How to nurture a community of online learners

Community.....

“Community…..” flickr photo by Kamaljith shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

I’ve been involved in open learning for several years now. It started almost by accident, when some guy called Dave ran a crazy learning experience that we called rhizo14, carried on serendipitously into a sister experience called CLMOOC, and gradually became a part of my daily ritual as I started participating in Daily Creates. Much of what happens in these open, online experiences can appear to be random and unstructured, but beneath and behind them is a set of core principles and values and a tried and tested design. Those can be broadly summed up as belonging to an educational framework called connected learning. That’s helped me to learn some tricks to help all of us (staff and students) to teach and learn online. They’re at the end of this post, for those wanting to skip straight to the punchline.

Connected learning is a work in progress. It begins from an (intuitively plausible, I think) set of beliefs in the value of learning that is interest-driven, peer-supported and academically relevant, and harnesses the power of social media in order to make these types of learning better integrated into learners’ lives while attempting to make it accessible to anyone who wants to participate (equity is a core value). As such, it is platform and technology agnostic, although the values of open education are central to what practitioners do.

At the heart of connected learning is the thought that we live, nowadays, in a participatory culture. Sometimes people describe this as “Web 2.0”, but participatory culture is actually a richer concept than that. Henry Jenkins contrasts the concept of “interactivity”, which he describes as a relationship between a customer and a software company and a property of some social media platforms, and “participation” which is a relationship between people (which can be facilitated by use of social media). This means that we can’t take student engagement for granted, we have to explicitly design it into our courses. For those familiar with the terminology, I might use this distinction to explain the differences between xMOOCs and cMOOCs. I say this to note a difference, and not to imply that cMOOCs are always superior – knowledge acquisition and participation in learning are not, imo, contradictory concepts – each has its place. Anna Sfard makes this point better than I could.

To an outsider, learning in the open can look unstructured and random, and those new to this type of learning and teaching can feel overwhelmed, out of their depth, unsure of their own abilities, frustrated, scared or even angry. This goes for both learners (often called participants) and educators (often called facilitators). This is why it is so important to design these experiences carefully, and to think carefully about the types of support that can be provided. I think, in the interesting times that lie ahead of us, we are all going to need all the support we can get – both to keep ourselves going, and to help our learners. Teaching and learning online can be an isolated experience, as those of us who do it know only too well.

So how can all of this help us now? First of all I should stress that I’m not suggesting that everybody immediately abandons whatever they are doing and redesign their courses so that they are connected learning experiences – I’m not trying to make more work for anyone. What I am going to tell you about is some tried and tested strategies that have helped the community that I am a part of to emerge and continue. I’m not pretending to have invented any of these strategies either – just to have used or experienced them for myself.

  • Remember that your learners will be in many different time zones, some of which will have better connectivity than others. People who can’t participate are likely to feel very left out and uncared for. Think about asynchronous activities as well as synchronous ones.
  • Some learners will have state of the art technology, others … won’t. Think about designing activities/resources that can load on different devices.
  • Realise that there is no such thing as a digital native: some (staff and students) will find it easy to adapt to this new way of teaching and learning others … won’t. We can’t predict who will and won’t adapt. Think about how to support staff and students who just can’t work out how to log in/submit/engage.
  • Don’t rely on one platform or one mode of delivery. Systems could be overloaded, or not available for a particular device, or not available in a geographical area (YouTube content, for example, can be restricted by geographical area). Yes, this could mean duplicating important content/messages in order to ensure that everyone who needs can access them.
  • Don’t force anyone to use a particular platform (other than official, institutionally supported ones). Your students might well have ethical objections to using a particular one. Respect those. Never require anyone to sign up to a (non-institutionally supported/“official”) platform in order to participate. Data rights are human rights.
  • Tap into the altruism of others. Nurture a community that helps each other (both staff and students). Model this yourself, watch for others doing it and publicly thank them. Think about the types of roles that might be needed to build a learning community: as well as you (the teacher), you might look for particularly active and/or knowledgeable students to become mentors.
  • Structure informal activities that people can engage in if they want. These don’t have to take a lot of time to design – you might ask students to share something unique about where they are living, to tell others about their hobbies, pets, or family. You could ask them to do this by sharing a small image, a link to a website, or a forum post. These help participants to feel that they belong and can build a sense of community over time.

And, finally, reach out to others around you. Use your networks and don’t be afraid of saying that you are finding something hard. My initial experiences of all of this was a baptism of fire. Those who watch me nowadays often think that I always find it easy to participate, and have always found it easy, but that’s not true. In fact, I nearly dropped out of an early connected learning experience (CLMOOC 2015) because I was feeling lost, confused and overwhelmed. What happened next was, I realise, due to the carefully designed support structure that was in place. I shouted out into the void and someone answered. The rest, as they say, is history.

This post was originally published on my personal blog

Openness, Precarity and Equity

As part of Open Education Week, the ALT Open Education SIG and Femedtech facilitated an asynchronous event Open Policy – Who cares?  The organisers invited provocations from members of the open education community in the form of Flipgrid videos and writings on femedtech.net. This Open Scotland contribution was written by Lorna M. Campbell. 

I’ve worked in the domain of open education for over ten years now and I passionately believe that publicly funded educational resources should be freely and openly available to the public.  In fact this is one of the founding principles of the Scottish Open Education Declaration.  When we talk about open policy the focus tends to be on “open” and “free”, however I think what is critical here is “funding”, because as we all know, open does not mean free. If we want to support the creation of open knowledge and publicly funded open education resources, then the education sector has to be supported by adequate funding and, perhaps more importantly, by equitable working conditions.  And this is where problems start to arise; at a time when casualisation is endemic in the UK higher education sector, too many colleagues are employed on exploitative precarious contracts.  This is why we are currently in a period of sustained industrial action that is protesting universities’ failure to make significant improvements on pay, equality, casualisation and workloads.  If you are a teaching assistant employed on a fixed hourly rate that doesn’t even begin to cover the preparation time for creating your teaching resources and lecturing materials, it’s hard to make the case, ethically and morally, that you should release your resources under open license, because you’re effectively giving your labour away for free, and very few marginalised workers have the privilege to be able to do that. So while I still believe that we do need more policy around open education, and that we have an ethical responsibility to make publicly funded educational resources available to all, we also need equitable working conditions that will enable us all to contribute to the shared knowledge commons.

Openness in the age of surveillance

Recently the topic of ‘openness in the age of surveillance’ has appeared in my life in multiple ways which I thought I’d share. Before I do a quick introduction, I’m Martin Hawksey and I work for the Association for Learning Technology, an independent membership organization which is focused on increasing the impact of learning technology for public benefit. Our funding comes from our membership services and events which means we have an independent voice. We use this voice to inform policy, practice and professionalisation of learning technology. The types of activities we are involved in around the theme of surveillance include co-ordinating the ALT Members response to the UK Government Technology and Data Ethics Inquiry, a webinar series around GDPR, as well as involvement in the ‘After Surveillance’ and Human-Data Interaction networks. ALT has also for a number of years supported the OER Conference, which this year includes the theme ‘Openness in the age of surveillance’.

This year’s conference theme has got me thinking about surveillance in education and open educational practices, but my interest in this area actually goes back further. For those that know me and my work they’ll know for the last 10 years or so I’ve been developing and distributing a free solution for people to archive data from Twitter in Google Sheets (TAGS). My journey with TAGS started with wanting to share a way for people to easily collect data from hashtag communities, mainly around events and conferences, but increasingly I’m aware like all technology this solution isn’t neutral and whilst I’ve a long list of positive uses of TAGS, I’m also aware this could be a tool to track and surveil individuals and communities.

The lack of control and ownership we have on the internet is really worrying. An example I highlighted in a talk at Domains19 in ‘Minority Report – One Nation Under CCTV’, which I also revisited for a Wikimedia DE event, was the news that Flickr had supplied IBM with over 100 million Creative Commons images so that IBM could train their facial recognition service. As Creative Commons were quick to highlight that this wasn’t related to how the images were licensed, in summary:

Whilst it’s true the dataset used by IBM were CC licensed this is a mute point. Even if these photos had a traditional copyright licence ‘fair use’ would have allowed IBM to data mine your photos without requiring any permission from you first. … did you ever give Google or any other search engine permission to index images associated with your name

Google Indexed Search Results

Surveillance in education feels unavoidable, for example, as soon as you record a students grade you are observing and recording an individual’s performance, but I heartened by the work of the community who are providing a critical eye as well as helping us to not fall into the hands of big brother. If this also interests you OER20 is a great opportunity to find out more about ‘openness in the age of surveillance’.

There are, at the time of writing, tickets available if you’d like to join us on the 1-2 April in London, but we are also live streaming a number of sessions that might be of interest. OER20 actually kicks off with a keynote from sava saheli singh who “conceptualized, co-created, and co-produced “Screening Surveillance” – a knowledge translation program for the Big Data Surveillance project”. After sava we are live streaming three related sessions from the parallel programme:

On day two of the OER20 programme we’ll also be live streaming:

For those attending OER20 in person there are also some other sessions you can click through to find more information about:

Hopefully you’ll be able to engage with OER20 either in person or online via the live streaming and the #OER20 hashtag, but if not I welcome your comments on what ‘Openness in the age of surveillance’ means to you.

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

 

Open for Scots

It’s not often that OER make the news but in December the Open University in Scotland’s new Scots language and culture course made a bit of a splash. I spoke to the OU’s Sylvia Warnecke, who led production of the OER, about interview requests, open archives, and creating a new pedagogy for a non-standard language.

Scots Language and Culture sits on OpenLearn Create – the OU’s most open platform, which makes course building tools available for free to anyone interested in creating, reusing or remixing content. We also use it for co-producing resources with partner organisations, which is what Sylvia did, rather than placing the course on OpenLearn, which houses only OU-generated OER.

“We had to develop a whole new pedagogy for learning Scots as it is not a codified language. There are no agreed standards for written Scots and the language has many regional variations in addition to 10 main dialect areas. We approached teaching Scots in the way a child learns a language, through immersion, mainly by listening. To do this, we had to have a new feature added to OpenLearn Create to enable people to listen to authentic Scots, then record themselves speaking and play it back so they can hear if their pronunciation sounds right.”

The project originated in 2016 following the Scottish Government’s launch of the Scots Language Policy, but it has been a long time evolving into its current form. It was produced in partnership with Education Scotland and was very much a community effort. Many Scots linguists, speakers and authors gave their time to the project, writing content and providing audio material. It also drew on content from archives and other online resources that have been made available with an open licence, such as the Dictionary of the Scots Language and the Scots Syntax Atlas.

Since Part 1 was launched in December (Part 2 was released this week) the course has been accessed by more than 8000 learners, making it one of the most successful on OpenLearn Create to date. Was Sylvia expecting the course to be so popular?

“We knew there was an interest but we’ve been taken aback by the overwhelming response from the public and the media. It was strange to be fielding requests for interviews with newspapers and radio. One of the questions I got asked was “why did it take a German lassie to make this happen?” I think it’s because I had no preconceptions about Scots, I just approached it as a linguist and could compare it to Swiss German, another non-standard language which is fully recognised in Switzerland. So many people have fed back to us what it means to them to have the validation that the way they speak is a real language and not ‘bad English’ like they were told at school. They are proud to be recognised as bilingual.”

Sylvia reckons social media has helped change attitudes to using Scots, reaching younger audiences and people with Scottish roots around the world. The Duo Lingo app’s recently launched Gaidhlig course has also been hugely popular and far exceeded expected numbers. The Scots OER is being used by a wide range of people and institutions, in schools, in prison learning centres and by groups of retired people, some of whom were not allowed to speak Scots when they were in school. 40% of people accessing the course are based outwith the UK (that’s right autocorrect, I said ‘outwith’!) from Canada to Australia.

Scots speakers may enjoy learning about the role of the language in Scottish history and culture and explore reasons for its ‘lack of prestige’. If you’re new to Scots you’ll learn to understand spoken and written Scots in different dialects and can begin to build your vocabulary. Each part of the course covers 20 study hours and you can earn a digital badge on completion of both Parts 1 and 2.

Gie it a shot!

@Gill_ie

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

Seven years of open

Happy New Year! This is traditionally a time for reflection so as I take the reins of the Open Scotland blog for January I will take the opportunity to look back on seven years of the Scottish Open Education Declaration (2013).

Full disclosure – I am a relative newbie to the open education community. In 2013, I was working in community education and had no clue about the massive potential of OER for my learners. I first heard the term in 2015 when I became involved in a partnership project to remix an OER for carers with Lindsay Hewitt of the OU in Scotland. I was smitten and when she offered me a (short-term) contract, I jumped (from my existing short-term contract). Precarity was my norm then. I had the opportunity to work closely with the then Open Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project and learned so much in a short time, attending every forum and conference that was going and meeting many of the fine people who had been involved in the Declaration along the way. I attended my first ALT OER conference in Edinburgh in 2016 (co-chaired by Lorna Campbell). OpenLearn, the Open University’s OER platform, was already 10 years old.

Before I was completely down with the terminology (we do have a knack for jargon and acronym) what I remember from those meetings was recurring mention of repositories. It is indicative of how the conversations have moved on that this is no longer the case. I’ve witnessed the direction move from OER to open educational practices (OEP) and pedagogy. There has also been a centring of ‘open’ within higher and further education. Unsurprising perhaps, as so many of the members and theorists within the growing and increasingly international community are located in HE institutions.

Which brings me, eventually, back to the Scottish Open Education Declaration. What’s interesting to me is that the Declaration wasn’t overly focused on HE. It was addressed to the Scottish Government, the Scottish Funding Council, education agencies, schools, colleges, universities, the third sector, and all organisations and individuals engaged in teaching and learning including galleries, libraries, archives and museums. It identifies the potential of open education in expanding access, widening participation, teaching and learning, digital citizenship, social inclusion, inter-institutional collaboration, publicly-funded research, accreditation (open badges), and lifelong learning (formal and non-formal).

Over the course of this month, I hope to explore activity in Scotland related to some of these lesser-blogged-about areas of open practice. Given my own role in widening access with the Open University in Scotland, you can expect to hear about projects I’ve been involved with. I am very much hoping that these can be the start of a conversation and would love to hear about – and boost – some of the exciting things you’ve been doing since the Declaration.

Tweet me @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

UNESCO OER Recommendation Approved

Earlier this week at the CI Sector Commission of the General Conference, UNESCO Member States voted to adopt the UNESCO OER Recommendation. The Recommendation is a key mechanism towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 on Quality Education. SDG4 aims to improve quality of life and access to inclusive education to help equip people with the tools required to develop innovative solutions to the world’s greatest problems. One of SDG4’s key targets is to:

ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development

Building on the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan, and the 2012 Paris OER Declaration, the new UNESCO OER Recommendation has five objectives:

  1. Building capacity of stakeholders to create access, use, adapt and redistribute OER.
  2. Developing supportive policy.
  3. Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER.
  4. Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER.
  5. Facilitating international cooperation.

The Recommendation acknowledges that:

the implementation of open licensing to educational materials Introduces significant Opportunities for more cost-effective establishment, access, reuse, re-purpose, adaptation, redistribution, curation, and quality assurance of those materials, including, but not limited to, translation to different learning and cultural contexts, the development of gender -sensitive materials, and the creation of alternative and accessible formats of materials for learners with special educational needs.

UNESCO’s Assistant Director General for Communication and Information, also announced the launch of a Dynamic Coalition for the implementation of the new OER Recommendation in order to promote and reinforce international cooperation.

The full text of the UNESCO OER Recommendation is available here: Draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources and a press release can be read here: UNESCO Recommendation on OER.