Time to promote an OER Policy at UoM?
Open Source Software has enjoyed great success over recent times, with some commenters saying we have entered a golden age: “with free and open–source code fertilising economic growth”. Open Education is seemingly slower to evolve, as is generally the case across the Education sector.
Things are moving along though.
From the Horizon Report 2018 Preview (full report is due in the Summer)
Key trends in the mid term (three to five years) are:
Proliferation of open education resources. The report called attention to the growing number of universities pushing forward their own open learning initiatives, noting that the term “open” is a “multifaceted concept” that should be broadly defined “not just in economic terms but also in terms of ownership and usage rights.” Interest in the technological and process questions (distribution, archiving, certificating) as well as how to use or create OERs
With the Horizon Report, the general buzz surrounding Openness, alongside a resurgence of interest in sharing resources in both the further and higher education sectors, you may be forgiven for thinking that we are in the midst of a (slow moving) Open HE evolution.
Challenges
It would appear that openness in HE is progressing, but the full picture is complicated by the dichotomy Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) themselves are facing. The further marketisation of Higher Education continues and we are further pressured into regarding our peer HEIs as competitors in the same market, for resources such as students, high profile researchers, VPs etc. Success in this arena is influenced by our appeal to the specific type of students and staff we seek. This can lead to a business like sense that the Institution needs be competitive and offer a highly polished learning experience.
This need for a competitive advantage could lead to an institution being reluctant to share educational resources or best practices, a situation where our resources are created for the good of our students and the success of our programmes only. Are these practices putting the brakes on the evolution of Open Education, or trying to play whack-a-mole? The short history of the Information Age has shown us that keeping valuable information under wraps is a difficult task, as demonstrated by services such as Sci Hub continuing relatively unaffected by legal pressures.
On the other side of the dichotomy, The University of Manchester’s mission statement includes Social Responsibility as one of the three core goals of the institution, and is further expanded as follows:
“furthering the frontiers of knowledge through research and teaching, but also contributing to the well-being of its region and society more widely.”
Improving openness in education would appear to fall under this remit.
How does the business-like needs of a modern HE institution gel with sharing in house created content, potentially to our competitors? Well so far we do not have any official guidance on creating OERs for sharing at UoM. This silence could be taken as a tacit embargo on sharing T&L resources, or it could simply mean we haven’t got around to making one yet. Either way, the end result is the same; it is challenging enough to seek explicit approval to share OERs that many (often time poor) educators may not see it to be a worth while endeavour to pursue.
Culture of cooperation
Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh are among the first UK Universities to produce explicit policies on creating & sharing OERs, and they sight their mission statements as key drivers for these policies. Edinburgh University’s OER policy includes the following line from their mission statement:
“.. make a significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the UK and the world, promoting health and economic and cultural wellbeing”.
https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/openeducationalresourcespolicy.pdf
If the Horizon Report is turns out to be accurate and the of Proliferation OERs is an upcoming mid term key trend it may be prudent to set our stall out and state our intentions for UoM created OERs, to get in front of the pack and potentially be one of the forerunners of the movement.
If we were to begin making OERs on a larger scale there would undoubtedly be concerns voiced about us giving away the product, and these are valid concerns if we are viewing ourselves as an entity in a competitive space. Other HEIs will face the same pressures, so we can look to see how they are responding to these challenges. In Edinburgh’s OER policy we can see they are guiding their educators to not make whole courses available as OERs, but smaller bitesize resources:
“It is anticipated that OERs used, created or published by individual staff and students will normally be single units or small collections rather than whole courses.”
https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/openeducationalresourcespolicy.pdf
Practices like this could mitigate some concerns of giving too much away for free, while allowing us to contribute to furtherment of global knowledge resources. This would entail a conscious effort to buck the marketisation trend and reach towards a more open future, a move some of our peer (competitor?) Institutions are already beginning to make.
Along side their OER policy, Glasgow University’s institutional OER repository was introduced which is based on the University of Southampton’s EdShare platform. Can the efforts of Glasgow & Southampton Universities alongside the other more curated OER repositories continue the gradual shift to a a culture of cooperation against market pressures?
Worth it?
A further question could then be, is all this worth the effort, are OERs likely to be reused?
On looking into OER reuse it would be easy to become disheartened fairly quickly. As David Wiley put it in his 2009 Open Content blog, “The dearth of empirically verifiable reuse of OERs begs the question — where is the “work we are doing in developing “field” of open educational resources really going?”. Alan Levine more recently compares finding evidence of OER reuse akin to tracking the elusive Bigfoot, but should we be concerned? Perhaps not, it has been suggested that reuse (or adaption) takes many forms, many of which are unmeasurable (using OERs for inspiration for instance).
We may never know how much OERs are reused, but does this mean we should we stop (or not start) making them? This should be a question for the educators spending time making them to answer (they are doing the work after all). However, until the institutional friction is eased and the position on creating and sharing OERs made clear, there may not be many OERs coming from UoM.
