Exploring openness in my roll and School
As an Electronics Technician and demonstrator in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), I have been reflecting on open practices within my roll and the undergraduate courses I am involved with. Along with other experiences of openness while I have been a member of PS staff at the University of Manchester. As a member of support staff my focus is on the open educational practices (OEP) and open educational resources (OER) of my school rather than open access research journals (OA).
My duties involving undergraduate students are to demonstrate and solve problems in a laboratory environment, from electrical and electronic experiments to software engineering practical sessions. We also have a dedicated open access laboratory attached to our workshop which is fully equipped for electronic systems development and manufacture. Students from EEE can work on projects with the benefit of our knowledge and experience.
There is also a weekly Electronics club where students from across campus can come to work on their own hobbyist projects as part of a university social society. Electronics club has an Electronics Experimental Officer in attendance in addition to Technicians to offer guidance. Projects completed by Electronics club members include: a radio Ham receiver, a bicycle spoke LED pattern generator, an electronically picked guitar and a panning robot arm camera.
Collaboration
Students from other schools are also welcome to use our facilities for projects which engage and collaborate by sharing creativity with the public, local schools and colleges. There is much interest in trying to engage children and young people into learning to write computer programming code and creating electronic and robotic systems.
Such projects include The Robot Orchestra which was a collaboration with young people across Greater Manchester to recycle old musical instruments and discarded electronics like old hard drives to form the robot orchestra.
The Manchester Outreach Project where a student is making a conductive ink theremin from graphene and LED’s which will be demonstrated at the Community Festival at University Place and the Blue Dot Festival at Jodrell Bank in the summer.
We also have The Children’s University of Manchester, with future students in mind.
Undergraduates
The undergraduate courses I am involved in are delivered from inside the Blackboard VLE, a blended learning approach is used where students are instructed to watch lecture capture videos, complete quizzes and work through guided study material such as tutorial questions, lab scripts, example software programs and instruction manuals. The vast majority of this learning material has been developed and generated by academic and academic related staff, which is therefore owned by the University.
Students are encouraged to find OER related to the particular project or hardware they are using, on the internet outside of Blackboard. Students can make use of printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing software tools, software language Integrated development tools, software examples and libraries, free component samples and many educational guides.
These tools are generally offered either free or as a student version as the manufacturers know that the use of their software tools by students often transfers into employment after graduation. Technical staff often inform students where and what OER are available on the internet and also students inform staff of new technologies they may be using such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino and ARM Processor platforms. Electronic development PCB’s have become affordable in recent years opening up opportunities for many more people who are interested in building their own projects to get involved with learning digital electronics and programming languages and techniques.
YouTube
YouTube has a huge amount of educational content on electronics, computer programming and embedded systems, where staff and students alike can develop and refresh their skills. Some educators have written whole courses dedicated to their chosen platform available at no cost to the viewer.
EEE also has a YouTube channel which demonstrates student projects and has information for prospective students, showcasing different courses available at EEE.
The EEE YouTube channel also contains some instructional videos produced by the technical staff on the assembly of electronic circuits such as soldering and crimping and terminating wires and also how to use electronics related equipment. This is perhaps the only OER produced by university staff freely available in the public domain as other resources are generally locked down inside the Blackboard environment.
MOOC’s
On a personal level as a member of staff and a student on PG Cert HE, I have attended a number of courses delivered using different formats, from the traditional classroom to massive open online courses (MOOC’s), all have which have been fee free as part of staff continuing professional development (CPD).
The MOOC I attended was a five week course delivered by FutureLearn on Blended learning, developed by the University of Leeds. While the course was very informative and well put together, if I wanted a certificate of attendance I would have to pay for unlimited access. This trend and upgrading seem to be repeated by other platforms which are generally advertised as free online education such as codecademy and edx from MIT. Khan Academy is free of charge but you must login via a social media account, so data rather than a fee is being collected.
So some MOOC’s while accessible by the internet are not really open at all, and it seems are repackaged educational ideas using new technology. While MOOC’s may not be as open as they seem and are perhaps not reaching the target audience, they are likely to remain an important supplement or alternative to conventional education methods because of access and the relatively low cost to run after the development fees.
Open
So how open are we? As a member of staff, the availability of learning materials and courses is huge and the ethos of accessible learning is being realised with CPD, only restricted by the amount of time we can spend on learning new skills.
As undergraduate students, once here and enrolled, they have all the content, collaboration and social learning along with the Manchester experience, which will hopefully allow them to flourish into independent lifelong learners.
