Transcript

PRESENTER:

So in terms of Open Education Resources, there’s three or four main major sort of groups of people we can think about. But obviously there are individuals, the individual learner students. And for them the evidence seems to be that’s coming from the literature and from the research and scholarship that is going on that these are the types of things that individual learners like.

They like to learn new things, or enrich their studies. They do like to share and discuss topics. They often use them to assess what they wish to participate in further formal education. Many are using it to decide which institution they want to study at. It’s becoming part of recruiting, it’s part of that public image, as I said, of the institution.

Happened with MIT. MIT say they’ve seen a change in the types of people who apply to them to study. Since they’ve had OpenCourseWare. They know that the majority of students who do apply have looked at MIT OpenCourseWare before they’ve applied. That happens everywhere. They might want to improve their own work performance. As I say, a lot of people might be saying, oh, this is great.

I just want to learn how to – I need to know about this. They say I’ll go back to that quantum mechanics one. Oh, god, I can’t remember. How do I do this? I need to find out how to do this. Oh, there’s this great little class on MIT OpenCourseWare. I can find out how to do that. It’s a bit more about information, but it’s a bit of that sort of informal professional development, creative development, they want.

They might want to create a revised OER themselves. But one of the issues that does come out with a lot of individual learners, they still often need guidance. Of course, and there’s lots of people, not just in this country but around the world, whose educational attainment is low in terms of being able to use these types of materials. They need a lot of support and activity.

Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s valuable to them. The next big group, you’re in teachers. Individually and collectively, the hope is through that sharing activity and endeavour, through Open Education Resources, we’ll create resources more efficiently and effectively.

And particularly perhaps those rich media resources. Maybe animation. Things which you have the technologies, you could do that. Particularly in this room, in the middle of training, you can create these things. But this is the time and effort involved in learning how to do it and doing it. Somebody else has already produced nice animation, this nice little bit of video, audio there. Isn’t that great?

Somebody else has done it. Or it’s saying instead of one person doing it, why don’t lots of people get together and collectively produce something like that? Shared effort. And they say they’ve all got that to use. I think we already heard about obviously looking at this stuff. It can be just a way of saying oh, I don’t want to use this material, but I want to see how they’ve approached it.

What’s their teaching strategy here? Ah. That’s an interesting way of doing it. So a lot of OER can be useful just to say umm, I never thought about putting it that way, or a type of activity like that, which is embedded in it. But creating resources of course is in collaborations with others. It’s important, I’ve already mentioned that. Joining communities of practice.

Customise and adapt resources by translating or localising them. Don’t underestimate how important it is, or can be, to have material translated into other languages so people can readily access them. And because it’s open licence, now this can be across countries.

And there are aspects, people might say, well, there is an element in the OER movement worldwide about is this a form of neo-colonialism? This is, whoa, these rich western countries producing these nice OER, and can’t all those poor countries who don’t have so many resources and things take these on and use them? Well, in essence they don’t have to. They can do whatever they want.

They’re there. No one’s pushing it on them. But you might even find within a country this could be important. Take South Africa. South Africa has ten national languages. For many South Africans, their first language is not going to be English, not going to be Afrikaans, necessarily.

In which case, if you create one OER in one language, if you could easily just translate and mould it to other languages, it means that everybody can study the same material in their first language, and not have to worry about studying in their third language, second language, third language, fourth, whatever it is.

Make it important. And it’s also important, I think I’ll probably say this later equally, those small, what might be seen as minority languages, of course you don’t find educational publishers producing stuff for them. It will be all in English, it will be in Spanish. These big languages.

So again, OER enables these ideas that it’s an open textbook, that it might be translated into a language that’s relevant to that learner. But you all know this. Remember that technology only supports, not supplants good teaching. And so for institutions, thinking as an educational institution, don’t dismiss that one. Showcase teaching research programmes to wider audiences.

Why not? Again, if you’re having an institutional repository, as I said, it is a window into your institution, just like any website. You have websites, and they are a window upon your institution. You might think it’s a very poor window, a very opaque window, whatever it is. A distorting window at the moment, but when your education resource is out there, it is showing something about your institution.

Just as an open access repository of research publications is showing something of your research. All its openness, it is a different type of take when your institution has already said, hey, I can help widen the pool of applicants with courses and programmes. Because it’s more visible, people can see it. There can be a lot of myths about what it is to study at institution X, and what it might be.

If people are worried about it. They can see something of those materials, and particularly if they are video lectures. They can see something of those, and they think, ah, I understand a bit better what the experience will be like for those who are unfamiliar with our education. For those who have not had anybody in the family go into that. Again, it’s just exposing that a bit.

Lowering the lifetime costs of developing OER. Of course that can be important by sharing these things. That’s one of the things that online learning does force us about, things like UK HE can be more cost effective. But collaborating, collaborating is not just for other universities.

Public commercial organisations, including educational publishers, this opens up new ways of doing knowledge transfer education. Also work-based learning with all sorts of institutions. Also, it can be used to extend various outreach activities, community based activities and things. Again, being open there. The local community, broader community, the alumni. The ex-students and things like that.

There’s all different ways in which OER provides a link between the institution and learners, students, and others. But of course it requires supportive policies and strategies. I’ll just note at this point, The Open University does not have an OER policy. There is a group of people going round about this, insisting that we have a policy.

It has a learning and teaching strategy in which openness and Open Education Resources – it has an operating policy around open media, as we now call it, in terms of what we’re doing. And that’s because we’re largely seeing in terms of mainstream, we don’t have to have something separate over there. This is about our learning and teaching strategy in general.

And just openness is a feature, a part of it. But just to finish off this bit, it’s governments, national agencies. They’re getting involved, they’re getting interested. We saw the Online Learning Task Force set up by the last Labour administration, carried on through the Coalition.

Certainly the Online Learning Task Force saw it as OER was showcasing UK HE, a way of attracting international students. Again, we already do that. Again, it’s that window not only to just the students in the UK, but to further afield. Developing educational resources in minority languages that commercial publishers might not get involved in can be important.

Develop educational resources that reflect local cultures and priorities. Again, that can be things that – we have done that a bit in the OU in terms of doing stuff specifically for Wales, stuff specifically for Scotland. Focusing on the fact that The Open University teaches across all four nations of the United Kingdom. It’s been doing that. We have to sort of reflect some of that as far as possible.

It’s very difficult to do that in formal programmes, although we try to do that as well. But we can do a lot more of that in this Open Education Resources aspect, and something that Ronald is working on, as you heard earlier. Cooperating international and common resources to meet common needs. I’ll come back to that with some examples.

But again, these need seed funding and supportive policies. There’s no good just government saying this is a good thing. They do need to seed it. Here in the UK, of course, we’ve had the UK OER programme, the – what has it come to? – about [GBP]12 million that’s been invested in various projects and the funding that The Open University’s had from the Higher Education Funding Council for England as well.