The role of Open Access and Open Educational Resources within Distance Education

Jon GregsonStylianos Hatzipanagos

CDE Fellows

              This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Overview of talk

• OERs: a brief introduction

• Linking previous research to current

investigation• The programme

directors’ perspective

What are OERs? DefinitionsOpen Educational Resources are

teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. (UNESCO)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. (JISC)

Notable OER initiatives MIT’s Open Courseware

initiative

Open University’s OpenLearn

JISC: project work

Jorum is the national repository for teaching and learning materials (many are OERs)

MERLOT

OERs and MOOCs http://www.flickr.com/photos/everton137/7027227731/sizes/m/in/photostream/

OERs vs. or in support of academic practice

Displaced from proprietary ‘silos’, i.e. the institutional VLEs.

Copyright ‘free’, as contributions to collective knowledge.

Most often come against recent improvements in creation of e-learning content. They are frequently didactic in nature.

They are often elliptical shells to fill in with context and meaning. Context and wrap around activities are missing.

Interactive aspects and their learning design are separated from content and are often implicit rather than explicit.

Hatzipanagos 2012

What we learnt from practitioners and librarians about OERs and their use

(1) Discoverability in repositories

Lack of context a major obstacle

An OER tracking tool that would demonstrate trail of use and or /repurposing was considered valuable. JISC funded project OER Track

Materials in OERs need to be complemented by the teacher input, ‘presence’.

There is a desire for a community of teachers to share.

OERs and professional/academic development

Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

What we learnt from practitioners & librarians about OERs and their use

(2)

Role of OERs Different categories of stakeholders have

different views on how to share VLEs and OERs: institutional investment vs.

sharing and opening up – OERs valuable for an institutional reputation

OERs as an important set of materials for international sharing in learning and teaching

A capacity building role for OERs.

Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

What we have learnt from practitioners librarians about OERs

and their use (3)

Finding OERs

OERs as meta-Google

ITunes/eBooks as OERs: overcoming the proprietary issues to create OERs

Networks of people putting information together

How do people find OER? By searching? By sharing? By recommending in social networks?

Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

What we have learnt from practitioners librarians about OERs

and their use (4)

Evaluation of OERs

An evaluation/review system should be an integral part of the online repository of OERs

Can’t evaluate until you have used – but then should OERs be quality reviewed before they are released?

Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

What we have learnt from practitioners librarians about OERs

and their use (5)

Metadata and OERs: creating context

Importance of contextualising resources.

Importance of comprehensive metadata which repositories often lacks.

Value of metadata in repositories

Who creates the metadata? whose role is to complete the metadata – librarians or teaching practitioners ? Teaching practitioner or someone familiar with web technologies?

Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

Evaluation of engagement with OERs, practitioners

Workshops: most practitioners not familiar with OER, strong academic development aspect of engagement.

Reusabilty/repurposing focus of workshops: preference for ‘useful, specific and practical OERs’.

“Context often missing”, preference for reusable rather than repurposable.

Main potential benefit of OERs: ‘improved learning’ and less ‘saving on academic time to develop appropriate material/content’.

(Hatzipanagos 2012)

Do you encourage your UoLIP students to make use of such materials?

• 4 YES, 2 NO

Responses from UoL practitioners

Within your UoLIP programme do you make use of open access materials (i.e. open access journals, open educational resources (OERs) etc.)?

4 YES, 2 NO

Are you familiar with different types of creative commons licences?

4 YES, 2 NO

Qualitative questions:

 Do you think a collaborative scheme for drawing

together an OA repository across the colleges involved in the UoLIP would be useful?

Mixed responses:

Not really -the world of OER is not static enough to make it meaningful other than a snapshot of that day…

Yes. I expect there may be some overlap between subject materials of interest to our students and students of computational courses provided by Royal Holloway and LSE.

What do you consider to be the major constraints in using OERs?

1. limited understanding of their value

2. cultural resistance – a ‘new thing’, ‘not developed here’, ‘can we trust it’ ? etc.

and

3. lack of staff development to create awareness of OERs in this area

What do you consider to be the main resource implications, when adopting

OERs?

1. training for academics to create awareness of OERs

2. time to search and explore repositories of OERs

3. limited number of OERs in my discipline

4. perhaps less effort to maintain than institutional resources

5. like most ‘e’ advancements, the development of OER e-assessment materials is time and resource intensive in the short term, but should result in cost/time savings in the medium/long term.

The emergent landscape in OER use

Librarians seem to take the lead in the OER campaign.

Practitioners not familiar with OER: strong academic development aspect of any engagement activity

Searchability/discoverability still an overall issue.

Disciplinarity: a complex landscape.

Questions for discussion1. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of OA

for ODL suppliers (consider reading and other course materials and resources)

2. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of OA for ODL students

3. How could we set up an OA infrastructure for UoLIP that would draw on the expertise of the Colleges, and also add value to their own offerings ?

4. Who within UoLIP is best placed to champion OA?

5. What capacity building is needed in UoLIP to develop OA approaches ?

6. What would a suitable policy for OA look like? (Think of required themes/components)

Any comments?Email

Stylianos at

s.hatzipanagos@kcl.ac.uk

Jon at