50,000 Facebook views from a $30 investment: CYP-Media’s use of open practices to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector<i></i>

In 2015 Tony Coughlan was awarded the Open Education Consortium award for Creative Innovation, recognising the impact of his CYP-Media project in using open educational practices (OEP) to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector. Core to CYP-Media is a blog (www.cyp-media.org) in which Tony curates and evaluates free e-learning, textbooks and journals for working with children of different ages and needs. The reach of these blog posts is maximised by dissemination through Facebook and Twitter. The CYP-Media.org blog cost only $30 to set up, yet its impact is substantial. The CYP-Media Facebook page has an average reach of 7,244 per item, with a maximum of about 500 shares or 50,000 views of an individual item, and Tony himself has been identified as one of the top 50 most influential social media-using professionals in UK higher education. CYP-Media shows how just one person can make a huge difference to achieving educational and social equity with a tiny financial investment and a commitment to openness. This paper outlines the conceptual background to CYP-Media, with its roots in Perryman and Coughlan’s (2013) ‘public open scholar’ research, Weller’s (2011) concept of the ‘digital scholar’, and the emerging practice and theories of digital curation. The paper details CYP-Media’s multi-platform social media strategy and the challenges encountered since the project’s inception in 2010, in addition to presenting a mixed methods analysis of CYP-Media’s reception within the children and young people’s sector. We conclude that openness does not have to be the province of institutions and organisations, or even smaller projects and that by listening to the needs of your target audience, rather than adopting a top-down approach, real educational transformation through OEP is within the reach of anyone.</i

Beyond the ivory tower: a model for nurturing informal learning and development communities through open educational practices

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are making an evergrowing impact on the field of adult learning, offering free high-quality education to increasing numbers of people. However, the top-down distribution of weighty university courses that typifies current provision is not necessarily suitable for contexts such as Continued Professional Development (CPD). This article proposes that a change of focus from a supplier-driven to a needs-led approach, grounded in theories of informal learning, could increase the positive impact of OER and OEP beyond the ivory towers of higher education. To explore this approach, we focused on the requirements of a specific community outside higher education – trainers in the UK’s voluntary sector – in order to design a more broadly applicable model for a sustainable online learning community focused around OER and OEP. The model was informed by a recent survey of voluntary sector trainers establishing their need for high-quality free resources and their desire to develop more productive relationships with their peers, and by evaluation of successful online communities within and outside the voluntary sector. Our proposed model gives equal attention to learning resources and group sociality. In it, academics and practitioners work together to adapt and create learning materials and to share each other’s knowledge and experiences through discussion forums and other collaborative activities. The model features an explicit up-skilling dimension based on Communities of Practice (CoP) theory and a system of reputation management to incentivise participation. The model is unique in building a pan-organisation community that is entirely open in terms of membership and resources. While the model offered in this article is focused on the voluntary sector, it could also be applied more widely, allowing practitioner communities the benefits of tailored resources and academic input, and collaborating universities the benefit of having their OER used and reused more widely for CPD through informal learning

Something for everyone? The different approaches of academic disciplines to Open Educational Resources and the effect on widening participation

This article explores the relationship between academic disciplines‘ representation in the United Kingdom Open University‘s (OU) OpenLearn open educational resources (OER) repository and in the OU‘s fee-paying curriculum. Becher‘s (1989) typology was used to subdivide the OpenLearn and OU fee-paying curriculum content into four disciplinary categories: Hard Pure (e.g., Science), Hard Applied (e.g., Technology), Soft Pure (e.g., Arts) and Soft Applied (e.g., Education). It was found that while Hard Pure and Hard Applied disciplines enjoy an increased share of the OER curriculum, Soft Applied disciplines are under-represented as OER. Possible reasons for this disparity are proposed and Becher‘s typology is adapted to be more appropriate to 21st-century higher education

The realities of ‘reaching out’: enacting the public-facing open scholar role with existing online communities

A core tenet of the open educational resources (OER) movement has long been that 'the world's knowledge is a public good' (Smith & Casserly, 2006, p.2) and should be available for everyone to use, reuse and share. However, this vision of openness and of the connection between OER and social justice, which McAndrew and Farrow (2013) observe is currently re-emerging, is limited by the fact that OER-provision is typically top-down, driven by higher education suppliers with the needs of higher education (HE) in mind. As a consequence, the OER that are released can be hard to find for potential users outside HE and often fail to meet those potential users' needs in respect of the content, size, format and level of the OER. Seeking to increase the impact of OER and open educational practices (OEP) beyond higher education we conceptualised a new role for academics - the public-facing open scholar. The role involves academics working with online communities outside HE to source OER to meet the specific needs of those communities. Having developed detailed guidelines for performing the role we piloted it within a voluntary sector child welfare community in order to explore its viability. To date, our pilot findings indicate that the role of public-facing open scholar is both viable and well-received by the case study community. However, the pilot process, conducted in a community which requires all participants to be anonymous, has also highlighted the need to be aware of the impact of privacy constraints when choosing a community with which to work. In addition, the pilot indicated that listening to a community's needs involves more than noting requests for advice and includes attentiveness to a community's culture and typical modes of participation. This, in turn, can help the public-facing open scholar to fit in with the community and gain members' trust. The implications of these findings are wide-ranging. Voluntary sector online communities offer one platform for the public-facing open scholar to realise the transformative potential of open education, raising awareness and increasing the use and reuse of OER by people outside HE. However, the scope for the role is not limited to the voluntary sector and academics could find opportunities to perform the role in many different types of community. Furthermore, whilst we have concentrated on the role of the individual academic, institutional dimensions are also relevant. For example, higher education institutions which formally recognise the public-facing open scholar role as an important component of academic output, rather than an activity which is in tension with the demands of paid employment, may themselves be seen as taking on the role of a benevolent academy that is contributing to a global movement for free and open access to knowledge

Reaching out with OER: the new role of public-facing open scholar

Open educational resources (OER) and, more recently, open educational practices (OEP) have been widely promoted as a means of increasing openness in higher education (HE). Thus far, such openness has been limited by OER provision typically being supplier-driven and contained within the boundaries of HE. Seeking to explore ways in which OEP might become more needs-led we conceptualised a new ‘public-facing open scholar’ role involving academics working with online communities to source and develop OER to meet their needs. To explore the scope for this role we focused on the voluntary sector, which we felt might particularly benefit from such collaboration. We evaluated four representative communities for evidence of their being self-educating (thereby offering the potential for academics to contribute) and for any existing learning dimension. We found that all four communities were self-educating and each included learning infrastructure elements, for example provision for web chats with ‘experts’, together with evidence of receptiveness to academic collaboration. This indicated that there was scope for the role of public-facing open scholar. We therefore developed detailed guidelines for performing the role, which has the potential to be applied beyond the voluntary sector and to greatly extend the beneficial impact of existing OER, prompting institutions to release new OER in response to the needs of people outside HE

Más allá de la torre de marfil: un modelo para potenciar las comunidades de aprendizaje informal y desarrollo mediante prácticas educativas abiertas

Els recursos educatius oberts (REO) i les pr&agrave;ctiques educatives obertes (PEO) tenen un impacte cada vegada m&eacute;s gran en l&rsquo;aprenentatge per a adults, ja que proporcionen educaci&oacute; gratu&iuml;ta d&rsquo;alta qualitat a un nombre creixent de persones. No obstant aix&ograve;, la distribuci&oacute; vertical descendent de cursos universitaris de molt contingut que caracteritza l&rsquo;actual oferta educativa no s&rsquo;adequa necess&agrave;riament a contextos com el desenvolupament professional continu (DPC). Aquest article sost&eacute; que un nou plantejament que permeti passar d&rsquo;un enfocament centrat en el prove&iuml;dor a un altre que graviti entorn de la necessitat, basat en les teories de l&rsquo;aprenentatge informal, podria incrementar l&rsquo;impacte positiu dels REO i les PEO m&eacute;s enll&agrave; de la torre d&rsquo;ivori en qu&egrave; est&agrave; avui situada l&rsquo;educaci&oacute; superior. Per explorar aquest plantejament, ens hem centrat en els requisits d&rsquo;una comunitat espec&iacute;fica que no pertany a l&rsquo;&agrave;mbit de l&rsquo;educaci&oacute; superior &ndash;formadors del sector voluntari del Regne Unit&ndash; per dissenyar un model que pugui aplicar-se de manera &agrave;mplia a una comunitat d&rsquo;aprenentatge sostenible i en l&iacute;nia centrada en REO i PEO. El model es basa en una enquesta recent realitzada a formadors voluntaris, que establia la seva necessitat de disposar de recursos gratu&iuml;ts d&rsquo;alta qualitat i el seu desig d&rsquo;entaular relacions m&eacute;s productives amb els col&middot;legues, i en un informe sobre comunitats en l&iacute;nia pertanyents o no al sector voluntari. El model que proposem presta la mateixa atenci&oacute; als recursos d&rsquo;aprenentatge que a la sociabilitat del grup. Investigadors i professionals hi treballen conjuntament per adaptar i crear materials d&rsquo;aprenentatge i posar en com&uacute; coneixements i experi&egrave;ncies per mitj&agrave; de f&ograve;rums de discussi&oacute; i altres activitats col&middot;laboratives. El model planteja una dimensi&oacute; expl&iacute;cita de millora de compet&egrave;ncies basada en la teoria de les comunitats de pr&agrave;ctica (CP) i un sistema de gesti&oacute; de la reputaci&oacute; que incentiva la participaci&oacute;. Es tracta d&rsquo;un model &uacute;nic per a la creaci&oacute; d&rsquo;una comunitat panorganitzativa totalment oberta quant a recursos i possibilitat d&rsquo;afiliaci&oacute;. Si b&eacute; el model que es presenta en aquest article se centra b&agrave;sicament en el sector voluntari, tamb&eacute; podria aplicar-se de manera m&eacute;s &agrave;mplia a altres sectors, la qual cosa permetria que les comunitats de pr&agrave;ctica es beneficiessin de recursos dissenyats a mida i de contribucions acad&egrave;miques, i que les universitats participants veiessin que els seus REO s&rsquo;utilitzen i reutilitzen de manera m&eacute;s &agrave;mplia per al DPC mitjan&ccedil;ant l&rsquo;aprenentatge informal.Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are making an ever-growing impact on the field of adult learning, offering free high-quality education to increasing numbers of people. However, the top-down distribution of weighty university courses that typifies current provision is not necessarily suitable for contexts such as Continued Professional Development (CPD). This article proposes that a change of focus from a supplier-driven to a needs-led approach, grounded in theories of informal learning, could increase the positive impact of OER and OEP beyond the ivory towers of higher education. To explore this approach, we focused on the requirements of a specific community outside higher education &ndash; trainers in the UK&rsquo;s voluntary sector &ndash; in order to design a more broadly applicable model for a sustainable online learning community focused around OER and OEP. The model was informed by a recent survey of voluntary sector trainers establishing their need for high-quality free resources and their desire to develop more productive relationships with their peers, and by evaluation of successful online communities within and outside the voluntary sector. Our proposed model gives equal attention to learning resources and group sociality. In it, academics and practitioners work together to adapt and create learning materials and to share each other&rsquo;s knowledge and experiences through discussion forums and other collaborative activities. The model features an explicit up-skilling dimension based on Communities of Practice (CoP) theory and a system of reputation management to incentivise participation. The model is unique in building a pan-organisation community that is entirely open in terms of membership and resources. While the model offered in this article is focused on the voluntary sector, it could also be applied more widely, allowing practitioner communities the benefits of tailored resources and academic input, and collaborating universities the benefit of having their OER used and reused more widely for CPD through informal learning.Los recursos educativos abiertos (REA) y las pr&aacute;cticas educativas abiertas (PEA) tienen un impacto cada vez mayor en el aprendizaje para adultos, ya que proporcionan educaci&oacute;n gratuita de alta calidad a un creciente n&uacute;mero de personas. Sin embargo, la distribuci&oacute;n vertical que caracteriza a los cursos universitarios disponibles en la actual oferta educativa no se adecua necesariamente a contextos como el desarrollo profesional continuo (DPC). Este art&iacute;culo sostiene que un nuevo planteamiento que permita pasar de un enfoque centrado en el proveedor a otro que gravite alrededor de la necesidad, basado en las teor&iacute;as del aprendizaje informal, podr&iacute;a incrementar el impacto positivo de los REA y las PEA m&aacute;s all&aacute; de la torre de marfil en qu&eacute; est&aacute; hoy situada la educaci&oacute;n superior. Para explorar este planteamiento, nos hemos centrado en los requisitos de una comunidad espec&iacute;fica que no pertenece al &aacute;mbito de la educaci&oacute;n superior &ndash;formadores del sector voluntario del Reino Unido&ndash; para dise&ntilde;ar un modelo que pueda aplicarse de forma amplia a una comunidad de aprendizaje sostenible y en l&iacute;nea centrada en REA y PEA. El modelo se basa en una encuesta reciente realizada a formadores voluntarios, que establec&iacute;a su necesidad de disponer de recursos gratuitos de alta calidad y su deseo de entablar relaciones m&aacute;s productivas con sus colegas, as&iacute; como en un informe sobre comunidades en l&iacute;nea pertenecientes o no al sector voluntario. El modelo que proponemos presta la misma atenci&oacute;n a los recursos de aprendizaje que a la sociabilidad del grupo. Para ello, los investigadores y los profesionales trabajan conjuntamente para adaptar y crear materiales de aprendizaje y poner en com&uacute;n conocimientos y experiencias a trav&eacute;s de foros de discusi&oacute;n y otras actividades en colaboraci&oacute;n. El modelo plantea una dimensi&oacute;n expl&iacute;cita de mejora de competencias basada en la teor&iacute;a de las comunidades de pr&aacute;ctica (CP) y un sistema de gesti&oacute;n de la reputaci&oacute;n que incentiva la participaci&oacute;n. Se trata de un modelo &uacute;nico para la creaci&oacute;n de una comunidad pan-organizativa totalmente abierta en cuanto a recursos y posibilidad de afiliaci&oacute;n. Si bien el modelo que se presenta en este art&iacute;culo se centra b&aacute;sicamente en el sector voluntario, tambi&eacute;n podr&iacute;a aplicarse de forma m&aacute;s amplia a otros sectores, lo que permitir&iacute;a que las comunidades de pr&aacute;ctica se beneficiaran de recursos dise&ntilde;ados a medida y de&nbsp; contribuciones acad&eacute;micas, y que las universidades participantes vieran que sus REA se utilizan y reutilizan de forma m&aacute;s amplia para el DPC a trav&eacute;s del aprendizaje informal

Using open educational resources in online welfare communities: Facebook as an arena for open scholarship across the Commonwealth

The benefits of open educational resources (OER) are extensively promoted, though in the UK they tend to be enjoyed by a well-educated elite. The provision of OER is also an exclusive affair, with universities releasing content on a top-down, higher-education (HE) focused basis rather than responding to the needs of potential OER users outside HE. Beyond the UK, whilst OER initiatives exist across the Commonwealth many perpetuate this approach with a focus on formal education that excludes people who could benefit most from OER. This paper reports research intended to widen access to OER throughout the Commonwealth and which builds on the authors’ work with online welfare community forums in the UK voluntary sector. This work resulted in the authors conceptualising a ‘public-facing open scholar’ role involving academics listening to community members’ needs then sourcing and sharing OER to meet those needs. The authors then looked further afield to explore what broadening access to OER might involve in welfare communities across the Commonwealth, where Facebook emerged as the preferred platform for online communities. The authors therefore selected several Facebook groups focused on the topic of autism, with which they performed an open scholarship role. The research revealed considerable potential for using Facebook groups to widen access to OER. The case study groups showed receptiveness to academics’ interventions and as sharing is embedded in Facebook culture it was an easy transition to broaden this to include sharing OER. However, the study also revealed challenges for open scholarship in that Facebook features behaviour patterns that have implications for the ways in which an open academic might work. In all though the substantial audience of receptive Facebook welfare communities encountered during the research study indicates the potential for broadening access to OER in this sector and in other non-HE spheres across the Commonwealth

A murky business: navigating the ethics of educational research in Facebook groups

Facebook’s use an educational tool is growing, as is the body of research evaluating the platform’s efficacy in educational settings. However, few studies directly address the many ethical challenges of researching in Facebook. This paper draws on our experience of researching online communities, including Facebook groups, as the basis for identifying the ethical dilemmas that arise when researching social networks. We draw on traditional guidelines for educational research, together with debates around open and ‘guerrilla’ research, in suggesting some of the ways in which these ethical considerations might be managed. The ethical challenges discussed in this paper include whether/how to gain informed consent in a public setting; the need to navigate online disinhibition and confessional activity; the need to address the ethical challenges involved in triangulating data collected from social media settings with data available from other sources; the need to consider the potential impact on individual research participants and entire online communities of reporting research findings; and the use of visual evidence and its anonymisation. We argue that it is imperative for the researcher to closely engage with the research context when making ethics-related decisions, as no two research settings are the same

When two worlds don’t collide: can social curation address the marginalisation of open educational practices and resources from outside academia?

A canyonesque gulf has long existed between open academia and many external subject communities. Since 2011, we have been developing and piloting the public open scholar role (Coughlan and Perryman 2012) - involving open academics discovering, sharing and discussing open educational resources (OER) with online communities outside formal education in order to help bridge this gulf. In 2013 we took the public open scholar into Facebook (Perryman and Coughlan, 2013) to reach an international audience of autism-focussed Facebook groups in India, Africa and Malaysia, with a combined membership of over 5000 people. Performing the public open scholar role within Facebook led to our learning from group members about new resources produced outside formal education, for example by voluntary sector organisations, government and professional bodies. These resources are surprisingly numerous and compare favourably with those from universities. Seeking to source more such resources we conducted a systematic large scale search of free online courses, recording not only the number of learning materials available but also how easy it was to find them. We found that provision from formal education, especially universities, dominates the returned results when searching for free online courses. Consequently, resources from outside formal education, while they exist, are difficult to find. Indeed, most aggregators and repositories proudly state that the free online courses they list are from 'Top Universities', appearing oblivious to provision from outside formal education. We extended our research to cover e-textbooks and found a similar situation, with content from formal education again dominating provision. On the basis of these findings we suggest that the prominence of university-provided content within search aggregators not only marginalises externally produced resources, relegating them to even more obscurity than has been the case thus far, but also marginalises the open educational practices that were involved in the production of these resources. We propose that the OER movement’s questions about ways of involving end-users as co-producers may be answered by looking to external communities and, accordingly, we should be supporting and learning from these communities. In addition, there is a need for further research into the open educational practices of external subject communities, who are clearly more than just passive consumers of resources and are involved in both producing and adapting OER. Our research has also led to our further developing the public open scholar role to include curation as a part of the process, on the basis of evidence indicating that online content curation has the potential to help increase the discoverability of resources and awareness of open educational practices from beyond academia. In particular, we suggest that ‘social curation’ ( Seitzinger, 2014) - which foregrounds sharing curated collections as a component of the curation process - has a key role in this regard. We suggest that further research in this area could be beneficial, for example in exploring the potential for librarians to become involved in curating OER from outside academia

Learning from the innovative open practices of three international health projects: IACAPAP, VCPH and Physiopedia

Open educational resources and open educational practices are being increasingly used around the globe to train and support professionals in areas where funding and resources are scarce. This paper evaluates the open educational practices (OEP) of three global health projects operating outside academia—the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP), the Virtual Campus of Public Health (VCPH), and Physiopedia. Each project aims to pool and share professional expertise, to the particular benefit of practitioners in low-income countries. This form of online knowledge-sharing appears to offer huge advantages to the health/public health sector, especially when conducted in the open, at a time when there is a huge global shortfall of healthcare workers and a need for cost-effective, high quality training. We evaluated the three projects using two frameworks—the OPAL open educational practices maturity matrix, and Vrieling’s OEP social configuration framework. We identified numerous innovative OEP from which academia, and indeed public health professionals around the world could learn, for example IACAPAP’s open textbook, VCPH’s trilingual OER repository, and Physiopedia’s wiki and use of open badges. However, some OEP—for example localisation of resources—are not accommodated by either of the frameworks we used. We argue that an extended OEP evaluation and impact framework is needed in order to better encompass OEP outside formal education