The methodology of the C-SAP cascade project can be traced from the C-SAP pilot phase project, which took place between April 2009-April 2010 and was part of UK-wide Open Educational Resources programme [UKOER]. Within the programme, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)and Higher Education Academy were collaborating with the aim of enabling higher education institutions, consortia and individuals to share learning materials freely online.

The programme supported universities and colleges in exploring processes and policies, intellectual property rights, cultural issues, technical requirements and data management issues. The C-SAP project has adopted a critical social science perspective on the processes of sharing digital educational resources, as well as related challenges. The project team has endeavoured to explore ways of making educational resources more “open” and less reliant on tacit pedagogic practice by using insights gained from the process of peer review and social science knowledge production.

Within the cascade project, we have embraced and/or expanded upon the following elements of the pilot project:

Pilot phase toolkit

An online demo prototype of the toolkit can be found at http://www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/oer/index.html; the pilot project website also offers case studies of using the toolkit to repurpose and open up teaching materials by project partners. The toolkit also acts as a key mechanism for offering guidance for potential users, since the ‘diagnostic’ tool allows users to take the OER descriptions created during the project, and adapt and save for their own purposes. It also offers a guided / supported process for creating new OERs from other module content.

The toolkit was developed to have 3 functions:

1. Map - capture a description of the module (based on the mapping pro forma that we are using)

2. Diagnose - allow others to amend the description (map) in order that it can be re-used

3. Generate - enable new realisations of this material (including disaggregation)

You can read about the ways in which the toolkit influenced our work in the cascade project by exploring pages tagged with “toolkit”.

Reflexive tasks

Within the pilot project, we were experimenting with tools that would aid the partners in articulating tacit elements of their academic practice and decided to experiment with a peer supported review exercise. We paired up the partners and asked them to review a sample module from the other partner’s contributed materials, focusing on issues relevant to OERs/ reusability. The pairings were made on the basis of overlaps in partners' discipline/ pedagogic approach/ topics covered. This review was based around a checklist and series of prompts. The exercises yielded in-depth accounts of ways in which pedagogical practice is challenged by the process of opening up teaching resources.

We built upon this approach in the cascade project, where reflexive tasks were a core element of the project methodology and were designed to support the partners in articulating a rationale for embedding OERs within their personal and institutional context.

The relevance of pedagogical frameworks

The pilot project generated rich discussion and debate amongst the project team about pedagogical frameworks to support releasing material in the social sciences, and questions of the intended users and what types of contextual information (tacit / known) about the ‘history’ of the materials is required to support discovery and re-use.

We built upon those discussion in the context of the cascade project when designing reflexive tasks; for instance, task 4 (“Peer review”) explicitly focused on pedagogical approaches in the context of student engagement with OERs.