Transcript

PRESENTER:

Just a little bit, you know – what is it we’re talking about? You know, OERs are a slightly nebulous concept. And why are they so important? You know, what’s ...? Because on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like that big a deal. Okay, something has a slightly different licence from what you’d normally have on a piece of content. So what? Well, this is a so what. What are we talking about? Well, obviously, we’re talking about content of some sort or another.

And I come back to what that content might be in a minute. But you increasingly hear the phrase ‘open, educational practice’, or ‘practices’ as well. And this is, if you like, what follows from making the content free to use and reuse and adapt. And this is where you start to use the content to reach to people who otherwise wouldn’t be your students, you know – new categories of learner.

It’s where you explore different ways of delivering your curriculum. I did a bit of research a while back on how students use technology, both to support their learning and in their non-student lives. And what the, sort of, discontinuities between the two were. One of the things that emerged from that was the extent to which students almost totally ignore the huge amount of work that their library had done to pull together resources just for them – creating collections in this sort of nicely walled garden for them – they bypassed entirely.

They use Google, they use Wikipedia. And if they didn’t find it in Google, they missed it – even though some things just for them had been created. So it’s, in a sense, the sort of practices around education are changing. And we’ll be hearing a bit more about some of those. OERs are an amazing tool for collaboration. You’ll be hearing about some of the projects which have OER at the heart.

I don’t know how many of you have been involved in sort of multi-partner projects. I can recall one that I was involved in quite recently. It was a two-year project. And we got the partnership agreement between the five institutions involved agreed in month 23 of the 24-month project. That’s how long it took us to sort everything out.

If you say everything we produce will be published with a Creative Commons licence, you don’t need a partnership agreement. All of that’s gone. And, not only do you have a vastly simplified way of collaborating between members of the consortium, but you also have a tremendously strong selling point to the funder. Namely, that everything you do for the purposes of your consortium members is equally available to help anybody else in a similar situation.

It’s proved to be a strong support tool for communities. I was speaking to a regional grouping of staff developers recently, and they hadn’t been using OER. But they immediately saw how helpful it would be to support them in their collaborative, mutual support activities which were already under way – but as a way to build on that and take it further. You’ll hear from Andy the role we all can play in marketing and bringing in new students.

There are some really interesting new models being built on the back of OER. We mentioned one of them last night which was the OERUniversity. And that’s one. There’s another one called BADGES, which is a new approach to recognition of learning that hasn’t been acquired in the conventional university setting, but has been acquired through use of OER. I also think that you shouldn’t overlook altruism and connecting with people’s strong beliefs.

None of us got into higher education to help strengthen the bottom line of our institutions, important though that might be. We came into it for other reasons. And, in many cases, it’s really caring about the capability of education to change people’s lives, to have an effect on people, to build civic society, et cetera – these reasons. And OER is a tremendous vehicle for people who care about education this way, to actually do more of what they care about.

And, I think, as we move from higher education as something that’s perceived as being a common good to something that is a private gain, for those that graduate – and it’s happening astonishingly rapidly in this country – this move from a, probably, state-funded system, where the assumption is that it is society that benefits from having a well-educated population to one where things are much more individualistic, in terms of how it’s viewed, with students as consumers, et cetera ...

Well, OER is almost a safety valve for that. There’s a level of frustration within universities, with the sort of changes and what they’re bringing – it’s quite palpable. And you can see OER as a sort of – a way to, if you like, subvert the system. And do what really needs to be done anyway. I leave that up to you. And there are many more reasons for it.