness of the value of open education within the Scottish Government and to drive forward the development of national open education policy.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Sarah Cornelius, University of Aberdeen; Sam Coulter, University of West Scotland; Linda Creanor, Glasgow Caledonian University; Kerr Gardiner, University of Glasgow; Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University; Natalie Lafferty, University of Dundee; Kenjij Lamb, College Development Network; Joe Wilson, joewilson.net

Open Education Presentations at #ALTC

The recent ALTC Connect, Collaborate, Create Conference at the University of Warwick featured a number of presentations focussed on open education in Scotland.

Into the Open – a critical overview of open education policy and practice in Scotland

Lorna M. Campbell, University of Edinburgh

This presentation provides a broad overview of current open education initiatives in Scottish Higher and Further education sectors and reflects on both progress and barriers to the development of open education policy and practice.

Developing literacies of open: across an institution and beyond

Stuart Nicol, University of Edinburgh

This presentation discusses a number of related initiatives at the University of Edinburgh in the context of supporting communities within the institution to acclimatise to the changing landscape brought about by the technologies and policies of open education.

Learning the Hard Way: Lessons in Designing OER in, for and through Partnership

Anna Page and Ronald MacIntyre, OPES Project, Open University

The presentation shares the OEPS project’s experiences of working in partnership with external organisations to create OER and enabling them to explore open educational practices in the process. The OEPS project has been adapting the existing tried and tested Open University course production models to partnership collaboration.

Making movies: Democratising the use of media in learning and teaching

Anne-Marie Scott, University of Edinburgh

This presentation provides an overview of strategic initiatives to place media use at the heart of the University of Edinburgh’s teaching, learning, research and public engagement activities and reflects plans for expanding the use of media to focus on assessment, feedback, and sharing as OERs in particular.

 

Open Education at ALTC Connect, Collaborate, Create

The annual ALT Conference ALTC: Connect, Collaborate, Create takes place at the University of Warwick next week and there are a number of papers under the Collaborate theme that focus on open education initiatives in Scotland and open education more generally.

If you’re unable to attend the conference in person you can participate remotely by following @A_L_T and the #altc hashtag on twitter. All keynotes will also be live streamed on the ALT Youtube channel.

ALTC 2015, CC BY, Chris Bull, http://www.chrisbullphotographer.com/

ALTC 2015, CC BY, Chris Bull, http://www.chrisbullphotographer.com/

Open Education in Scotland

Designing Open Educational Resources in, for and through Partnership
Tue, Sep 6 2016, 11:30am – 1:00pm
Ronald Macintyre & Anna Page, Open University

The Opening Educational Practices in Scotland project focusses on how to use Open Educational Resources (OER) to support those distanced from education. At the start we were keen to avoid the easy reading of ‘openness in education’ as a matter of educators in organisations releasing openly licenced learning materials online. However, as educators have “lived with” OER in various forms and free online has seeped into the classroom we have moved from considering how to make the resource open, to considering what open resources enable us to do – what one might call “the practice turn”.
Full abstract

Making movies: Democratising the use of media in learning and teaching
Tue, Sep 6 2016, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Anne-Marie Scott, University of Edinburgh

Strategic planning in many of our institutions places media use at the heart of teaching, learning, research and public engagement activities. Our initiatives in online education, student experience, and innovative teaching have surfaced many requirements for the collection, management and delivery of video and audio assets.

The presentation will include a summary of the scenarios that our academic community prioritised and how the IT solution selected (Kaltura) has met the challenge. We will reflect on our plans for expanding the use of media in the next academic year, focussing on assessment, feedback, and sharing as OERs in particular. We will share our ‘DIY Film School’ pilot training courses, teaching our staff and students how to make movies using their smartphones, and discuss the impact that all of this work is having on digital skills development, learning and teaching experience, and fostering a new culture of creativity, sharing and experimentation.

Full abstract

Into the Open – a critical overview of open education policy and practice in Scotland
Thu, Sep 8 2016, 1:30pm – 3:00pm
Lorna M. Campbell, University of Edinburgh

This paper will present a broad overview of current open education initiatives in Scottish Higher and Further education sectors and reflect on both progress and barriers to the development of open education policy and practice. Although strategic open education policy drivers may be lacking at national and sector level and awareness of open education appears to be minimal at government level, a range of innovative open education initiatives have arisen across the sector.

The collaborative Open Scotland initiative, now supported by the University of Edinburgh and the ALT Scotland SIG, continues to raise awareness of all aspects of open education and lobby for policies that support open practice at the national level. Open Scotland also supports the Scottish Open Education Declaration, which, although it has yet to gain support at national level, continues to be influential within institutions as a tool to open discussions about the strategic benefits of open education.

Full Abstract

Developing literacies of ‘open’ across an institution, and beyond
Thu, Sep 8 2016, 1:30pm – 3:00pm
Stuart Nicol, University of Edinburgh

This paper will discuss a number of related initiatives at the University of Edinburgh in the context of supporting communities within the institution to acclimatise to the changing “semiotic landscape” and shifting “materiality of literacy” (Barton et al. 2005, p 23) brought about by the technologies and policies of open education. The University of Edinburgh is committed to supporting open and sustainable learning and teaching practices by encouraging engagement with Open Educational Resources (OERs) within the curriculum, and supporting the development of digital literacies for both staff and students in their use of OERs. In support of this vision an OER learning and teaching policy has recently been approved (University of Edinburgh 2016), underpinned by a central OER support service. The Open.Ed (www.ed.ac.uk) website has also been launched as a one-stop-shop about OERs at the University, which includes guidance, showcasing of best practice and blogs by prominent open practitioners.

This position has been developed over a number of years through discussion and collaboration with staff and students both inside the institution and from the wider educational community. Highton, Sekar and Nicol (2015) discussed how the driver for broader engagement with OERs came from the student body represented through Edinburgh University Student Association (EUSA). The OER policy itself is derived from openly licenced policies developed at Leeds and Glasgow Caledonian Universities and the OER position paper from Greenwich University.

Full abstract

CC BY Chris Bull

ALTC 2015, CC BY, Chris Bull, http://www.chrisbullphotographer.com/

Open Education

Developing flexible open courses (“cMOOCs”) with international collaborators
Tue, Sep 6 2016, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Sarah Honeychurch, Maha Bali, and Kevin Hodgson

Collaborate to Create: Stakeholder Participation in Open Content Creation
Tue, Sep 6 2016, 3:15pm – 4:15pm
Richard Windle, Heather Wharrad, Kirstie Coolin, and Michael Taylor

Repositories for open education: a reflection and look forward for EPrints
Wed, Sep 7 2016, 10:25am – 12:05pm
Kelly Terrell

Different Aspects of the Emerging Open Education Discipline
Wed, Sep 7 2016, 10:25am – 12:05pm
Martin Weller

Collaborative partnerships to produce accessible open educational resources
Wed, Sep 7 2016, 12:15pm – 1:15pm
Abi James, E.a. Draffan, and Mike Wald

Lecture capture: risky business or evolving open practice
Wed, Sep 7 2016, 2:15pm – 3:30pm
Jane Secker, and Chris Morrison

ALT Scotland SIG: Sharing Stories – enablers and drivers for learning technology in Scottish education

A guest post from Prof Linda Creanor, ALT Scotland SIG Co-Chair. This post previously appeared on the ALTC Blog.

Towards the end of June the ALT-Scotland SIG held their annual a event which this year focused on Sharing Stories – enablers and drivers for learning technology in Scottish education It was held on the east coast of Scotland this time where around 50 delegates were hosted by Dundee and Angus College at their impressively modern Gardyne campus. The variety of presentations, discussions and demos can be seen in the outline programme. The event was recorded and both the morning and afternoon sessions are now available on the ALT YouTube Channel (morning and afternoon session) and embedded below (the YouTube video pages for each of these sessions includes navigation to the individual talks).

The presenters shared stories about innovative developments, including the ‘huddles and medals’ approach to transforming staff engagement with technology in the University of the West of Scotland, new approaches to mobile technology for blended learning at Edinburgh College, and the publishing of e-textbooks at the University of the Highlands and Islands as part of the Jisc funded eTIPS project. We also heard about marks integration at Glasgow Caledonian University, approaches to encouraging collaboration among online distance learners at the University of Dundee, and strategic developments around open education and the promotion of CMALT certification at the University of Edinburgh.

There was also time for a useful open update and discussion session, where delegates shared tips and tricks, successes and concerns around various aspects of digital learning.

The really fun part came when participants were let loose in the College’s new Learning Lab where we had the opportunity to try out the various exciting technologies that are now being used for teaching and learning on the campus. We had a tour of the inside of the human body through virtual reality headsets (definitely not for the squeamish), tried out 3D scanning and printing (with some unusual results), programmed routes for miniature vehicles (with variable outcomes) and flew drones to experience how they’re being used by construction and surveying students (all landed safely).

More information and photos of the day can be found on the Educational and Design Team’s blog at the University of Edinburgh and also on Lorna Campbell’s Open World blog.

All in all it was an inspiring day, helped immensely by the very warm welcome from colleagues at Dundee and Angus College. The lively conversations continued as we left the campus buzzing with new ideas about technology and learning.