Using OER repositories to support online teaching and learning— or not..
Me: (collaring a colleague in the corridor), “If I say ‘OER’ to you, what does that make you think?”
Him: “Remind me, OER…?”
“Open Educational Resources”.
“Ah, yes. Well, there used to be Jorum, didn’t there, and now that’s closing down, so I’m not really sure where I’d look. I don’t know if it really got taken up, anyway.”
“Hmm. Sounds almost as if you think OERs are a thing of the past?”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t think people knew where to look or what to do with them.”
This is anecdotal, of course, but it does reflect a certain inertia I’ve come across both in my work in the Humanities eLearning team and more widely. Back in 2006, this from a paper on the ALT website: “Many potential users of Jorum have yet to understand the function of repositories, let alone seek to use one.” Ten years later, and a blog post I read from 2015 about the demise of Jorum sounded familiar, the author said she’d never uploaded to it herself, couldn’t remember the last time she looked at it, but always encouraged others to do so. And this, I have to confess, is probably a fair description of our approach to OER repositories in eLearning. Of course they’re a good thing, aren’t they? Another opportunity to add to the arsenal of potential online learning resources. And yet…
Why, then, does there appear to be little take-up? Is it just too difficult? Too confusing? Are the benefits not clear enough? Time is the most limited commodity academic staff cite when it comes to developing elearning material. So the idea that they could take something someone else has already created, where the foundation work has been done for them, and all they have to do is tailor it for their own learning outcomes, that’s got to be a good thing, right? If you branded it that way, ‘want to save time developing your elearning?’, ‘want to use an effective resource where someone else has already done the leg-work for you?’, that’s going to be a winner, yes? Except, no. Because finding a suitable resource and then deciding what to do with and whether it will actually achieve your intended outcome could well take as long as starting from scratch, and may even be completely fruitless. Unless we get better at directing and framing our guidance, perhaps, and the repositories get better at describing, categorising and structuring available resources to enable more effective searching and re-use.
In elearning, we’ve provided some guidance on finding OERs, we’ve produced and run workshops. But things tend to fizzle out after that (although I should point out we don’t have specific data on Faculty take up). Staff are happy to use YouTube videos, point to online articles, they get that, maybe the odd TED talk, Slideshare presentation, perhaps an image or two from one of the free image banks available. But when it comes to organised OER repositories, we’re more likely to get a request in the form of ‘I need this exact thing to support my teaching, do you happen to know if there’s something out there I can use?’. Or, are there any subject specific places I could look? And we’re happy to have a scout around, time permitting, and make a few suggestions if we find something. But we just haven’t managed to sell it as a self-sustaining, proactive part of the online learning design dressing-up box. Because OERs seem to be buried in its dark recesses and they may not fit anyway without a fair bit of nipping and tucking.
So, should we bother to try and encourage their use?
There are many well documented benefits to using OERs, beyond the possible but not guaranteed time-saving one. Practically, re-using material from an OER repository gives you peace of mind, because you know that anything uploaded there has already been licensed to share. You don’t need to worry about copyright, getting in touch with the creator, you just need to check the terms of the licence and off you go. And if the supporting documentation has been done well, even better. They should be more academically robust that something you’ve happened across elsewhere. They’re free, of course. And, hopefully, they would provide an opportunity to present your subject matter in a different way, one you may not have thought of, so your students get a richer experience, maybe you engage more students with different learning styles. And there are many repositories out there — traditional, specialist, institution-based — Jorum has a good list as a starting point. For elearning, one to explore might be the University of Nottingham’s Xpert, a JISC funded project delivering and supporting e-learning resources created through the open source tool Xerte Online Toolkits.
Of course as well as being an active ‘re-user’ of OER repositories you can be an active ‘contributor’. Say you’ve produced a learning object which has measurably enhanced your students’ learning experience. Wouldn’t you want to share that for the benefit of other academics and students, potentially anywhere in the world? OERs in their broad sense carry with them many positive characteristics around connectedness, inclusivity, community, sharing, innovating, vibrancy, immediacy, currency… And the open aspect of OER repositories is designed to enable modification, adaptation, re-use, customisation, ownership — they are intended to be empowering, and can provide a valuable way of receiving feedback on your own resource, as suggested in this Jorum user success story, and encourage you to structure and document your resource well.
But something doesn’t seem to be quite working, and the decision to retire Jorum and replace it with a new Jisc Content and App Store is probably a reflection of that. A statement from Jisc says they are “building on our customers and users’ views that they are looking for forums and engagement spaces to be able to share resources peer to peer.” Ideas are coming through around Communities of Practice and subject area Open Guilds (networks of teachers/lecturers committed to creating and sharing open educational resources). Within our team, we’ve talked about compiling subject related lists of OER resources, as well as encouraging the development of our own Communities of Practice, so maybe we’ve stumbled into the same sorts of conclusions. Glasgow Caledonian University were recently the first Scottish HE institution to approve an OER policy, based on an OER use and publication guide produced by Leeds University, perhaps that’s something we should be looking at. For my own practice, as a result of starting to look in more detail at what is already out there, and how Creative Commons licensing is being used, I’ll be pursuing these ideas further. Beyond that, I think, there’s also a whole discussion about how to incorporate OERs as part of a fully blended structure of online materials underpinned by sound instructional design, which I’d like to explore, but that’s for another time.
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