Open Educational Resources and Ownership.
When reflecting on openness in relation to educational resources, the area of ‘openness’ possibly closest to my professional practice, is the tension between openness and ownership of learning resources, and how the marketization of HE, potentially places limits on sharing openly the educational resources produced by HEI staff.
I work as a Learning and Assessment Developer within the Student Development & Community Engagement Division. A significant part of my role is to develop and deliver, as part of a small team, the undergraduate credit rated units which comprise the academic element of the Manchester Leadership Programme (MLP). I have particular responsibility for our online academic unit that is delivered entirely via the Blackboard VLE (see here for a rather out of date taster film). We are also responsible for working with academic and PSS colleagues across the institution to develop and deliver the Ethical Grand Challenges (EGC) ‘Signature Programme’. Online educational resources relating to EGC activities are also in development, which will be available exclusively to UoM students.
The materials I am involved in producing provide research led teaching, informed by, and featuring contributions from, leading researchers and practitioners from within the institution and beyond. The content is designed for a non-specialist undergraduate audience and uses a blended learning approach; combining film, audio, interactive tools, quizzes and group discussions to deliver and develop understanding of the unit content. The content is designed to be accessible and students are referred to a wide range of open access resources produced by NGOs, Government departments, professional bloggers and newspapers, alongside academic publications. Many of our online educational resources are arguably ripe for sharing. However, while I would love to share openly the educational resources my colleagues and I are proud to have produced, I also recognise fully that they are not mine, or ours, to give.
An Open Educational Resource (OER), is, a one that uses a Creative Commons license or which exist in the public domain and is free of copyright restrictions (see Wiley, Bliss & McEwen’s 2013 review of the literature on OERs). The OER Commons Wiki definition unpacks this a little further to explain that “an OER can exist as smaller, stand-alone resources that can be mixed and combined to form larger pieces of content, or as larger course modules or full courses”. Not usually for the sector, the University is the first owner of the rights of any work made in the course of employment, unless an agreement has been made to the contrary. As it happens, I’ve never actually asked what is, or is not, possible, in relation to providing ‘openly’ the educational materials I am involved in developing, nor how one secures an agreement contrary to the standard institutional copyright. However, reflecting on openness in relation to my day to day practice, leads me to wonder; were I to ask for permission to make the resources I work on open (taking into account agreements or otherwise from contributors of course), then how might I argue my case? What might be the challenges and the objections?
The main argument for providing educational resources ‘openly’ is one of altruism and social responsibility. Notably, the term Open Educational Resource originated from a 2002 UNESCO Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, wherein openness was linked explicitly to supporting social and economic development. These are themes core to both MLP and EGC, which both aim to provide students with the opportunity to gain insights into societies ‘grand challenges’, and to engage students in exploring their ethical responsibilities as citizens, graduates and future leaders. Both programmes have emerged from the University’s core goal for social responsibility, one of the three core goals that underpin The University of Manchester’s strategic plan.
However, a barrier to openness, that is arguably an exemplar of wider tensions in the sector, is that the programmes also contribute to the distinctive ‘The Manchester Experience’ and to some extent to Goal 2, for ‘Outstanding Learning, Teaching and Student Experience’. Consequently, in common with most producers of teaching and learning materials at an institution such as Manchester, that prides itself on providing research led teaching, our teaching and learning materials are arguably part of the distinctive offer of the institution.
Given students are effectively paying through tuition fees directly for the teaching they receive from their universities, and the high quality teaching and unique opportunities provided are marketed as part of the distinctive offer of an institution, it could be argued that students have purchased the right to an element of exclusivity in terms of access to institutional teaching and learning resources. One of the more persuasive instrumental arguments for openness in the publishing of academic research in the Finch Report is that, because research publicly funded, the outcomes of such research should be accessible to the tax payer. However, because of the fees structure, and the consequent, and ongoing marketization of the ‘knowledge economy’ sector and opportunities of yet higher fees offered by the TEF Framework, the public ownership argument seems much less powerful when applied to the educational resources produced within HEIs.
The rapid rise of MOOCs as engines of inclusivity and development in 2012 (The New York Times ‘Year of the MOOC’) and rapid fall, once it was established that the majority of people taking MOOCS already hold a degree, to being perceived as marketing tools for HEIs, demonstrates some of the tensions in the OER movement. Good intentions don’t always lead to expected or hoped for results. This doesn’t mean innovation in openness should cease however, and the ongoing OER movement seeks to incorporate and go beyond MOOCs and aspires to an intellectual culture that more closely resembles gift exchange.
So to bring this to something of a conclusion, given the factors discussed here, and the many other barriers to sharing open educational resources in an accessible and sustainable manner (handily summarised here by JISC and the HEA) I don’t think there is a simple answer to prioritising ownership over openness, or vice versa. However, I certainly agree that the principle of sharing educational resources openly is a valuable one. In common with Collini’s view (expressed in his 2012 publication ‘What are Universities for’), I think there remains a strong popular desire amongst students that universities should, at their best, “incarnate a set of ‘aspirations and ideals’ that go beyond any form of economic return”. The challenge for HEIs, particularly in an increasingly marketized sector, is to continue to engage in debate on how best to internalise their social responsibility ideals, and to express them in how they do business.
