The Programme for the day can be viewed at http://oerworkshop.weebly.com.  There were strongly upbeat presentations from Sir John Daniel (President, Commonwealth of Learning which co-sponsored the forum), Martin Bean (Open University VC) and Barbara Chow (Hewlett Foundation Education Programme Director). These and other speakers made great play of the large quantity of high quality OERs now available but Quality Assurance also kept cropping up during the day.  Emma Kruse-Vaai from the Virtual University of Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC)  gently observed that for most users of English language OERs worldwide English was a second language so quality, if viewed from the perspective of fitness for purpose, was not an absolute but depended on the context.

UNESCO asked delegates what they thought the organisation could and should do to support OER.  It’s not an outfit flush with cash – indeed their current OER Programme is primarily paid for from a tiny $50,000 grant from the US Government.  The main answer that emerged was to seek to influence national policies – in particular to encourage governments to:

• create incentives
• remove barriers
• fund infrastructure (to allow the digital economy to take off)
• integrate openness into public policy
• require open publications of government-supported research (including data), software and funded projects

It wasn’t clear to me though if the channel back to national governments through the UNESCO “excellencies” would be sufficient to bring about any change.

UNESCO has a unique global reach and its interest in OERs goes back a long way – indeed the term Open Educational Resource was coined by UNESCO in 2002.  For some excellent case studies (from CoL) go to http://bit.ly/hdbnCf.  I would also commend the OER Dossier written for UNESCO by  Neil Butcher http://bit.ly/d2jYIj.

The main thoughts I took away from the forum were:

• it’s really important that the flow of OERs is bi-directional and not just North -> South.
• OERs written for second language speakers of English are likely to be of more value globally than those written for native speakers
• the most impressive OER initiatives are in the developing world – eg VUSSC which exclusively develops course content as OER and TESSA (see case study at http://bit.ly/eytj5m) delivering teacher education through the medium of OER to 300,000 primary school teachers
• governments (eg USA) are simultaneously increasing protection for rights holders by for example extending the duration of copyright and restricting fair use provision while promoting OER as a solution to educational needs.  The two “movements” need to be brought together to achieve an optimal balance.

While we probably are leader at the OU as an institution I also think that the UK is a leader as a country with respect to OER and that is as much due to the JISC/HEA managed UKOER programme, which is just about to enter its second phase. Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC, was one of the invited Keynote speakers at the OCW Consortium Global conference and certainly impressed participants from other countries about the scope and ambition in the UKHE behind all types of openness related to education (open access publishing, open innovation, open source software, open data as well as open educational resources). His slides are here and a video of his talk here.

 There is a wide spread of activity within OER-HE and I am the Work Package Leader for the strand on Widening Participation. This is interesting because although there are EU statements through the Bologna process about widening participation such as the one below, there is clearly very different views on what this means in practice:

 The student body within higher education should reflect the diversity of Europe’s populations. We therefore emphasize the social characteristics of higher education and aim to provide equal opportunities to quality education. Access into higher education should be widened by fostering the potential of students from underrepresented groups and by providing adequate conditions for the completion of their studies. This involves improving the learning environment, removing all barriers to study, and creating the appropriate economic conditions for students to be able to benefit from the study opportunities at all levels. Each participating country will set measurable targets for widening overall participation and increasing participation of underrepresented groups in higher education, to be reached by the end of the next decade. Efforts to achieve equity in higher education should be complemented by actions in other parts of the educational system. (Communiqué of the Conference of European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education, Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, 28-29 April 2009, IP/09/675, accessed 25 May 2010 from http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/675&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en)

 So watch this space for updates as the work progresses.

 They are particularly interested in two key issues related to OER in Higher Education, namely quality assurance and sustainability.

So here are the questions and the answers I gave them.

2. What processes has your institution established to assure the quality of OER developed and shared by your institution?

The Open University has well established quality assurance procedures for the development of educational resources for student or teaching project use. All educational materials for modules and courses are developed by teams and peer reviewed internally, by academic colleagues and also by an independent external assessor (before first student use) and examiner (during student use), for both academic rigour and pedagogical design. The technical quality of these educational materials is managed and reviewed by our professional technical and media staff in our Learning and Teaching Solutions division while student surveys are used as evidence in annual reviews while in presentation to help drive continuous improvements.

All OER released by The Open University are derived from these already quality assured materials and follow an integrity model whereby as few editorial changes as possible are made to the substance and structure of the content with most change being in how the material is delivered to the learner (e.g. text in print as an educational resource to be used by students, text on screen as an OER for OpenLearn; separate audiovisual files on DVD changed to embedded MP3 files online) and only require limited further academic or technical review before publishing. Once published users can rate or review the OER or comment in forums on the quality of the resource which can lead to changes.

3. How has your institution’s OER initiative been funded to-date? (If possible it would be useful to know approximately how much and over what period of time you institution has received funding from donor agencies/government/alumni/commercial organizations etc.)

Just considering our flagship OER initiative OpenLearn (see below for other projects) funding to date has been as follows:

£4.65 million for 2006-2008 from Foundations (the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation)

£3 million for 2009-2012 from a Government Agency (The Higher Education Funding Council for England)

About £3 million to date of internal investment (it is not always easy to account for all expenditure across 5 years of activity and this does try to account for all direct and indirect expenditure associated with just OpenLearn and not related OER activities e.g. iTunesU).

4. In the light of your experience has OER assisted in generating additional funding for your institution and if so can this be quantified?

Yes but mostly in terms of grant funding rather than revenue funding.

In terms of revenue we have tracked users of OpenLearn and some have gone direct from the site to register on a course online in the same session thus contributing through course fees. We calculate this to be in the order of 4,000 registration a year (but noting that we have over 200,000 registration each year) and of course OpenLearn may only be a partial factor in students choosing a course. Separate investigations indicate that a bit more than this figure positively quote OpenLearn as a reason for requesting a prospectus or making an enquiry to The Open University (these equally raise a related issue that OER can help lower some costs, particularly around promotion and marketing).

In terms of grant funding the figures above indicate that we have gained significant external grant funding from different sources against internal investments directly for OpenLearn related work. However this does not account for more than £5 million of grant funding in the last 3 years to more than 10 other R&D projects that we are involved with that relate to aspects of OER, such as TESSA (www.tessafrica.net), OLnet (www.olnet.org) , OPAL ( see http://www.icde.org/ICDE+to+play+key+role+in+Open+Educational+Quality+Initiative.9UFRzW5W.ip) and iCoper (http://www.icoper.org/). The funding for these many projects variously comes from Foundations, UK Government Agencies, European Agencies and alumni in roughly that order of importance).

Education is a process that generally involves learners, teachers and sets of educational resources that can be mediating artefacts in the educational process, arranged in some structured way as I argued in this book chapter. It is a purposeful human activity where education is the main purpose. Learning can also occur in non-educational settings when it is better described as a purposive activity where it is useful to describe it as educational even though that may not be the primary purpose of that activity (lifelong learning or the University of Life?). In the latter case there are learners but no obvious teachers or educational resources as the learners draw upon many different people and things in their social or working environments.

I set out these thumbnail sketches of systems for describing educational experiences to pose the question what are the main properties of the components of such systems and the practices expected of people involved when we put open in front of them? What do we mean by open education, open learning, open teaching and open educational resources?

Open education has got a lot of attention lately with another in the long series of Open Education conferences later this year, the Cape Town Declaration on open education and recent books such as one I contributed to called Opening Up Education. Wikipedia defines open education as a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared over the internet. That seems to rather dismiss pre internet activity and I go along with what I say in my chapter in the aforementioned book that openness has many dimensions but is about removing barriers to education.

Open learning has been a phrase used for some time as well with a Journal of Open and Distance Learning and the Open University basing its work on a supported open learning model. Again a significant aspect of open learning is about removing barriers to learners engaging with educational experiences and I have talked about that elsewhere.

Open educational resources are even more topical and talked about starting with the definition given at a UNESCO workshop through to the large funding program from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/) where they also see OER as being one way to help transform teaching and learning. A central feature of OER is an open licence that allows and encourages sharing, reuse and remixing (and probably influences the current Wikipedia entry for open education).

What has been less obvious is any discussion about open teaching (although the OLCOS materials at http://wikieducator.org/Open_Educational_Content do so to some degree) and it is open teaching that I want to focus on for the rest of this piece.

So what might constitute open teaching? Is it about creating teaching experiences that eliminate barriers to students taking part in those experiences or is it about (re)using OERs that are available to all? While we could have interesting debates about such definitions as with all aspects of openness, I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching from an essentially individual activity to a shared activity. Stereotypically most teachers work alone in constructing and delivering their teaching experiences. They may draw upon others similar work in this process and they may involve their students in co-creation or delivery of the experiences, but fundamentally they alone decide on a chosen path or lay out a new route map of resources and activities that constitute the educational experience. However, the arrival of OER has meant that both teachers and students are able to view in greater depth the teaching and learning experiences of others to inform their own praxis. They are also able to ‘teach’ more easily (and effectively?) around someone else’s resources and maybe activities. But even more than that, it is becoming possible to rework other people’s material and to even co-create such material with colleagues around the world.

The co-creation of educational resources and courses is a major feature of open and distance learning where teams of academics (supported by media professionals) develop and deliver the teaching and learning experiences, including our associate Lecturers who do ‘teach’ around the main, carefully crafted, proscribed educational materials. At the Open University there may be as many as a dozen academics writing for and commenting on other’s work in the same course team to develop these carefully crafted educational materials and associated activities. This is team teaching that can seriously challenge your thinking and has encompassed some of the most heated academic discussions I have ever witnessed! But it does produce high quality materials, albeit at high cost and in a clear institutional framework. So, can such synchronous or even asynchronous collaboration and co-operation occur between institutions and across borders and will (open) teaching become more of a collective than an individual activity in future?

Of course there are many barriers to open teaching or any changes in teaching practice as well discussed in the OLCOS Roadmap 2012 report and by Diane Harley in the Opening Up Education book I mentioned earlier, not least the lack of recognition of teaching compared to research in promotion and tenure. Nevertheless, just as much research has steadily moved from individual to team efforts and still been accounted for largely through peer review by their community of practice, open, collective teaching can be accounted for in similar ways. The openly published nature of the resources means that such scholarship is as evident as any research publication and the more open nature of the reviews of the resources and associated experiences means there is potentially more feedback than for most research and more ways to assess impact and contribution. In other words the very openness of teaching makes it more accountable than much research, it is just that we have to work out the ways that citation (e.g. numbers of reuse, numbers of reworking. etc), peer and user reviews can be factored into the rewards and recognition that academics receive (and of course eliminating the shameless self citation I did at the beginning of this piece!).

Such recognition and reward for teaching is practiced in the Open University for the same reasons that teaching success can be measured by peer review of the scholarship in authored materials and user reviews of its effectiveness and impact with learners and others. I have argued in Opening Up Education that successful supported open learning depend on the four Ps of support: pedagogic support as built into materials, personal support of the learner, peer support from fellow learners and the professional support provided by ‘teachers’ and that the latter is most important most of the time. But those professional teachers also need to feel, and actually be, supported if they are to make open education a mass rather than a niche phenomenon. The culture change that is needed lies mostly with institutional policies and practices, not teachers or learners. Perhaps, as with OER, this needs to happen first in the most prestigious institutions or be recognised by the most prestigious learned societies to demonstrate to everyone else that teaching matters as much as research.

What struck me in South Africa is that many Universities see OER as an integral part of their futures. They have concerns and are not always sure what best to do but they see the value of cooperation and collaboration both within South Africa and with other countries as critical and that they have to rethink and review their institutional priorities. In fact they see all types of openness as being important as ways of building and developing a better and more substantive Higher Education sector. And while they want to do much of that themselves they are willing to join with others abroad in mutually supportive activities.

So the Open Courseware Consortium seemingly offers one way to bring like-minded institutions together even now they have to pay (very reasonable) membership fees. And they do not even have to join as an institutional member but can join through an affiliate member such as the country based Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium. So now we have emerging regional consortia to sit alongside the global one. But we also have other global consortia emerging.

It was the 2001 MIT decision to release materials used in their undergraduate courses openly that really started a global interest around OER and in 2005 MIT helped found the OpenCoursWare Consortium which has now moved out from under the incubator role that MIT provided. The OCW Consortium now involves more than 200 institutions in over 40 countries.

In a similar way another global consortium is being developed that derives from the Connexions website. The Connexions Consortium is interested in doing many of the same things as the OCW Consortium but of course it is their platform and repository that provides a particular attraction to members. Just as recent is the OER Foundation which has equally similar aims and is equally but not solely linked with a platform, WikiEducator, and a set of core principles.

So is it a good or bad thing that there appear to be competing organisations and a proliferation of movements? I don’t think so. I like to take the old eco mantra of ‘think global and act local’. Global consortia and movements help set a distinct discourse and forum for the sharing of ideas and beliefs but real action is more local to your department, your subject, your organisation, your country. Real sharing occurs when the relationship is reciprocal and mutually beneficial. You publish something. Someone else uses it. And you think ‘wow, why did I not think to do it that way’. The difference OER make is that you can do that independently if you want to or collaboratively if you want to. And because it is open you can collaborate in ways that you would never have imagined possible.

PS While much of what has happened globally could be said to indicate that institutions were huddling together for warmth in a hostile climate the ever-growing recognition and financial support given by regional and national governments means that this movement or collection of movements will certainly grow as did open source software before it, although it is difficult to guess how life changing it may be and how long it will take to happen. Open and distance learning has been around decades but is still a minority activity although now many Universities embrace it in some way it too is growing fast.

This blog is linked with the main website for SCORE but definitely has a life of its own. Authored primarily by Chris Pegler (Chris’ View) and  Andy Lane ( who supplies the World View). The blog is also open to others who wish to share their views of OER and will increasingly feature contributions from SCORE fellows.

We would welcome conversations with Subject Centres and their communities on how SCORE can support existing OER work in higher education and also how it can help develop new OER initiatives at national, institutional, discipline and/or individual level. We are particularly keen on supporting dissemination of OER and having conversations around creation, reuse and adaptation of OER drawing on both practice and research examples.