Open Educational Resources (OER) at UCT: Innovating Pedagogical

Practices

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Michelle Willmers & Michael PaskeviciusHELTASA Colloquium

6 October 2009

Who are we?

• OER UCT Project at the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT

• Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, building on a previous research project, OpeningScholarship

• OER UCT aims to:– Audit potential OER at UCT– Create a directory listing the UCT collection of OER which

will go live from February 2010– Showcase the teaching of UCT academics– Share lessons learned through a case study

What is OER?

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials (usually digital) that are shared freely and openly for anyone to use and under some type of license to repurpose/ improve and redistribute.

What has enabled OER?

Change in philosophy• The Open Source Software

movement led the way in showcasing the value of openness

and the ‘architecture of participation’ (O’Reilly 2003)

• OER is based on the philosophical view of ‘knowledge as a

collective social product and the desirability of making it a social property’ (Prasad & Ambedkar cited in Downes 2007:1)

Affordances of the Internet

OER is premised on the ‘simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that

technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge’ (Hewlett Foundation)

Alternative copyright licensing Previously copyright was binary: All rights retained or

public domain

Now alternative licensing options such as the GNU General Public License and Creative Commons provide a range of options where some rights are reserved

Copyright©

Public domain

Copyright©

Some rights reserved Public domain

Creative Commons: making OER possible

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DKm96Ftfko

Degrees of openness

Financial models

• Donor funding – e.g. Hewlett Foundation• Marketing budget – e.g. Open University• Commission – e.g. MIT and Amazon• Endowment – e.g. Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy• Membership – e.g. Sakai Consortium• Government – e.g. UK £7.8 million grant

Why now?

Why now – globally?

• Advance knowledge by unlocking information for the benefit of all

• Provide open access to high-quality educational content to educators and learners

• Provide a model demonstrating the value of openness

• Provide an opportunity to display various perspectives – not only Northern/ Western perspectives

Why now – institutionally?• Increase institutional visibility, advancing

competitiveness, attracting students and resources

• Promote effective social responsiveness• Improve learning experience by selecting

materials in pedagogically sound and innovative ways

• Improve recruitment by helping the right students find the right programmes

• Enhance teaching coherence across courses• Ensure better long-term archiving, curation

and reuse of teaching materials• Attract alumni as life-long learners

Why now – individually?

• Profile teaching as well as research• Create record of teaching for teaching

portfolio• Foster connections between other

colleagues, departments and even other universities (especially cross-disciplinary studies)

• Increase impact of teaching materials• Extend use of teaching materials to high

school learners and life-long learners

Discussion

• Incentive • Undermining potential publication for profit• Quality assurance• Attendance at lectures

Incentive

Why would academics spend their time doing this? Giving away their intellectual capital freely?

• It is voluntary (even at MIT and OU)• MIT provides additional help in learning design and

copyright clearance• Teaching grants would be ideal• Demonstrates teaching ability and contribution to

social responsiveness• Keeping copyright on own materials and updating

when necessary

Undermining potential publication for profit

‘Evidence that OCW publication in fact promotes the sale of related faculty publications, as it both widens the market for those publications, increases name recognition and demonstrates uses to which those publications might be put in the classroom.’ (MIT website)

Quality assurance

• Individual academic• Institutional materials development and

copyright clearance ‘team’• Other authorities (e.g. use of ‘lens’ strategy at

Rice University)• Use and ratings by users – post-publication

review as it were

Attendance at lectures

In the UK the Joint Information Steering Committee (JISC) manager of the OER pilot says:

‘Putting material online could potentially result in fewer students attending lectures. But I think higher education is starting to move towards the idea that it doesn't matter how the learning is facilitated; the important thing is whether it works for the student’ (Attwood 2009)

Conclusion

‘Today, a confluence of events is creating the perfect storm for significantly advancing education. With a growing inventory of openly available educational tools and resources, and with an increasingly engaged and connected community, transformative opportunities for education abound.

The good news is that the emerging open education movement in higher education and beyond is beginning to change the way educators use, share, and improve educational resources and knowledge by making them open and freely available.’ (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008:2)

References• Attwood, R (2009) Get it out in the open. Online: http://

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408300 24 September

• Downes S (2007) Models for sustainable open educational resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects 3: 29-44.

• Iiyoshi, T & Kumar, MSV (Eds) (2008) Opening Up Education: The collective advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

• O’Reilly, T (2003) The Architecture of Participation. Available online: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3017 (Checked 4 October 2009)

• Yuan, L, MacNeill, S and Kraan W (2008). Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education. JISC CETIS. Available at http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/0/0b/OER_Briefing_Paper.pdf [Accessed 4 February 2009].

OER UCT Links

• Visit the OER UCT open Vula site (this presentation is listed there too)vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/openuct

• Read the OER UCT project blogblogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct

• For information regarding related workshops and seminarswww.cet.uct.ac.za/projects#OER

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