This page hosts the write-up of conversations from the  project team meeting on 20 January 2011 in Birmingham.

Notes from the cascade project meeting, 20 Jan 2011, Birmingham

Attending: Phil, Craig, Dafydd, Richard, Darren, Anna

Degrees of openness

We touched upon issues of repurposing and attributing resources that have not originally been designed as OERs – Craig and Phil mentioned the resources they found on the methods@manchester website, these resources do not address issues around copyright, IPR etc. there is an implicit assumption that they can be used within an educational context but then would have to be attributed according to conventional citation rules (a useful resource for finding out how to attribute/reference an OER can be found on Connexions repository www.cnx.org at the bottom of each resource). On a related note, this is what we are finding out as part of our collections OER project where we are conducting a survey on using teaching resources online – 50% of respondents so far claim that they do not take licensing into consideration at all as they plan to use the resource for educational purposes anyway.

Phil talked about his module “Crime today” where students are taking photographs and posting them on the wiki, these could be construed as OERs, and the issue of granularity has cropped up in the context of the pilot phase as well. In the pilot, we decided to release modules but on phase 2 will probably allow for resources of varying granularity.

What is the relationship of OERs to the set book (Anna will collate resources on projects on open textbooks in the US context) – complaints of students that they receive OERs which duplicate the content of the book they had to pay for.

Welsh context

Dafydd mentioned that in the Welsh medium context, colleagues are much more prepared to share as this is such a small community, also there is a sense that sharing resources is necessary to sustain the project of delivering university-level education in Welsh. Dafydd added that because there are so few resources in Welsh at the moment, there is a higher chance for reuse, but maybe a lower one for repurposing.

Dafydd also commented on issues around language study skills in Welsh – currently, no equivalent of IELTS for Welsh speakers; he also talked about the need to find some new terminology in Welsh for repurposing the SPSS resource (terms such as cross-tab).

Student engagement

We talked about ways of exposing students to OERs, with the approaches ranging from recommending hand-picked resources to students (Phil commented on feeling overwhelmed himself when he started searching for OERs and that he found a number of resources of dubious quality that he would not want to recommend to the students) to encouraging openness. There is also a related issue of in-curricular vs. extra-curricular use, ties in with some issues which came up within student report ion the use of technology commissioned by the NUS; one of the questions being  – where does OER fit in relation to technology-enhanced learning?

How will approaches towards student engagement (as well as the choices that students are making) change depending on the institution? Craig mentioned that a number of students at his institution are non-traditional students, mature, making a second attempt at higher education

Dafydd mentioned that assessment for the SPSS module which uses the OpenLearn resource will involve engaging students in commenting on the questionnaires they will design as part of the module, they will have to assess quality of discussion and impact and the comments will then become part of the resource (Helen Jones mentioned she would be happy to share student consent forms etc. for releasing student comments). That’s a really interesting approach which includes elements of peer learning; this approach also brings up issues around constructive alignment as well as relationship of assessment to OERs issues. At the same time, what would the students use informally, how would that be different? In general, if the conditions were “right”, what uses might people make of OERs? Finally, Dafydd had a technical question on how to collate and export student postings, Richard will get back to him with more information on relevant technical solutions

In terms of collection evidence related to student engagement, partners will rely on official course evaluations; there will also be an element of focus groups or student interviews (max four per partner) where students would be remunerated with vouchers. Dafydd’s interviews would be in Welsh and C-SAP will arrange funding for transcription&translation.

We also touched upon issues around actual versus potential student engagement – for instance, Craig mentioned the idea for a student-led module at Blackburn, where students would develop a campaign for a charity/a pressure group (Anna will put Craig in touch with Helen Beetham who could help, there are also a number of related resources on community-based learning as developed by C-SAP). Richard suggested a pragmatic move where Craig could present this course as being more about a pedagogical move rather than an admin course description.

Issues emerging from the cascade meeting

Oxford impact study might be of interest to our work

The institutional context was really strong theme in the cascade strand discussions ( notes from that meeting are available). To what extent are people representing their institutions through their use of OERs? Is it enough to cascade within our own practice/ within our own institutions? Craig mentioned that he learnt a lot through the project and there are a lot of things he might want to cascade to his colleagues; Dafydd spoke about various forthcoming events where he will have the opportunity to cascade issues emerging from the project.

Dafydd is in a position where he does academic development across Wales, does not really have a formal institutional context; he mentioned a relevant aspect of his work which is about effective collaboration between institutions – so can use an institutional framework which is relatively open. At the same time, within our project we have an example of academics who are strongly embedded within a concrete institution – but if we talk about sharing resources, what is Blackburn’s relationship with Lancaster, the validating institution in this context?

Issues around licensing – on what basis are people happy to share their material? During the cascade meeting, other projects mentioned possible more sinister uses of CC-licenses where an institution would re-purpose a resource in such a way to make it seem as if the OER originates from that particular institution – by using logos, branding etc. (while still attributing the original creators and technically remaining within the scope of the CC-license). How willing would people be to share research-informed teaching materials? Would there be a preference for sharing more generic or more specialised resources? At the same time, thanks to the properties of CC licenses, within HE in FE context OERs could become equivalent to publications

Jorum repository has introduced a division between HE and HE in FE resources, how does that impact on the programme? JorumOpen team are also interested in our reflexive tasks and would like to see any emerging conclusions on partners’ use of Jorum

OER expertise

We touched upon issues related to OER expertise – there is an implicit tension within the OER movement, on the one hand OERs are meant to be designed in such a way that theoretically any user could pick up the resource and repurpose/re-mix it; on the other hand, there is a body of expertise emerging in the context of the OER programme. Moreover, experiences of colleagues on the project demonstrate that they need the support of the project to be able to overcome some of the technical barriers they have encountered (for instance Dafydd’s experiences with the OpenLearn module); Phil and Craig also mentioned implicit knowledge related to judging the quality of the OERs they found

We also touched upon some related debates possibly of interest – the debate around RLOs (reusable learning objects, in many ways a predecessor of OERs) as well as the Ron Cooke report (On-line Innovation in Higher Education) which in many ways inspired the OER pilot programme

Plans for release

Phil and Craig will take some time to think about their plans for release – Anna will get back to them to help develop a plan of action. At the moment they would like to release some resources on photography (Phil) and critical theory (Craig).

We have talked about ways in which we can use toolkit developed in the context of the pilot phase for releasing OERs in the second phase, for instance Phil and Craig might use the toolkit as a container for a block of activities to develop a mini-collection of resources related to photography etc. Richard is currently working with his colleagues at SHU on an extended version of the toolkit and will arrange to talk with partners on the project on how they might incorporate the toolkit in their plans for release.

Craig and Phil mentioned that there is a new e-learning manager at their institution which might be helpful in terms of release and cascading project outputs; related to that they would like to learn a bit more about using Adobe Connect and Anna will arrange an opportunity to use the C-SAP Adobe Connect room  

Emerging cascade framework

In the project work plan we have indicated that we should soon begin to refine our cascade framework – in order to do that, we need a “rough and ready” version, that could simply be an annotated schematic (a diagram, an image etc.) which we post on the wiki and develop together.

At the moment, our emerging cascade framework would have the following elements:

1. Loose framework for OER use re: student engagement (and evidence for it)
2. Influences from the pilot
3. Influences from other partners (the collaborative nature of the work)
4. Aspects of knowing about OERs
5. Cascading to students
6. issues around pedagogic literacy/digital fluency

We also need to start thinking about evidence to support the framework, examples of possible evidence have been provided by the synthesis and evaluation team.

Meetings, staffing, project support etc.

We decided to have the face-to-face meeting in early June, Anna will send out a doodle poll to arrange a date. There will also be a series of phone catch-up meetings with Richard around the end of March. Richard will also arrange to talk to Craig and Phil soon re: using the C-SAP toolkit and its relevance to their practice.

Importantly, from February on, Anna will take over managing the cascade project as Darren is leaving to an e-learning post at University of Birmingham.

Helen Jones mentioned that she is happy to be contacted on an on-going basis.