Tom Browne is Education Research and Evaluation Advisor, in Education Enhancement, within Academic Services at the University of Exeter. From May 2009-April 2010 he was Project Manager and Principal Investigator of the HEFCE-funded and JISC-managed institutional OER project called Open Exeter. He is also part of the team who have recently been awarded a 12 month HEA Phase-2 OER project to embed OER practices within HEA-accredited courses.

Tom's career has traversed a variety of roles: He has been both an academic and in professional support, having been a lecturer in Geographical Information Systems at Sussex, and IT User Support and Educational Technologies Manager at Exeter. He has also been an Assistant Registrar for Educational Policy at Exeter. He has served on the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee and is a member of the JISC Learning and Teaching Practice Advisory Group and also the UCISA Academic Support Group. He has served as an individual and institutional HEA Accreditor and is an NTFS reviewer. He has published and presented widely on organisational and practitioner technology related learning and teaching issues.

This SCORE project is borne out of a recognition that without academic buy-in, an OER culture will not become embedded within the learning and teaching practice within HEIs.

From May 2009 to April 2010 I was the project manager and principal investigator for the Phase-1 HEFCE-funded and JISC-managed institutional OER project at the University of Exeter.   In November 2009, with colleagues from the OU, I ran a one-day workshop on OER at Exeter. It was salutary how little prior understanding was evident. Subsequently I conducted several experimental OER workshops to cohorts of early career staff on our HEA-accredited courses, focusing on the demand side. It proved to be an effective entrée into OER and confirmed my view that such workshops should be more substantially developed. Given that most HEIs have HEA-accredited courses, the potential for take-up and for creating a community of practice could be significant. Finally, in acknowledging the research focus of much of UK HEI, in order to achieve ‘buy-in’ OER needs to be positioned as fitting in with the scholarly endeavour of a research-inspired approach to learning and teaching.  More ambitiously, structured OER awareness can also be related to the Professional Standards Framework (PSF) as part of CPD for all staff. 

The following is proposed:

1. I will build upon an existing community of practice of HEIs.   The South West Educational Developers Forum (SWEDF) is an ideal vehicle.  It is regionally based and is populated by academic developers. 
   
   1. Although Exeter was the only SWEDF HEI to have a Phase-1 institutional project, several other universities contributed to HEA-managed subject centre consortia and are currently part of Phase-2 JISC and HEA managed projects funded by HEFCE.
2. In association with the HEA, I will act as a critical friend for the HEA-managed Phase-2 projects at Exeter and Falmouth, which will be releasing resources suitable for HEA-accredited programmes which meet UK PSF.
3. The primary outcome will be raising the bar of effective practice within the participating institutions.
4. The primary output will be a toolkit of staff development activities, available for repurposing to fit each HEI’s context.  This should include specific activities for individual and group work that address both the:
   
   1. demand side, which is a considerably underdeployed, though key aspect of OER
   2. supply side, which introduces e.g. IPR and quality issues.
5. Case studies will be produced, drawing upon these activities.
6. Exeter will be able to take the initiative in embedding such toolkits into its HEA-accredited courses and to evaluate their impact.
7. It is essential that those engaging with OER understand the institutional setting within which they work.   Awareness-raising documentation will be developed to address those factors that mitigate against effective engagement with OERS.   A scaffold of questions will be developed, to be populated by each institution, indicating their policies regarding e.g. fair dealing, quality, rewards.  

My fellowship will run from 1/8/2010, for 12 months at 50% FTE. Such a period should allow for considered reflection and will maximize the opportunities over which trial courses within different HEIs can be explored and lessons learnt.

Dr Gabriel Reedy is a Lecturer in Higher Education at King’s College, London. Prior to this, he was a Curriculum Innovation Fellow at The Open University, where his work engaged with issues of teaching and learning in higher education using new technologies. In 2006 he was a visiting scholar with the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, where he conducted the fieldwork and analysis associated with his doctoral research. His postgraduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, focused on cognition and the learning sciences, and had a special emphasis on technology enhanced learning environments.   
 
Prior to his postgraduate work, Gabriel was a consultant and manager in the software industry, focusing on user training, elearning, and user experience issues. His experience includes work at Microsoft, Intel, and several smaller software and telecom companies, as well as consulting experience in healthcare and education. He has taught at the undergraduate university level in technical communications, and at the postgraduate level in educational technology and teacher training. He  has served as an associate lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and at the Faculty of Education, The Open University.
 
Gabriel has been appointed Education Lead for the Simulation and Interprofessional Learning (SaIL) Centre at King’s Health Partners (King’s, Guy’s, and St. Thomas’ Hospitals). Building on a multimillion pound grant for the construction and development of a purpose-built learning centre on the campus of Guy’s Hospital, the KHP SAIL Centre uses high-fidelity simulation technology as an integral part of medical, nursing, and healthcare education. In this role, Gabriel serves to advise, review, and evaluate educational programmes for the Centre, and to advise on research and enquiry into learning through simulation technology.
 
Gabriel has been awarded both an Early Career Fellowship by the International Society for the Learning Sciences (funded by the US National Science Foundation) and an Open Resources in Education (SCORE) Fellowship (funded by HEFCE).
 
Gabriel teaches on the Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice (GCAP), the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) and the MA in Clinical Pedagogy (MA Clin Ped) programmes. He is the programme Director for the Institute's research degrees (MPhil and PhD).

Paul Hatherly is a Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Science, The Open University.

The Practical Sandpit

Practical experience is essential in science education, facilitating investigative, manipulative and cognitive skills and supporting the philosophy of the scientific method. Such provision is challenging for distance learners, a problem I addressed under the physics innovations CETL (piCETL) virtual experiments programme. Here, I developed photo-realistic representations of experiments - interactive screen experiments (ISEs) – which, by their nature inherently replicate and contain defects found in real experiments.

The issue of practical science in traditional universities is also pressing, with the provision of equipment, time and instructional methods at stake. With the possibilities and benefits of virtual experiments established for distance learners, I am investigating and developing the means by which ISEs can be used and created for the wider HE sector.

The deployment of ISEs as OERs has arisen through my participation in the JISC sponsored “Skills for Scientists” project where I created resources for the JorumOpen repository under Creative Commons licensing.

However, making resources “open” does not mean they will be used, and personal experience as a laboratory coordinator suggests that academic creativity in practical learning is vital.

It is therefore apparent that although “open” in terms of being accessed, virtual experiment OERs are “closed” in the sense of creative re-use.

The main element of my proposal is the development and evaluation of an internet-based “sandpit” for creating virtual practical resources from basic modules. This approach will make virtual experiments truly open in that instructors can create and tailor resources according to their own practise and students’ needs.

The OpenSpires project http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk released hundreds of hours of Oxford University’s digital learning content as Open Content Resources (OER) in appropriate ways via appropriate online platforms. The project has had global impact, as the resources are from world-class speakers and researchers. Oxford academic colleagues are supported in changing practice by becoming 'open content literate' to make informed choices regarding the materials they release and choose to reuse.

OpenSpires focused on supporting strategic institutional learning and encouraging cultural change. Follow on projects have continued and expanded this work. Our current OER projects are: Triton, Ripple, Listening for Impact and OER Impact Study. The outcomes will promote the sharing of effective practice that may inform and influence policy in other research-intensive institutions in the UK HE sector and beyond.
 

In institutions where teaching is research-led academic colleagues are regularly engaged in processes of knowledge creation. This new knowledge quickly becomes the content of their teaching. Oxford University has established processes to enable academic colleagues to capture their research presentations as podcasts and licence those as OER with a rapid turn-around and minimal extra effort. We have aimed to make this creation of OER part of the day-to-day activity of staff who research and teach. This SCORE project will explore the relationship between OER and the research-teaching nexus by looking closely at how academic staff at research intensive universities are supported in their practice. Working with colleagues in central services and academic libraries at this project will look at the synergies between OER and Open Access Publishing in institutions where OER provides another dissemination mechanism for research, impact and public engagement.

Melissa Highton is head of the Learning Technologies Group, OUCS at University of Oxford. She has institutional responsibility for e-learning strategy, the VLE and IT skills and training. She is a Fellow of Kellogg College and works closely with the E-learning Research Group in the Department of Education. She is the senior manager responsible for Oxford’s current OER initiatives and the development of open-source learning technologies.
 

Alannah Fitzgerald works for the English Language Centre at Durham University.

Being somewhat nomadic, she has gained considerable experience and understanding from learning, teaching and researching across different academic cultures, including HE institutions in the United Kingdom, Canada, Korea, and New Zealand (her country of origin). She is part of the open education and open-source software movements. Increasingly, she is working in the area of OER for academic practice in HE institutions and with NGOs to devise educational interventions for under-resourced communities. Her doctoral work is in the areas of educational technology, open educational resources and corpus linguistics. In conjunction with the Greenstone Digital Library Lab at Waikato University in New Zealand she is developing the TOETOE project to provide open e-resources for training language teachers and learners to develop and share learning content derived from large web-based corpora like those developed by Shaoqun Wu with the open-source FLAX project.

Technology for Open Education – Training with Open E-resources

(November 2010 – October 2011)

Open E-resources for training in the area of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) will provide the context for investigation with the TOETOE project. The open collections will reflect tools and content from the open-source and open-access movements for the development of open educational resources (OER) in language teacher training. These OER collections will provide dedicated learning support in the following areas:

Dynamic Collection

1. Identifying and aggregating OER located in web-based repositories that are EAP-relevant and which can be dynamically updated via RSS feeds. This collection will act as a key resource in OER for the EAP community.

Static Collections 

2. Materials and curriculum development guidelines for the EAP teaching community working within an OER framework, including: discovery, use, reuse and repurposing of existing digital materials. This will also include guidelines that promote an understanding of the different licensing standards for the use, promotion and sharing of OER.
3.  Learning support for incorporating open web-based language concordancers (for example, the Flexible Language Acquistion Project (FLAX) built on the award winning open-source digital library software, Greenstone, and the British National Corpus) for data-driven language learning.
4.  EAP discipline-specific collections identifying typical rhetorical functions and formulaic language sequences derived from academic journal articles published using Open Access standards.

The TOETOE project collections in OER will provide dedicated learning support in EAP syllabus and programme development for EAP practitioners which can be shared across the sector. A gap in EAP-specific teacher qualifications currently exists whereby many EAP teachers have received insufficient formal training in the core competencies of professional EAP practice. Instead, many EAP teachers come to the higher education sector having been trained in General English language teaching only with the Cambridge ESOL Teaching Awards being standard entry-level qualifications. These qualifications are based on curricula which are heavily textbook reliant, placing a burden on EAP teachers to develop EAP programmes using authentic academic texts and assessments that address a range of students’ needs across different academic disciplines. The British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes, UK (BALEAP) is trying to address this deficit in formal EAP training and has devised the ‘Competency Framework for Teachers of English for Academic Purposes’.

Ester Ehiyazaryan is a lecturer in eLearning and Professional Development at University Centre Doncaster (UCD). She has considerable experience of educational research in the contexts of post compulsory and higher education, which she has gained through her doctoral work on the use of interactive media for enhancing creativity and subsequently through working with the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Sheffield Hallam University. She currently teaches on a range of undergraduate programmes in education as well as the Masters in Education Innovation and Enterprise at UCD. Her research and scholarship interests are in the use of educational technology for developing innovative teaching and learning practices.

Embedding Open Educational Resources in Research Methods Teaching in Education, Social Science and Criminology

(March 2011-February 2012)

This action research project seeks to raise awareness of the value of OER within University Centre Doncaster as well as to support the embedding of open educational resources in research methods teaching within the School of Humanities Education and Social Science. The project aims to attract active second and third person involvement from colleagues and the broader institution. Participants in the study from the areas of Criminology, Sociology and Education contribute to collaboratively evaluating existing OER, as well as developing thinking and practice in embedding these resources in academic practice. Participants will also be involved in internal and external dissemination of the work.

Outcomes from the project:

1.    A collection of research methods OER which works on a ‘local’ level to scaffold engagement, evaluation and reuse of the resources in academic practice.

2.    An evaluation of the OER in the context of the three disciplines based on evaluative tools such as The Conversational Framework and the Learning Object Attribute Metric (Windle et al.).

3.    Documentation illustrating the embedding of these resources in a subject specific context using recognisable frameworks, such as LD_Lite (Littlejohn and Pegler, 2007) or the Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) (Laurillard et al., 2011).

4.    Encouraging collaborative practice and institutional dialogue on the reuse and inclusion of OER in academic practice, on the levels of internal strategy and policy.

The research methods collection is available on Cloudworks and is open to commentary and recommendations: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/5548

A reflective blog on the progress of the project is available here:

http://tinyurl.com/ucdoer

Richard is an Associate Professor of Health E-learning at the University of Nottingham, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy, and is Co-Academic Lead for the research and development group known as Health E-Learning and Media (HELM) (formerly SONET – sonnet.nottingham.ac.uk). Richard has been involved in e-learning for over a decade in the development and delivery of a number of online and blended learning resources, in supporting others in their development and in research and evaluation around the effectiveness of e-learning. Richard has been involved in a number of national and internationally funded projects in the field of e-learning within health in partnership with a number of other higher education institutions, NHS and health delivery organisations, charities and health support groups. 

Richard’s research and development interests focus around the design of pedagogically-led learning resources and their effectiveness. They include: community of practice approaches to e-learning resource development and participatory research methods, student generated content, e-learning as a health intervention and reuse.

Most recently Richard was the Nottingham coordinator for the HEFCE funded Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Reusable Learning Objects (RLO-CETL www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk). Through this initiative and others he contributed to the development and delivery of approximately 200 learning resources that were released under a Creative Commons Licence, and it was this work that led directly to his interest and involvement in the OER field.

Richard’s SCORE fellowship project focuses on developing a deeper understanding of OER reuse patterns, their extent and impact within health. This will involve empirical investigation of reuse and reuse patterns from established OER projects. A flexible, person-focused approach will be developed in order to discover and follow reuse networks and investigate the questions outlined above. The project will be grounded within health sciences; the magnitude, complexity, cross agency and vocational nature of the subject provide a rich field in which to study reuse.

The initial part of the study will involve the identification of re-users of health science resources from tracking within our existing OER projects and also from partnerships with other health OER providers (eg JORUM, OPENLEARN, PHorus, UNOW and NHS Evidence). Re-users will be contacted via questionnaire. Although this will provide information on the breadth and range of health–related reuse, the main aim is to identify a diverse subset of reuse instances and networks suitable for following in far more depth. These will form the basis of a series of rich case studies representing the reuse patterns listed and others that may emerge, 

Recent publications:

R.J. Windle, D. McCormick, J. Dandrea and H. Wharrad (2011) The characteristics of reusable learning objects that enhance learning: a case-study in health-science education. British Journal of Educational Technology. 42, 811-823.

R.J. Windle, H. Wharrad, D. McCormick, H. Laverty and M. Taylor (2010) Sharing and reuse in OER; experiences gained from open reusable learning objects in health. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2010-4)

R.J. Windle, H.L. Laverty, B. Hallawell, L. Herman and H. Wharrad (2010) SHOULD: learning disability nursing students teach their peers. Learning Disability and Practice.

R.J. Windle RJ, H. Wharrad (2010)Reusable Learning Objects in Health Care Education. In A. Bromage, L. Coulder, & F. Gordon (Eds). Interprofessional E-Learning and Collaborative Work: Practices and Technologies. Pp. 244-259. PA, USA, IGI-Global Publishing 

H. Wharrad H, and R.J. Windle Case studies of creating reusable inter-professional e-learning objects. . In A. Bromage and F. Gordon (Eds) Interprofessional e-learning and Collaborative Work Practices and Technologies. Pp. 260-274. PA, USA, IGI-Global Publishing

Chris Follows is currently the Arts Learning and Teaching Online (ALTO) college coordinator at the University of the Arts London; the UAL ALTO project is part of the second phase of the UK OER programme.

Chris studied BA Fine Art painting at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating in 2000 and has worked at the University of the Arts London for over 7 years. Chris’s practice includes painting, digital media, web, video and animation.

In 2007 Chris began to video document students and staff working together in their studios and talking about their practice. In 2008 Chris developed http://process.arts.ac.uk during a 40-day UAL fellowship with an aim of creating a new user driven online collaborative resource that explores process in arts practice.

Designing OER arts practice: The aims of his SCORE Fellowship Project are to explore existing methods of arts practice which exploit the creation of new meanings through the appropriation and reworking of existing content, ideas, materials and processes and how this tradition can support and encourage the development and reuse of OER rich media content. Chris will investigate and evaluate the most effective and efficient ways of utilising OER in arts HEIs by identifying best processes and practices for creating learning resources/objects to support the learning and teaching. Observe and contrast current practice in the OER community. Examine the effective use of source files and edit notes in relation to producing better ‘editable’ learning resources/objects. Investigate better methods of linking recourses with learning design by improving and exploring resource derivative information. Examine the effectiveness of inter-college and HEI collaborations. Develop an Arts-UKOER ‘Remix and Redistribute’ community of practice. 

To date ‘big’[1] OER has been about opening up course materials and content to the general public: facilitating learning beyond the classroom. Alongside this individuals have begun creating their own ‘little’ content and making it openly available. Recently there has been a discussion of how this might ‘flip’ the classroom ‘lectures’ can take place outside of the classroom, with the activities that are often assigned as homework taking place within the class[2]. This proposal will investigate a third possibility, encouraging students to scavenge for open content to be used within their own classroom. This has the potential to enhance their evaluation and use of OER more generally, as well as potentially encouraging the creation and mashing up of new content.

A previous, C-SAP funded project[3] by the proposed fellow used focus groups to explore the pedagogic and cultural issues in using YouTube videos in teaching an introductory sociology class. This project explored the issues around using openly available material embedded within class. An unexpected outcome of this was the extent of student use of online videos in their self directed study. Students suggested their own video resources via email, some of which were incorporated into classroom sessions – to the delight of the students who made the suggestion, and to the benefit of the whole cohort.

This project will continue this work, looking at the implications of embedding the scavenging and evaluation of OER multimedia content (big and little) within the curriculum of an introductory anthropology class. This class will have approximately 80 students across three groups, and will be comprised of mainly international and mature domestic students, providing a diverse student body. In the first week a period of class time will be given over to showing students all the potential sources of online OER video material and the skills and criteria for evaluating them. In each subsequent week the students will be encouraged to search for and suggest resources that they think will be of use for the following week’s topic. These resources will be collated, commented on and rated within the course VLE and included within the sessions.

My project aims to use OER to explore self-assessment for new postgraduate researchers (PGR). PGR come to our institutions from varied backgrounds, with different educational and work experience.  Facing a training programme can be daunting and overwhelming, with too much to choose from; or, conversely, viewed as patronising and potentially unhelpful or distracting. 

Current skills audits provided by HEIs and UK-wide institutions such as Vitae comprise of a skills list with a series of tick boxes or numerical self-grading of competency. These audits are based on assumed rather than actual competence in a skill and do not consider whether the student has an understanding of what that skill actually is. My SCORE Fellowship will develop sample materials, available as OERs, to enable PGRs to understand the skills they need to gain, to self-assess their skills at the start of candidature and to help them to identify those areas in which they need further development. The materials will illustrate the value of training, demonstrating how key skills are developed.

My sample materials will be presented, evaluated and disseminated via open repositories, helping PGR students to get the most from skills training and benefiting from the input of colleagues from across the sector. 

Eleanor Quince is Postgraduate and Employability Tutor for the Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton.

Eleanor has worked with postgraduate researchers in the arts and humanities since 2004. Graduating with a PhD in the small and highly specialised area of eighteenth century furniture design, Eleanor welcomed the RCUK transferable skills training initiatives which enabled doctoral researchers to move beyond the confines of their academic field. In 2004/5 she designed a programme of skills training for Humanities PGR at the University of Southampton. Over the years she has developed and expanded this programme alongside other aspects of postgraduate education, including student-led conferences, seminar-series, student journals and support groups. In 2007/8 she was successful in gaining internal funding to create a series of Learning Objects, turning face-to-face PGR training into online PGR training; accessible to students researching abroad, living at a distance or studying part-time. Although postgraduate researcher development has become her main focus, Eleanor continues to research and publish on the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on design and cultural artefacts.

Sarah’s research into Open Educational Resources within the field of media practice began when she was awarded an ADM HEA subject centre fellowship in 2008 to undertake a small-scale OER project. i-mpact was completed to a Beta testing stage at institutional level, housing and distributing un-manipulated film and video footage, the raw materials for filmmaking and visual storytelling for use in teaching exercises, assignment work and for peer review. The Score Fellowship will enable Sarah to take the project to its cross-institutional stage; investigating aspects of cultural resistance, adoption and change in the context of a shifting higher education landscape.

Sarah is principal lecturer in broadcast media at the University of Brighton, where she has led the subject area for the past five years. This includes a suite of well-regarded course offerings in the media production field, cutting-edge studios and digital facilities and the University of Brighton student radio station. Sarah has grounded these developments at the interface between the academic world and the professional media industries, emulating industry conditions in all teaching and assessment approaches. 

Sarah is also an audio-visual arts practitioner, undertaking practice-based explorations into new forms of fictional and dramatic storytelling in visual and sonic media. She is particularly interested in multi-linear and multi-channel aesthetics, her own multi-screen interactive cinema installation ‘Crossed Lines’ has been exhibited internationally, as has her surround sound and hypersonic installation ‘auditoryum’ (a collaboration with Marley Cole).  She was awarded her PhD in interactive storytelling in 2009 and continues to publish journal articles in these areas.

Gabi is a member of the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester, which brings together teachers and researchers interested in innovation in teaching and learning. Gabi’s career has spanned a range of sectors and activities, from adult literacy work in South Africa, to EFL curriculum development in the Arab Gulf, to tutoring on the online MA TESOL programme at the University of Leicester. Her recent roles at Leicester include acting as Coordinator of the OTTER project (www.le.ac.uk/otter), which enabled the release of OERs at Leicester, and Knowledge Transfer Fellow on the OSTRICH project (www.le.ac.uk/ostrich), in which knowledge about OER creation was shared with the Universities of Bath and Derby. Gabi is also currently involved in facilitating Leicester’s “Carpe Diem” workshops for academics on curriculum design.

TOUCANS focuses on the viability of the OER university (OERu) concept in England based on the input, perceptions and evidence from a sample of key stakeholders. The OERu (www.wikieducator.org/oeru) is a virtual collaborative partnership between universities aimed at providing opportunities for the estimated 100 million adults in the world who are eligible for Higher Education, but cannot afford to access it. At the point of starting the project, universities from Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States have signed up as “anchor partners”, but none from the UK. TOUCANS aims to find out what the perceived obstacles are, as well as the potential benefits for UK institutions, and to provide some recommendations for universities that are considering participating.

The project has two mutually reinforcing strands. The first strand engages with issues relevant to the visual aspects of open educational resources and looks at the ways in which existing UKOER projects have addressed (or not) issues around the use of images, with images understood encompassing a broad range of still photos, moving pictures, symbolic diagrams, maps, animations (both static and dynamic). The exploration of images/visual elements of OERs is then extended by incorporating a discussion accessibility issues which are specific to Open Educational Resources. OERs are embedded within the ethos of open education and open access, which emphasise the need to widen access and remove educational barriers, including any barriers related to accessibility. At the same time, we know little about factors which might motivate OER creators and re-users to embed accessibility within their teaching materials. Thus the second strand examines approaches to accessibility taken by project holders in the context of UK OER programme and treats issues related to repurposing visual elements of OERs as a particular manifestation of accessibility issues.

Project

Dr Ming Nie's background