How OERs can help a Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject Area - Quantitative Social Science

Dr Jackie Carter, University of Manchester and SCORE, The Open University, UK

CC BY-NC 2.0

“I came to understand the world by visiting it. I use statistics to check my understanding and to tell others.”

200 years 200 countries 4 minuteshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

http://howtomakeadifference.net/2012/03/28/hans-rosling/

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 NPR http://richannel.org/visualising-how-a-population-reaches-7-billion

http://www.esds.ac.uk

Prof John MacInnes - ESRC Strategic Advisor for Quantitative Methods at Undergraduate LevelSource: www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Undergraduate_quantitative_research_methods_tcm8-2722.pdf

Policy Drivers for Quantitative Skills

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=419552&c=1

• Quantitative Methods (QM) or Quantitative Skills (QS) or Statistical Literacy

• Increasingly, Hefce will invest on behalf of students to meet the costs incurred by universities that cannot be covered by fees alone: support for widening participation, high-cost subjects, specialist institutions, and strategically important and vulnerable subjects.

www.britac.ac.uk/policy/Languages_and_Quantitative_Skills.cfm

Celebrating the value and relevance of the social sciences(above)http://blogs.bis.gov.uk/blog/2011/11/08/celebrating-the-value-and-relevance-of-the-social-sciences/

QUANTITATIVE SKILLS: LEARNING LESSONS FROM OVERSEAS (right)http://www.britac.ac.uk/

www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform33/OpenWorking.html

http://www.oer-quality.org/tag/qa/

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2462/3613705218_aae4ca0477.jpg

The SCORE Project

The aims of this project are to share teaching resources and expertise in those institutions already working to upskill students in QM; and to focus on resources that address global issues by using real world data

The resulting open educational resources (OER) will be accompanied by ‘stories’ or narratives of exemplar usage, engaging social science learners with QM. The focus will be away from economics and psychology

Methodology

• Identify willing respondents from:– quantitative-methods-

teachers mailing list– Media contacts– Policy practitioners

• This presentation is a snapshot of results 2/3 way through the project (see paper)

myitzonecasestudies.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/case-studies.jpg

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0The Michael http://www.flickr.com/photos/pictoral/268139464/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Fear of TestsStudying for my biostatistics exam was scary enough, without the spiders.

giving students an opportunity to express their fears and frustrations about the use of abuse of statistics from the outset, ….supporting them throughout - and especially in the early stages - in terms of their use of data and statistics

CC BY 2.0 Stuart Bannocks www.flickr.com/photos/42665617@N07/6021961819/sizes/z/in/photostream/

‘you don’t learn much about research methodology by just reading books and writing essays, you do have to go out and collect some data, and you don’t really appreciate the craft of quantitative methods until you do a bit of recoding and see what difference it makes’

Mark Easton – Home Editor http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15164970

‘so students get a real view of where Britain sits in a global context….it captures their imagination’

Data, data, data. I cannot make bricks without clay (Sherlock Holmes)

let them ‘get their hands dirty with data’ in order to appreciate that it generates an improvement in practical not just theoretical skills.

There is a balance between helping students to collect data themselves and giving access to authoritative data sources

[it’s about] transferable skills

…focussing on research design and how to become a social scientist.

[Using data provides] a risk-free way to gain statistical, computer and information skills .. directly applicable to the workplace

Data Journalism

• BBC College of Journalism

• Focus on open data – e.g. Political party donations

• Tools for data exploration (pivot tables)

• Motivation – in search of a story

Policy Related Research

www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/23/child-poverty-britain-map#

UK Poverty Advisor for Save the Children

Statistics in Real Life – 1st Year course at University of Manchester – Guest speaker

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5537336223/sizes/z/in/photostream/

My first reaction to sharing resources was one of horror! I remembered days spent writing .. my teaching materials and felt very protective of them – why would I then share them with someone else? …in academia we are socialized into being protective about our materials

Context is everything in QM teaching and I started to feel that I was almost certainly going through the same laborious process that hundreds of lecturers before me had gone through themselves. Why we’re we replicating this process in isolation? Think how much time we could save if we pooled resources! …I decided that I didn’t want to continue the ‘cycle of abuse’ along the lines of “well I had to do it on my own so why should I share my hard-earned experience and resources with someone else?”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5537336223/sizes/z/in/photostream/

and I realized how great these things were precisely because people had collaborated and shared. … actually I was quite proud of my resources and that as well as criticism there was also the possibility that I would receive positive feedback… there is a parallel with publishing – if you do good work then it gets read and you start to build your reputation. In an era in which the student experience and teaching quality is becoming increasingly important to HEIs, why wouldn’t you want to show-off your resources?

Once I understood the terms of the Creative Commons licenses and the protection they gave my resources I was sold.

If you do it [tagging] right then your work will turn up high on Google searches (I’ve already had people tell me that they found my resources via Google

.. stipulated through the licensing agreement that any derived works must be deposited in JORUM also – thus we are starting to build a critical mass of open access materials that will only snowball as more and more people get involved

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5537336223/sizes/z/in/photostream/

is open a step too far too soon for some?

QM teaching group (QANTAC) – sharing in a closed way first….

.. Real world examples – real opportunity to develop OER worth sharing

….but with leadership could open up

Need to understand the benefits of sharing

Links to employability very important

Learning from similar initiatives

“OER is a very young concept. People who live it every day are sort of like 'why aren't more people doing it?’ It's still very young and it will come of age. We will look back ten years from now we will see the OER movement as the single biggest change for creating access to high quality higher education for people on the planet - most people just don't realise it yet.

And where we've got to do some work is search and retrieval and application - that's still the great frontier. We're not doing a good enough job in equipping our educators to participate; we're not doing a good enough job in enabling our students to find it and do something meaningful with it”.

Professor Martin Bean; VC Open University, UKQuestions & discussion: Bridging the divide: visions of education futures through technology. Going Global Conference 2012

Jean Spector http://fr.fotopedia.com/items/jeans-AJA3RruQUkAAttribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works