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

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

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

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

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

Alienation and educational inclusion : a mixed methods study of teaching and learning with contemporary art in the Level 1 university curriculum

UNESCO (2006b) proclaims that' Arts Education is a universal human right'. However, art educators have observed that Western visual arts education is still dominated by a culturally exclusive canon of artworks which some students find alienating and irrelevant. Calls to abandon the canon in the name of inclusion have been made by school arts educators and research in secondary schools has shown that including contemporary art in the curriculum can empower and engage learners. However, inclusive visual arts curriculum development in higher education is infrequently explored.This thesis is intended to address such imbalance. It reports the findings of a mixed methods study exploring the impact of adults' affective and cognitive responses to art on their learning. A questionnaire and interviews were used to gather information about Open University undergraduates' responses to contemporary and non-contemporary artworks and their experiences of studying a visual arts module featuring meta-cognitive scaffolding and guided reflection. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data indicated that while the Western canon has the power to exclude, replacing canonical works with contemporary art is not a 'one size fits all' solution to achieving educational inclusion. Rather, it appears there is an age and experience-related divide in adults' affective and cognitive responses to art. Younger, and art-trained adults often relish studying provocative, emotionally potent and offensive contemporary artworks, especially works addressing topics they feel are personally relevant. In contrast, some older adults' cynical preconceptions about contemporary art's unworthiness for serious study, and preferences for visually pleasing, inoffensive artworks, can prevent productive engagement with contemporary art. However, the study findings suggest that meta-cognitive scaffolding can offer a structure within which students can reflect on and make sense of their responses to contemporary art, while also developing the skills to interpret works with unstable and controversial meanings

TEL MOOC Long Term Impact Evaluation Study

This report presents the findings of a theory of change-based evaluation of the massive open online course on Introduction to Technology-Enabled Learning jointly offered by the Commonwealth of Learning and Athabasca University. The report finds extensive short-, mid- and long-term impact on TEL implementation and open educational practices across 32 countries, leading to improved learner outcomes and institutional change. However, infrastructure problems and institution-related, technological and cultural barriers limit impact in many contexts

Addressing a national crisis in learning: open educational resources, teacher-education in India and the role of online communities of practice

India currently suffers from an estimated 1.33 million shortfall in teachers and many existing teachers are unqualified, resulting in inadequate access to education and poor standards of learning for those already in the education system. Indeed, India’s Annual Status of Education report identified ‘an alarming degeneration’ (ASER 2012, p. 1) in educational standards in Indian primary schools and a ‘national crisis in learning’ (p. 2). This paper considers whether the use of open educational resources (OER) within India’s teacher-education system can help solve some of these problems. The paper reports research by the OER Research Hub (OERRH) at the UK’s Open University (OU), focused on two India-based OER projects – DFID-funded TESS India, led by the OU in the UK, and the Subject Teacher Forum, created by Bangalore-based NGO IT for Change. TESS India builds on the lessons learned in Africa by its sister project TESSA (Wolfenden, 2008) and aims to create the biggest network of free, high quality, teacher education resources in India. The Subject Teacher Forum involves building 'Teachers’ Communities of Learning' whereby teachers create, review, curate and share digital resources with one another. The OERRH study is assessing the impact of OER in widening access to education and in changing teacher-educators’ resource-sharing and self-reflection practices. This paper focuses more narrowly on the challenges currently facing teacher educators in India, exploring the extent to which OER offer an appropriate solution to overcoming them. In particular, variations in teacher-educators’ ICT skills and in their access to the Internet are considered. Of particular interest is the role of online peer-support communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and reputation management systems in incentivizing OER creation, use and curation. Finally, the paper considers the ways in which community-based models of OER provision might be used to support teacher-education in other Commonwealth countries. References Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wolfenden, F. (2008) The TESSA OER Experience: Building sustainable models of production and user implementation. In Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) Special Issue: Researching open content in education. [Accessed 20 April 2013] http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/issue/view/3

Developing sustainable business models for institutions’ provision of open educational resources: Learning from OpenLearn users’ motivations and experiences

Universities across the globe have, for some time, been exploring the possibilities for achieving public benefit and generating business and visibility through releasing and sharing open educational resources (OER). Many have written about the need to develop sustainable and profitable business models around the production and release of OER. Downes (2006), for example, has questioned the financial sustainability of OER production at scale. Many of the proposed business models focus on OER’s value in generating revenue and detractors of OER have questioned whether they are in competition with formal education. This paper reports on a study intended to broaden the conversation about OER business models to consider the motivations and experiences of OER users as the basis for making a better informed decision about whether OER and formal learning are competitive or complementary with each other. The study focused on OpenLearn - the Open University’s (OU) web-based platform for OER, which hosts hundreds of online courses and videos and is accessed by over 3,000,000 users a year. A large scale survey and follow-up interviews with OpenLearn users worldwide revealed that university provided OER can offer learners a bridge to formal education, allowing them to try out a subject before registering on a formal course and to build confidence in their abilities as learners. In addition, it was found that using OER during formal paid-for study can improve learners’ performance and self-reliance, leading to increased retention and satisfaction with the learning experience