True openness…
I am Debbie, a psychology lecturer at The University of Manchester. In this academic role, I teach at undergraduate and postgraduate level, conduct research in the area of health psychology, act as a widening participation (WP) officer and am co-director of the MSc Health Psychology programme. Openness and open access are terms I am hearing more and more as I am being encouraged to make my teaching and research open and thus more available to students, other academics and the general public. Before studying for my Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCert in HE), I understood little about what openness meant to me personally but now I am starting to get a better idea. However, I am left pondering this question:
How open can I truly be as an academic and who I am trying to be open to?
I get it, I mean I fully appreciate the benefits of making published scholarly work open access. Our research may have direct implications for clinical practice and/or policy but the barrier of journal subscriptions may stop individuals informing these from seeing the findings. Also, it can create the opportunity for discussion and interaction with others, something that can occur in real time through the Internet. This ability to instantly inform practice and policy and get feedback from others would be truely rewarding as a researcher. However, the ‘gold’ open access route scares me! I am still a early(ish) career researcher who does not have a large pot of research funding to pay the increasing article processing fees associated so I worry how I will publish unfunded work in the future.
Also, making research articles open access does not mean that the availability is increased. You still have to know where to look for articles and you still have to understand the information in the articles. Numeracy, literacy and technology performance are not skills held equally by all in society. Therefore, we cannot assume that making research findings available on the Internet that we are making them open to all. Academic writing is full of jargon and complexities that the lay person and people from other disciplines may struggle to understand. Academic journals are starting to use Twitter to convey key messages from research papers, which is as a great addition as social media is popular with 61% of adults reporting using it in 2015 and many academics use Twitter. However, do these tweets reach all of these adults or do they simply reach other academics who would read the full article regardless. Does jargon and complex language prevent the open access agenda from reaching its full potential? Surely, the gold open access route only has value if we make a conscious effort to write academic papers in a format that is easily understood by anyone. In my WP work, I really enjoy explaining the work we do in a University to school children as it challenges me to avoid jargon and really helps me to fully understand what we do.
We are also being encouraged to make our teaching and learning environments portable and open to all. One way we can do this is via open educational resources (OERs). The Internet is the most obvious platform for OERs to be housed as adult’s use of the internet has increased yearly with around 80% of adults in the UK accessing the Internet in 2015 compared to 35% in 2009. I like the idea of teaching being more open as it fits within the WP agenda, as offering OERs can open up education to more people, people who previously faced many barriers to attendance and barriers to success in the current education system. However, all of the issues raised above about availability are relevant here too and need to be addressed before we can make our teaching and learning environments open to a wider audience.
Blogademia is a term I had not heard of until I started to read material for my PGCert in HE. I previously struggled to see why people would write blogs, especially those in academic posts (i.e. limited time and having a formal academic writing style) but now I see that blogging could help bring a level of transparency to our roles. Students still think we have all the holidays as annual leave away from the university and find it hard to think of us doing anything else other than teaching. Seeing more about what we do and our views on it will make this clearer and more approachable which will help manage students expectations in the long run. Likewise, it is a great way to advertise your work and the work of your research group in a more relaxed and instant environment. However, the challenge with blog writing is to make these blog interesting enough to appeal to the public outside of academia and at a level that the content is accessible to all. Writing a blog requires a different writing writing style, so away with the formal academic talk and hello to the more personal approach, something that some academics struggle with and I need to learn. To acheive this, I have now started to read blogs on a weekly basis including the The Guardian HE blog network British Psychological Society research digest. I am getting so into the world of blogging that I am finding myself read them on the train instead of Facebook!
Wow, so there is no nice conclusion to this piece as I now realise that I have even more to learn than I first thought! I am starting to understand the open access policy but need to develop the skills to communicate my research in a more available manner to a wider audience! Hmm maybe I need to consider writing a blog as a way of being transparent and opening my work up to those outside of academia – watch this space!
