Am I good enough? The mediated use of open educational resources to empower learners in excluded communities

This paper explores the issues involved in providing education to excluded communities and reviews some case studies where the mediated use of open educational resources available from the UK Open University’s OpenLearn website has empowered socially excluded groups. It argues that the successful use of e-learning in the long term is dependent on appropriate interventions within excluded groups and communities, and that open educational resources provide a safer option for them to gain confidence and competence and so become more empowered

Open Content: when is it effective educationally?

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are often seen as a subset of Open Content. This raises the question of what characterises OERs and distinguishes it from other types of Open Content? And if the content is deemed educational then what makes it effective in promoting learning in a prospective learner

Sharing and reusing rich media: lessons from The Open University

OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources comprise many types of assets including rich media. However dynamic rich media offer different opportunities and challenges for learners, teachers and higher education institutions alike than do more static items such as text. The Open University in the UK has been extensively developing and using rich media in its distance teaching programmes since it was established in 1969, often in partnership with the BBC. As new media technologies have arrived so has the capabilities of The Open University to create rich media. This paper describes these developments and then discusses the approaches required to guide them in a way that both serves the university and the wider higher education community. It concludes that rich media are an essential part of the developing OCW/OER landscape and that openly sharing them brings defined benefits to an HEI beyond their traditional student body

Case Studies on Institutional Open Approaches: The Open University

Interpreting openness has been part of The Open University’s mission since its foundation in 1969. As a distance teaching university it has always developed extensive educational resources for its students and occasionally for a wider audience but the emergence of open educational resources (OER) has challenged the ways in which it both develops and uses such teaching materials, in particular an over-reliance on in-house authoring and embedded third party materials and income from sales and licensing of such content. As educational resources are integral to the university’s teaching and business model a large scale, institution-wide, action research project aligned to University strategic objectives was established to examine the potential impact of OER in those models (with funding support from a US Foundation). Extensive research and evaluation activities plus widespread staff acceptance and experience in the use of OER in various parts of their work has enabled a gradual bottom-up adoption and planned top-down embedding of OER and other aspects of openness into most facets of University work after five years, including a defined open media policy

Open Engagement Through Open Media

This case study outlines and characterises the broad range of public engagement activities using media technologies undertaken by The Open University and in particular draws out how both open access and open licensing of content is influencing the ways in which a university can engage with various publics from around the world. It also discusses how different channels and social media technologies are shaping the way that such engagement happens and how it is necessary to think about ‘learner journeys’ through different media and different types of educational content. This is all placed in the strategic view of how open media is supporting the enduring social justice mission of The Open University

Understanding influences on farmers' practices

Farming is a complex human activity system with many actors and many components. Farming is also an activity that has, in recent decades, been ascribed two major, but potentially conflicting, objectives: the short to medium term production of sufficient food to support socio-economic driven needs of security and stability and the medium to long term philosophical and aesthetic desire to manage and conserve the ‘natural world’ . While there have been attempts to reconcile these different objectives both theoretically, as with the concept of Ecosystem Services , and practically through Agri-environment schemes , all too often these innovations have been provided for farmers by others without sufficient regard to the farmers’ own practices and contexts. This is in contrast to being developed with farmers, using their experiential knowledge to shape those innovations both before and after adoption and implementation. Indeed our main thesis is that the differing perspectives of the many actors, and in particular the perspectives of farmers versus other actors, leads farmers to use knowledge management practices that mix and match information from a variety of trusted sources to suit the needs of their farming business. If external knowledge and innovations are to support sustainable intensification then they must also be matched with an understanding of the practices and contexts in which they are to be deployed. In this paper we set out some key considerations that researchers have raised about innovations, practices and knowledge exchanges around farming that can influence both productivity and environmental performance

A Wolf in Sheep���s Clothing? An analysis of student engagement with virtual learning environments.

The article is freely available on-line via The Higher Education Academy website.The growth in the use of virtual learning environments to support learning and teaching should be accompanied by research to examine their effectiveness. The aim of this study was twofold: a) To explore the views, opinions and experiences of student engagement or non-engagement in online learning activities; b) To use this knowledge to develop learning and teaching strategies that enhance student engagement with online learning activities. Focus groups were conducted with students studying leisure and tourism degree programmes to explore reasons for usage and non-usage of the online activities in the Wolverhampton Online Learning Framework (WOLF). Results identified issues related to student awareness, motivation, behaviour and learning approaches, assessment and technical factors. Findings from the study have implications for practice, including how to enhance the relevance of information, technical factors, enhancing awareness and links with assessment

Re-evaluation of the factorial validity of the Revised Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2

Anxiety is one of the most frequently researched constructs in the field of sport and exercise psychology. Although there are at least 22 published scales available to measure anxiety (see Ostrow, 1996), the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2: Martens, Burton, Vealey, Bump, & Smith, 1990) has generally been the scale of choice since its development. Given its prominence as a research tool, indeed it was described by Woodman and Hardy (2003, p.453) as having 'near sine qua non status', the CSAI-2 has naturally been the subject of considerable scrutiny of its psychometric characteristics. Several studies have now been published which have raised concerns about the factorial validity of the CSAI-2 in its English (Cox, Martens, & Russell, 2003; Lane, Sewell, Terry, Bartram, & Nesti, 1999), Greek (Tsorbatzoudis, Varkoukis, Kaissidis-Rodafinos, & Grouios, 1998), and Swedish (Lundqvist & Hassmen, in press) versions. Collectively, reevaluations of its psychometric properties have raised serious doubts about the validity of the CSAI-2 in its original form and by implication have cast a shadow over the findings of dozens of studies that have used it to measure anxiety. To address this situation, Cox et al. (2003) conducted a two-stage process using calibration and validation samples to arrive at an improved measure. Having deleted problematic items in the original CSAI-2 and having subsequently supported the factorial validity of a revised version of the measure, termed the CSAI-2R, they recommended that researchers and clinicians should in future use the revised measure in preference to the original. The purpose of the present study was to re-evaluate the factorial validity of the CSAI-2R, as recommended by Cox and colleagues. Considering the potential for the revised measure to become the new scale of choice for researchers in the sport and exercise domains, this is judged to be an important contribution to the anxiety literature

Open by Degrees: A Case of Flexibility or Personalization?

This chapter focuses on the history, development, and perceived value of The Open University UK’s BA/BSc (Hons) Open degree (hereafter referred to as “OUUK Open degree”) over the past half-century in the context of changing external pressures and addressing debates around the coherence and acceptance of such a personalized program of study. It touches on the changing views of “openness” over time, from the origins of The Open University’s “open entry” policy, through to ideas around flexibility of study, open education, and personalized learning. The chapter concludes with recommendations for other higher education institutions wishing to introduce a multidisciplinary open degree into their portfolio of curriculum