Survival: how to do your existing job and more ... with fewer people

Abstract

We are all facing demands to do more with less. Following a restructure in December 2012, academic librarians at the University of Northampton were down four team members, the role of the team remained the same, but student numbers and distance learners were growing. This is the story of how we created the Skills Hub, a repository of skills based OERs, without money and with fewer staff. In September 2013, Library and Learning Services (LLS) launched the Skills Hub (http://skillshub.northampton.ac.uk), a repository of open educational resources (OERs) for use by schools, students, researchers and the community. Since its launch the content has had more than 14,000 views per month and has had visitors from 88 countries. Around 70 of the OERs have been created in-house by LLS staff and many take the form of bite-sized videos. To date, the total funding that the Skills Hub has received has been £422. In addition, there are no dedicated staff working on the Skills Hub. Development work has been undertaken by integrating the production of open educational resources into existing staff workloads. Since January 2013, the Academic Librarians and the Academic Practice Tutors have been actively and enthusiastically engaged in both the technical and content aspects of OER creation. Training has been by means of peer-to-peer support and by setting aside time for rapid development days. Openness is one of the strategic priorities at Northampton and the Skills Hub is built around this principle. All of its content is created or sourced under a Creative Commons licence and users are encouraged to take and use elements as they choose. It is delivered via a flexible, engaging and exciting interface that uses visual cues and graphical and media consistency to help orientate the user. Content is applicable not only to students at Northampton but also to schools and the public as part of our commitment to community engagement. There are no passwords, content is regularly reviewed and updated and feedback from users is an integral part of each resource. This paper will present the development of the Skills Hub with an honest account of the process we went through, the challenges we faced and the content created. We will share how we reviewed the content and focussed the development through the use of learning analytics and student evaluators. We will also discuss how we got buy-in from across the university, both from within and without of the department, particularly looking at the project development and at critical political and strategic points in the project timeline. Finally, we will discuss how we carefully positioned the project within the arena of learning and teaching and alongside the University’s open access agenda, as a means of protecting the project and enabling its survival. The Skills Hub offers hope to colleagues who might fear that the development of open educational resources is beyond them as well as materials that they can customize and integrate into their own teaching and learning activities