Open educational resourcesDr Ester Ehiyazaryan

School of Humanities, Education, Social and Sports Science, University Centre DoncasterSCORE Fellow, Open University

What are Open Educational Resources?

“OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property licence that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge”.

(William and Flora Hewlett Foundation)

From Banksy shop

What are Open Educational Resources?

Ten key points:1. OER are free to use and publicly available.2. OER can be used in teaching and learning (usually with attribution to the original creator).3. The majority of OER can be altered and adapted (‘repurposed’.)4. Using OER is not cheating; in fact it can improve the quality of learning experiences by building on other people’s work.5. OER development is a global movement – don’t be afraid to search global OER repositories.6. OER materials are not necessarily just teaching materials; there are a number of student support materials available as OER.7. OER are not just for teachers to use or repurpose; students can be encouraged to use OER to support their own learning.8. Many institutions now have OER repositories available through their VLE.9. JISC and the Higher Education Academy have developed a number of UK-based OER repositories as part of a pilot study, including specific repositories for Academy Subject Centres.10. Don’t knock it until you have tried it.

(Leeds Met, A Staff Guide to Open Educational Resources)

•SCORE – Support Centre for Open Resources in Educationhttp://www8.open.ac.uk/score/

Aims of SCORE:•Provide skills training in developing and reusing OER (see short term teaching fellowships http://www8.open.ac.uk/score/short-term-fellowships, 28th October deadline)•Build evidence of the impact of OER in HE•Address issues such as IPR and support the establishment of a legal framework for rights management•Enhance our understanding of how OER are used in various contexts

Context

Should we create or reuse?

Online Learning Taskforce report to HEFCE:‘Collaborate to compete’

There is no point duplicating effort to create content that is already available and has been proven to work.Institutions can build on the existing open educational resources initiative (funded by HEFCE, managed by theJISC and the HEA) to achieve economies of scale and efficiencies. In addition they can pull in the best contentand openly available learning resources from around the world and adapt them for particular courses. Studentscan then access a richer, wider range of material to enhance their learning experiences wherever they arestudying, and leading experts can build a profile beyond their institution. There are also significantopportunities for partnership with private organisations to produce content that is interactive, responsive andpedagogically effective.

Responsibility of the JISC, HEA and the Open University (as part of its national role) – suggested investment of£5 million per year for five years, awarded under broad direction from funding councils.

Students expect greater flexibility inProvisionIt is essential to understand the rapidly changing needs and expectations of current and future students. Learners are increasingly able to navigate high quality, open and online resources and can do this through social networks, which in some cases are more supportive contexts in which to develop skills.New broadcast and distribution channels such as iTunes U, Youtube and Wikipedia demonstrate this trend. Learning environments and contexts are becoming increasingly participative and the learner’s contribution is highly valued by teachingprofessionals. However, students also need to develop their skills in digital and information literacy – for example, evaluation of the usefulness of varying types of web sources/information.

Online Learning Taskforce report to HEFCE:‘Collaborate to compete’

Should we create or reuse?

OER repositoriesJorum, University of Manchester

HumBox - humanities teaching resources on the web

SlideShare – sharing presentations online

iTunesU – OER available through the iTunes store

Merlot – multimedia educational resources for learning and online teaching (peer reviewed), California State University

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

http://www.humbox.ac.uk/

http://www.slideshare.net/

http://www.apple.com/education

/itunes-u/

http://www.merlot.org/

OER development tools

Xerte – a suite of tools for the development of interactive learning resources; Nottingham Universityhttp://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/

LabSpacehttp://labspace.open.ac.uk/

Examples of Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) developed with Xerte:

Introduction to qualitative data analysis

A classification of qualitative research methods

Intellectual property rights (IPR)

Creative commons licenses:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

CC licenses explained:http://creativecommons.org/videos/creative-commons-kiwi

Courtesy of Flickr: by Giuli-O <http://www.flickr.com/photos/giuli-o/>

Web2Rights - a JISC funded project which supports creators of digital content to understand licensing and IPR:http://www.web2rights.com/resources.html

•Action research study – second and third person participation – colleagues from Education, Sociology and Criminology

•Collaborative evaluation and embedding of OER in research methods teaching

•An OER research methods collection:

http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/5548

Embedding OER in Research Methods Teaching (SCORE project)

Criteria for selection

16. GRANUALITYDoes size matter? Is it easier to reuse small bits of content (assets), or is it preferable to search for big, significant resources?

Purpose

Concerns

Quality

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18. CONTEXT-FREEOne theory is that stripping out context-specific information makes resources more easy to reuse. What do you think?

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21. INNOVATION

Resources which make innovative use of technology can be difficult to produce. Is this is a good reason to reuse them?

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Concerns

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Selection criteria

(Chris Pegler, ORIOLE project)Chris Pegler’s reusable card game is available here: http://orioleproject.blogspot.com/p/shop_16.html

Interactivity (no interactivity >50% of RLO is interactive)

Media richness(no visual or audio elements Media elements are of exceptional quality)

Feedback(none includedFeedback is adaptive to learners needs)

Selection criteria

(Learning Object Attribute Matrix (LOAM), Windle, Nottingham University)

What we found…The interdisciplinary nature of OER aids narrative construction; allows learners to internalise knowledge (constructivism); has the potential to address some of the difficulties which learners have with research methods learning.

Zimbardo study

ethics

Experimental research

Psychological element of an

experiment

Social theory

Feminism

identity

R2: I think it is useful as yet another source, not only for research modules – what I found pretty much with all of these that I looked at is that there are uses in other modules as well.

Questionnaire design

What we found…

The size of the resource (granularity) …influences learner autonomy; …affects perception of the resource by tutors (academic credibility); …determines the level of work the tutor will have to do in introducing the resource in a programme of study.

Large:http://onlineqda.hud.ac.uk/index.php

Small:http://www.arasite.org/mmedia/addvalquaire/index.htm

What we found…

Context and level specificity – rigid level specificity detracts from the flexibility and reusability of the resource. Level and context specificity is where the real work for the tutors comes in when reusing resources.

undergraduates

postgraduates

researchers

teachers

What we found…R2: Either in a seminar or if they are going to listen to it at home developing the blogs. Now we do have a discussion board on blackboard although I don’t think the students tend to use that I think they prefer to use facebook.

R3: I would say for next session please listen to Frances Rogers and see what he has to say about research and we’ll discuss this in next week’s seminar. So they’d have to listen to it in their own time but then as a class we’ll come back together discuss what they found about the research, strengths and weaknesses.

R1: Good basis for collaborative activity – making use of the tutor-learner created scenarios. You could create scenarios – like ‘you have been given the task to conduct action research into this…how do you go about doing it. These are the features, these are the people involved, these are the problems and whatever and then something like that would be great to link with it. What it does is that it kicks off a lot of creative ideas and follow-ups.

Blended learning

Real-life data in teaching

Economic and social data service (ESDS):

Free access to significant datasets (British Crime Survey, Millennium Cohort study, British Social attitudes survey)

Teaching and learning resources including research methods guides, data analysis guides, case studies of teaching use.http://www.esds.ac.uk/resources/teaching.asp

Browse by subject here:http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/browsebySubject.asp

demographic

Behavioural

Economic

Attitudinal

Questions…