An institutional OER adoption and management model

The OSTRICH project has generated some interesting outputs that have built on the lessons learnt from the OTTER project. This morning Ale and I mapped out all the main stages in the OSTRICH “story so far” in the form of a flowchart, with the aim of deriving a set of guidelines for other institutions that are considering implementing OERs for the first time.

This is what we came up with (all credit to Ale for the diagram!):

Draft institutional OER adoption and management model

In case the text is not clear enough, the key stages in the diagram are:

Senior Management Team engagement

-> Stakeholder analysis

-> Engagement of key stakeholders (e.g. Learning and Teaching support unit/ e-learning support team, academic contributors, IT services, the library and IP. copyright officers)

-> Knowledge transfer (Evidence of the benefits of OERs from other institutions, information about licences and formatting, advice on workflow procedures)

-> Decisions made on technical platforms, branding of OERs, licensing, maintenance and sustainability, support for academics

-> Assessment and decision-making around which subject areas to prioritise for OER development, whether to start from scratch or convert existing materials, and negotiation with potential academic contributors

-> Development of institutional repository if needed (or a decision to only use publicly available repositories such as Jorum Open or OER Commons)

-> Application of workflow processes described in CORRE or DORRE workflows. (Including: populate, check, evaluate and celebrate.)

More detail (and a better version of this flowchart) to come soon…

Gabi Witthaus, 22 June 2011

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From CORRE to DORRE

One of the most exciting outcomes of the OSTRICH project has been the trialling of the CORRE workflow model (copied below) that was developed at Leicester in the OTTER project, at both Derby and Bath. (Please note that this model was accompanied by a range of project management resources such as spreadsheets for tracking activities, templates for progress presentations and general guidelines for producers of OERs. These are all available at www.le.ac.uk/otter/about-otter/documentation.)

The CORRE (Content, Openness, Reuse and Repurposing, Evidence) workflow model for OER creation

The model has been validated by Derby, who found that they could apply it when converting existing teaching materials into OERs. At Bath, however, where most of the OERs are new materials being created from scratch, some modifications were needed to the model. The main change was the integration of a “Design” stage under the “Content” phase of CORRE, to replace or supplement the “Gathering”  of existing resources from academics.

Designing for Openness, Reuse, Repurposing and Evaluation

The journey from CORRE to DORRE is described in our OER11 presentation. Further support materials and guidelines are being developed and will soon be available via the OSTRICH website.

Gabi Witthaus, 21 June 2011

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Communicating with partners in cascade projects – online or f2f?

Last week Ale and I had a very productive meeting with our colleague at the University of Derby, Phill, to reflect on the achievements of the OSTRICH project so far, and the lessons learnt and questions that have arisen out of the project. Losing Linda Swanson has obviously been a major setback and very distressing for all of us, but despite the difficulties and everyone’s sadness around this situation, we all agreed that the project was running as smoothly as it could be under the circumstances.

One of the “lessons learnt” about the cascade process that I found particularly interesting was that there seems to be no getting away from the fact that our face-to-face meetings have been more fruitful (and more enjoyable) than online meetings. Online meetings are good enough for simple updates and joint decision-making on relatively straightforward issues, but when we wanted to do some deep collaborative thinking (e.g. in drawing up our revised model of CORRE that we shared at OER11) or to reflect in a relaxed way on the project (as in the meeting at Derby last week), everyone was firmly of the opinion that a face-to-face meeting would be more productive.

Perhaps one day we will have webconferencing technology that more closely emulates the nuances of face-to-face communication than is possible today. In the meantime, I think that in any future projects of this nature, we will build regular face-to-face visits into the schedule from the start if possible.

Gabi Witthaus, 7 June 2011

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In memory of Linda Swanson

It was great sadness that we learnt last week of the passing away of our colleague on the OSTRICH project, Linda Swanson. Linda was the copyright officer for Derby, and had made a significant contribution to the project before her illness and hopsitalisation two months ago. Linda was highly respected by the project team members and the academics she worked with for her deep knowledge of copyright law, and her ability to apply this knowledge to the development of open educational resources. She was also much loved by all for her friendly, cheerful personality and willingness to share her knowledge and support others. She will be sadly missed by all in the project team. The OSTRICH project team extends its sincere condolences to Linda’s family and friends.

Gabi Witthaus, 1 June 2011

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Institutional strategy for OER in the spotlight

On Friday I attended a very inspiring SCORE seminar at Nottingham on institutional issues around OERs. There were great presentations from Tom Browne (Exeter), Melissa Highton (Oxford) and Steve Stapleton (Nottingham) in the morning, followed by an international focus in the afternoon – a remote presentation by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Willem Van Valkenburg of the Technology University Delft, the Netherlands. Some of the interesting discussions we had revolved around the following topics:

Who has authority to release OERs in institutions?

Exeter, Leicester and Nottingham all have centralised procedures in place for checking OERs before release – mainly to ensure that a suitable Creative Commons licence has been allocated, that the materials are ‘clean’ from an IPR perspective, and that the formatting of the OERs enables reuse and repurposing as far as possible.

At Oxford there is some devolution of authority, with academics and their Heads of Departments signing off on OERs before release as confirmation that there is no copyright infringement. Here, the central OER team’s role is mainly focused on the provision of technical support. At UCT in South Africa, academics have the authority to release their materials themselves, after receiving support from a small central team on copyright, licensing and formatting. This is seen as an essential aspect of sustainability of the OER vision. There is a similar devolution at Delft. Once a teacher has posted a course to their VLE (Blackboard), they can choose to apply a conversion script to publish the item as OCW.

These various models for publication and release of OERs will be elaborated on at the OSTRICH OER11 presentation on 14 May.

Is it a good idea to use the term ‘OER’ in our institutional marketing?

We speculated on whether the term ‘OER’ is widely understood outside of the project teams working on OERs. The term OCW may be more familiar to people because it was popularised by MIT several years ago. Willem also noted that students at Delft preferred the concept of OCW (whole learning programmes with all the support materials) to OERs (decontextualized resources of varying sizes). Some project reps indicated that they only used the term ‘OER’ in reports to JISC, but used the more widely understood term ‘Creative Commons’ in flyers for workshops with academics.

The difference between OERs being released purely as marketing tools and OERs being released as learning materials

This issue was touched on in various discussions throughout the day. I have tried to represent the different outcomes of these two basic approaches in the table below, also drawing on the online discussion hosted by JISC (one of the ‘2nd-Tuesday’ workshops for the JISC Phase 2 OER projects) on 8 March.

Marketing	Learning
Small, decontextualized chunks of learning materials	Whole packages with lots of context – usually referred to as OCW rather than OERs
More multimedia (e.g. iTunes U, YouTube)	More print and audio files
Generally not reused by the authors in their own teaching because the OERs are small decontextualized chunks of material; the actual course materials from which these OERs are derived remain locked behind the garden walls of institutional VLEs and get updated there.	Generally reused by the authors/ institutions for teaching the programme rather than using materials in the VLE.
Not intrinsically linked to either face-to-face or distance learning	Seen as a precursor for campus-based institutions to offering online courses for distance learning, where all material will be openly available on the Web.
These OERs are OK for reuse by other academics but often not very useable by self-learners, as the lack of context can create difficulties for learners.	More useable by self-learners because the additional context makes them more self-explanatory.

As the concept of the OER university comes of age, these issues are likely to be debated a great deal more.

Gabi Witthaus, 14 March 2011

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CORRE workflow model transfers well

Today I visited our OSTRICH partners at Derby with my colleague, Media Zookeeper at Beyond Distance, Simon Kear. We had a very stimulating and inspiring session with Phill Gagen, Sam O’Neill and Linda Swanson. The Derby OSTRICH team is now in full swing with the gathering, screening, copyright clearance, transformation and formatting of OERs, and they’re building up a great bank of materials on subjects from Algebra through Hairdressing and Prenatal Development, to Quarrying. Many of these materials are filling gaps in the OER landscape, potentially meeting needs in specialist subject areas. (I was particularly interested in one of the Law OERs – on Law in the Music Industry – which is bound to be of interest to a wide range of people, not just Law students.)

Apart from looking over all the great OERs-in-progress, we also discussed how the CORRE workflow and evaluation model, which was developed in the OTTER project at Leicester, is being implemented at Derby. It seems that the model has transferred more or less seamlessly to the Derby context – the only major difference being that, since the Derby team is creating most of its OERs from scratch, as opposed to ‘OER-ing’ existing teaching materials, they are working much more closely with the academics than we were able to do in the OTTER project. This is likely to help lay the foundation for integrating OERs into learning design as a matter of course in future.

As a post-script, I was delighted to hear from our OER colleagues at Nottingham today that “It turns out that OER do save time and students do use them“!

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OER workflow checklists – work in progress

At yesterday’s workshop with OER contributors in Derby, we brainstormed the questions they would ask themselves at each stage in the process of creating an OER, with reference to the CORRE framework generated during the OTTER project. What follows is the ‘raw’ list of what was generated – this will be compared to the indicative questions in the CORRE Tracking Sheets to ultimately inform Derby’s own version of the CORRE process.

A) Gathering/selecting an item of teaching material to be converted into an OER

1. Is the item cohesive? i.e. Can it stand alone?
2. Is the content accurate?
3. Is it current and correct?
4. Would I want my mother to see it? (Or: Am I happy to be associated with this in the public domain?)
5. Do we have a sufficiently collegiate approach to feedback? (Thinking ahead to the validation stage…)
6. Does the resource comply with university’s regulations and requirements?
7. Does the university have commercial ambitions with this material that I need to consider before deciding on turning it into an OER?
8. Does it contradict or duplicate other materials?
9. Have I identified the metadata? (Tags for searchability, as well as an abstract and information for potential users about the context for which this resource was designed)

B) IPR and copyright (Questions to be applied to the resource as a whole as well as all its separate sections)

1. Where does this originate from?
2. Who is the rights holder?
3. What, if any, existing licence, has this been published under?
4. Is this fair use?
5. Can we contact the rights holder if needed?
6. What is the risk?
7. Do we have permission from people included in the images/ videos/ audio files? (Written consent forms)
8. How long is it going to take to get copyright clearance? Can we afford the time?
9. If clearing copyright is going to be difficult or too time-consuming, can we recreate or replace this material instead?

C) Transformation for reuse

1. How much work is required to transform the materials so that they can stand alone? (E.g. removing references to resources that are not openly available)
2. If we take anything out, do we need to replace it with something else to keep up the coherence?
3. Do the materials need much work to make sense outside of context that they were delivered in?
4. What transformation is needed as a result of IPR issues?
5. How much of the transformation is the author’s responsibility as opposed to OSTRICH team responsibility?
6. Granularity – what will be the ‘chunk size’ of the things we are publishing?

D) Formatting/ digitisation for reuse (choosing the file format and executing it)

1. Corporate image (Branding – Derby formats and logos etc.? Policy decision needed)
2. Most suitable formats/ uses to allow it to be accessible to global market? (Can we produce it in a range of formats? Including mobile platforms?)
3. Do all the materials have to be DDA compliant?
4. Could the resource be altered for DDA purposes (by another user) if needed?
5. Language and dialects – e.g. will international users understand the accents in audio files?
6. Can I do it? Are the resources available to support me?
7. Does it require complicated technology (either for the author or for the end user)?
8. Will it work? (e.g. if we put it in a new format)

E. Validation

1. Which groups need to validate the resource, and at which stages? Project team? Contributors? Students? Colleagues/ other educators? School/department head/ other senior managers? Are any sign-offs needed?
2. What criteria will be used for validation at each stage? (E.g. fit-for-purpose, accessibility, scholarship – is it good enough?)
3. Do we need to bring in “media experts” to check quality of products (e.g. videos (Bearing in mind that students don’t necessarily want “BBC-style” perfection)
4. How do we get people to engage in the validation?
5. How to process the data and what will be done with it?
6. Granularity – when to validate?

F. Tracking

1. What resources are being viewed – any stats on what’s popular, what’s not (e.g. using Google Analytics)? Can this information enable us to make decisions about what kind of new resources to bring in?
2. Where are the users?
3. Are there any significant trends?
4. Timing – e.g. is it busier towards the end of the semester?
5. What to do with resources that are never/ have not yet been used?
6. How can we best use the stats in reports to senior management? (Qualified by a statement from the project team explaining what the stats mean)

I’m looking forward to seeing those old OTTER checklists being revised for Derby’s context in the light of these discussions.

Gabi Witthaus, 4 Nov 2010

 

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YouTube as OER Repository?

Is YouTube an OER repository?

On the negative side:

1.    YouTube videos may contain copyright infringements.

2.    No guarantee of quality.

On the positive side:

1.     There are multitudes of film clips with good educational content.

2.     It’s free.

3.     Clips are technologically reusable – kind of. You have to know how to do it.

4.     YouTube.edu may begin to encourage better quality.

There is overwhelming evidence that many people, especially young (pre-university?) people, use YouTube as their first-port-of-call search engine. I was recently speaking about YouTube with a group of undergraduate medical students, and they admitted YouTube is the first place they go for film clips of any kind of clinical practice.

Not only does YouTube contain OERs, it can be used to advocate OERs. To illustrate, I give you OER FAQs by Beyond Distance’s Dr Sahm Nikoi.

What do you think about YouTube as an OER repository?

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester

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OSTRICH on the move

Today was the first programme meeting for the ‘cascade’ strand of the Phase 2 open educational resource (OER) projects, including OSTRICH. OSTRICH stands for OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs. It is a one-year project funded by JISC and the HE Academy, led by the University of Leicester and with the universities of Bath and Derby as project partners. OSTRICH will cascade the knowledge, lessons learned and models developed as part of the OTTER OER project at Leicester and will enable partners to develop and release 100 credits’ worth of OERs. In doing so, OSTRICH hopes to put Bath and Derby firmly on the national and global OER map. We are very proud to have an ostrich in the Media Zoo!

At today’s meeting in London, I had the opportunity to meet OSTRICH’s sister projects, as well as colleagues from the funders and OER projects funded under other strands – including TIGER. We’re all set for a great year of OER collaboration, development and growth. Let the fun (and the work!) begin.

Dr A Armellini
PI, OSTRICH Project
Beyond Distance Research Alliance
University of Leicester

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