Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

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1) Benefits and evidence of OER use and re-use

- Benefits include multi-use, richness, reach etc

- It’s easy to get download data but what does that tell us?

- There might be a dichotomy between encouraging open practice, and trying to record and formalize the collection of data on use

2) OERs across sectors

- HE is generally perceived as an authority stamp

- Sectors have v different business models eg in FE local competition is critical; in cultural heritage OERs can be perceived as a threat – as content can be commercialized

- When OERs are used as promotion – snippets to draw people in, there can be a tension as an institution seeks to ‘control’ OERs.

3) Institutional support practices

- Reward and recognition is critical to further development

- OERs not viewed as business as usual

- Institutional policies can be a barrier as developments become too formalized – and can have negative influence on sharing and networks

4) Benefits and business models

- It is possible to open up degrees eg level 1

– pay for the exam only; level 2

– pay for the course content; level 3 – pay for tuition and support – Social benefit? Life-long learning

5) Features of OERs

- Creators need to consider multiple formats etc; to make re-use as easy as possible 1-click access

- Creators need to consider discoverability, metadata levels etc

– users don’t care how they find it

Overall I felt we didn’t get much chance to find out what the other projects had done (apart from what could be gleaned from informal conversations), so I’ve begun to look through the websites of the projects – lists at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer to draw up a table of interested projects with possible OERs for re-use / further investigation. It will be quite subjective, but I will add it to the web-site when finished, and welcome your thoughts on OER projects that particularly stand-out.

Ann-Marie

Some of the things I picked up:

• Visible (formal / legalised etc) re-use is just the tip of the iceberg
• Academics don’t view re-use as time-saving; their motivation is more often cited as ‘adding richness’ to their courses
• Academics are happy to share bits of content, but generally perceive the learning design as the bit they should be doing
• There is an assumption that there is good stuff out there, and it they (academics or students) can’t find it, they consider it to be a search failure
• Students often use materials they find for learning, but rarely cite them or even talk about them – because they perceive that they aren’t supposed to (or don’t know how) to reference them formally.
• Students value academic recommendation and collation

Overall, David suggested that we should continue to evaluate and collate digital resources to scaffold learning; that support in information skills areas should cover using non-conventional sources; and that we should continue to foster a culture of voluntary use and re-use. 

Ann-Marie

The conference focuses on teaching and learning and so we had decided to concentrate on speaking about work package 2 – mapping the material to the various frameworks – to show how we had tried to make the material as relevant as possible to the education community. We also talked about the challenges we faced – mostly IPR – as we wanted to inspire discussion. The session was very useful and the audience had very useful comments and had lots of thoughts about IRL issues, both that we encountered and from experience in their own institutions. This was reassuring to hear as at least our IPR challenges weren’t exclusive to UoB and LSE.

The other sessions were also useful as, although not directly related to OERs, it was good to hear about teaching practice from a point of view outside that of the UK and we found. The attendees were all enthusiastic and always interested to hear about DELILA. All in all it was an extremely interesting two days, and a conference which Liz and I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in teaching and learning

DELILA Workshop: 26th July 2011, Senate House, University of London

Ruth Stubbings started off by noting how important it is for us to develop our own skills in order to foster skills in others- a very useful reminder and connection to make. Also, that sharing good practice and making the most effective use of people’s expertise were both very valid in themselves – and the IL Group was keen to support. Ruth finished by pointing out that events such as DELILA can give rise to a “eureka moment”; again I thought that this comment would encourage the 60 or so people there to be attuned to looking for connections.

Jane Secker (LSE) – “Why, why, why DELILA”

Jane’s project was open sharing of information Literacy (IL) and Digital literacy (DL) teaching materials. Starting points had been the CILIP IL Statement & the SCONUL 7 Pillars.

She & her team had been working to convert “normal” IL/DL material into “open” material. Jane said this was time-consuming if proper standards were used (and useless if they weren’t!), and that copyright issues could be a problem  She noted that included within the project were worked examples with timings, lesson plans etc (good idea). A “gap analysis” to see if anything was “missing” had also been done (even better idea)

Jane also talked about some of the issues: e g -whether IL/DL issues were too institutionally specific (I wondered if they’d have “street cred” if used elsewhere) ; another issue was whether materials could be kept up to date to match changing issues/needs.

An important point was that while DL/IL underpin much teaching / lecturing, it was very infrequently explicit (It’s the same story in schools!)

Jane Hughes (UCL) –CPD4HE

Jane explained how the CPD4HE project had been trying to address issues of DL within academic disciplines. They wanted to improve the learning of a discipline and the process of learning itself. They used VLEs, shared notepads, virtual online learning options, “moodle”. Text & commentary had been included to help users to see that methods used in one discipline were similar, if not identical to those used elsewhere –I thought it was good that they were doing this, but frustrating that they were having to do it!

Ella Mitchell & Cathy Walsh (University of East London)- Introduction to Infoskills

Ella & Cathy explained that a lot of their material had been underused so had decided to pull it all together within the “Get that job” section of the UEL website-not only making it more visible but very much suiting the needs of students on a 24/7 basis. Ella & Cathy described the resource as “Level 1” learning. The resource has been very successful for the target group, and also for pre-entry and international students and addressed the “expectations gap” for academic staff. This to me suggests that perhaps the skills are not really level 1, or that academic staff are not aware of skills levels inherent within assignments they are setting!

 Ella & Cathy showed the audience the different aspects of the skills package. They also described the package as “text light” though the contents look very useful & user-friendly.

Ella & Cathy noted that another group was now looking at broader skills but did not go into details. I’m keen to find out more about this!

Elizabeth Cleaver (UoB/Newman College) & Claire Gordon (LSE)- OERS: A PG Cert  Perspective.

Elizabeth & Claire had concluded that it was a “no brainer” that IL should be included in the PG Cert course, which was for 100 students, and up until Elizabeth and Claire’s work had included no IL element.

They’d experienced the dilemma of bolt on versus build in (a common issue!) They’d decided to embed but try not to bury. They had done this by focussing on specific underlying themes within specific contexts, with the themes often being underlined for clarity – highlighting the skills in other words

Elizabeth & Claire also talked about some of the issues in integrating their work –lack of time in course calendar, receptiveness of academic staff (probably also understanding of academic staff!) being the main ones.

Panel discussion

The panel discussion at the end of the day focussed on “how feasible is it to share IL/DL resources” (what resources can be shared) and “Should IL/DL be embedded into teaching qualifications?

Most time was spent on the first question, with a show of hands being called for regarding generic or specific materials. I raised the question of means of sharing – I thought online fora could be very valuable for some types of sharing; events such as DELIA could be most useful for others and so on. DELILA was well worth coming down from Scotland for –it was good to see so many links being made between IL/DL work and the wider academic world.

Venue:Room  4, CPD Building, Glasgow Caledonian University

Outline Programme
9.30-10.30   Copyright for librarians
10.30-11.00 Coffee break
11.00-12.00 The DELILA project

Trainer : Jane Secker.

Jane is the Copyright and Digital Literacy Advisor at LSE. Facet have recently published her book on Copyright and E-learning and she will share some practical advice from her own work with staff at LSE. She was also the Project Manager for the JISC / Higher Education Academy funded project DELILA.

The copyright training session will be refresher training covering copyright issues for library staff when preparing teaching materials in paper and electronic format. It will be based on best practice at the trainer’s institution and also include hints on running copyright training for staff at your own institution. The session on DELILA will be an overview of the project with a chance to see some of the digital and information literacy resources the team have recently released as open educational resources.

The event is free, but places are limited. Contact Marion Kelt to book your place m.kelt@gcu.ac.uk

Not sure where GCU are? Use our travel directions page at http://www.gcu.ac.uk/theuniversity/howtofindus/traveldirections/

We’ve been discussing if reviews and rating might be appropriate as a feature to add to our repositories. Feedback suggests that a reviewer really needs to try to re-use a resource before they can properly assess it. So that tends to suggest resources must be shared publicly and that peer review should happen afterwards. If you interested in reading more, see our Quality Control and Evaluation Report for more details.