Tag Archives: open education

Why is open education resource creation, management and publishing important?

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A reflection for Open Education Week.

I was asked by Open Book Publishers to write a short statement/testimonial on “why it is important to publish educational resources in Open Access and/or why do you think Open Education is key to the future of learning?” The original is posted on their site with other reflections from people who have published open books. Do read them. I’m cross posting here as part of my own curation.

The suggested subject for this reflection was “why it is important to publish educational resources in Open Access,” but I’m not happy with that emphasis on the end point. It’s important that learning resources are not static once published, rather on publication a resource enters an iterative cycle of revision-reuse-evaluation-reflection.

My starting point for sharing educational resources was that high quality teaching and learning resources are difficult and time consuming to create; and like anything that is difficult and time consuming they are costly in terms of money or, more frequently, unpaid effort. To me, OER made sense as a means of sharing the effort of creating learning resources, dividing work between partners with different skills and viewpoints. It also made sense to get input from a wider range of contributors in such a way that the result is of use to a wider audience, providing a greater return for this effort.

This view has consequences not just for publishing, but for authoring and resource management during an extended lifecycle. Key among these are the need for collaborative authoring processes, tools that support these processes, and publication in formats that are interoperable with these tools. So, it is important to publish educational resources in open access because this supports a sustainable approach to the creation and widespread use of quality educational resources.

Just to expand a little on that final paragraph, I would stress that David Wiley’s ALMS framework is as important as his 5Rs (“Poor Technical Choices Make Open Content Less Open“) and highlight the interoperability of ePub in this context. When it comes to book publishing would like to call out people such as PressBooks, BookSprints and the CoKo foundation for their leadership on tools that facilitate open, collaborative authoring (though I know that this only scrapes the surface of people doing great things in collaborative content creation). Finally, thanks to Open Book Publishers for the excuse to spend a few minutes thinking about this.

Devolved Management of OER in Irish Higher Education?

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I sometimes get asked for asked for advice by people who are thinking of setting up national infrastructure for OER based on institutional open access research repositories or similar, often with the rationale that doing such would mirror what has worked for open access research papers and cultural heritage. My advice is to think hard about whether it is appropriate to treat OER in the same way as these other types of resource. This week I read a paper, “Towards a Devolved Model of Management of OER? The Case of the Irish Higher Education Sector” by  Angelica Risquez, Claire McAvinia, Yvonne Desmond, Catherine Bruen, Deirdre Ryan, and Ann Coughlan which provides important evidence and analysis on this topic.

Photograph of Mon Repose
M_n Rep_se, Corfu, by Marc Ryckaert via Wikimedia Commons CC:BY

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Sharing and caring for Open Scotland

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This month I will be curating for Open Scotland,  that is writing a blog post or two and tweeting a bit on the #OpenScot hashtag.  I’ve published the first blog post, Sharing curation in Open Scotland, and I am not going to reproduce the content here, so follow that link to read what I have to say about Dorothy Hodgkin, kindness in scientific research and how that relates to Open Scotland.

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Quick Notes: Defining Textbook Structure and Elements

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Yesterday I joined an Office Hours session run by the Rebus Community, which was a presentation by  Dave Ernst, (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and  Executive Director of the Open Textbook Network). He spoke about  Defining Textbook Structure and Elements, essentially summarizing a chapter on developing text book structure from guide by the Open Textbook Network for teachers who are creating open textbooks. That resource, and the Rebus community look like they are well worth a look if you are not already familiar with them. Here are my notes mixed with my own reflection & comment.

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The end of Open Educational Practices in Scotland

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On Monday I was at Our Dynamic Earth, by the Holyrood Parliament in Edinburgh, for a day meeting on the Promise of Open Education. This was the final event of the Open Educational Practices in Scotland project (OEPS), which (according to the evaluation report):

involved five universities in leading a project based in the Open University in Scotland. Its aims were to facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland, and to enhance capacity for developing publicly available online materials across the tertiary education sector in Scotland. The project particularly focused on fostering the use of open educational practices to build capacity and promote widening participation.

 

There have always been questions about this project, notably the funnelling of money to the OU without any sign of an open bidding process, but at least it was there. With the OEPS finishing, two things caught my attention: how do we get political support for open education, and what open educational practice is current in Scotland. To paraphrase Orwell: if there is hope, it lies in the grass roots [hmm, that didn’t end well for Winston].

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Reflections on a little bit of open education (TL;DR: it works).

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We are setting up a new honours degree programme which will involve use of online resources for work based blended learning. I was asked to demonstrate some the resources and approaches that might be useful. This is one of the quick examples that I was able to knock up(*) and some reflections on how Open Education helped me. By the way, I especially like the last bit about “open educational practice”. So if the rest bores you, just skip to the end. Continue reading →