We're moving!

Following the OER phase II start-up meeting on 22nd September, we decided to move the blog to the Wordpress platform as this seems to be the preferred option for the OER phase II blogs - please join us at http://csapopencascade.wordpress.com/!

Learners and OERs

OER has a broader potential for learning and teaching than simply making resources publicly available. Widely available learning content, is fundamentally changing the relationship between students and their institutions as sources of expertise. On a related note, we made the issue of student engagement key element of the cascade project bid for the second phase of the OER programme, where we are looking at ways in which can be integrated sustainably into curriculum design processes in a manner which effectively engages the students. We are also planning to involve students at partner institutions in the process of reviewing the cascade support framework. While the framework for student engagement will keep evolving in the course of our project, in the meantime we decided to revisit the pilot project to learn about experiences of the individual strand projects who have been engaging directly with learners,

Overall, the consensus from the individual strand projects was that students support the open sharing of teaching and learning resources and view OERs as supplementary resources that could improve the quality of their learner experience. In terms of potential benefits, OER can make it easier for students to access materials on topics that cannot easily be accommodated within the main curriculum. Furthermore, students can also benefit from applying knowledge in a wider context than their course would otherwise allow, such as for instance international dimension. Interestingly, in terms of students’ own readiness to share, according to the OTTER project at University of Leicester, a third of students say they would not be willing to turn their own materials(e.g. lecture notes) into OERs and share them with other students. At the same time, the involvement of students in producing OERs introduces additional issues related to IPR and copyright since not all universities have a clear IP ownership policy for student work. Hopefully, the forthcoming meeting with the phase II project partners in October will be a great opportunity to discuss these issues and start embedding student engagement within the cascade framework. 

Teaching in public

The cascade project is slowly gaining momentum as we are setting up meetings with project partners, talking to our project consultant, trying to finalise the project plan. At the same time, as the conversations about the cascade framework are opening up, we are trying to revisit the earlier conversations which took place during the OER pilot programme. Now that the synthesis and evaluation report is out, we can get more of an insight into issues raised by other projects and we are quite keen to engage with is the concept of public teaching as it relates to OERs and the cascade framework.

The ChemistryFM project released OERs within the Teaching in Public Framework: a concept which involves progressive curricula design, with students as an academic’s ‘first public’ (Burawoy, 2005), the promotion of teaching as a ‘public good’ (Deem et al, 2007) and the role of university lecturers as ‘public intellectuals’ (Fuller, 2005). In the initial proposal, the project team argue that their interest in the project stemmed from a vision of higher education of public good, where the creation and sharing of Open Educational Resources might act as an effective method of countering the neo-liberalisation of higher education. The commitment to a participatory pedagogy and the principle of education as a basic ‘human right’ has quite significant implications for institutional policies:

Why should an academic or their institution offer their educational resources for free? Advocates argue that such altruism has always been part of the academic tradition and that by sharing and reusing educational content, the quality of those resources is improved and the speed of educational innovation increases. It is also argued that education is often provided at tax-payer’s expense and so it is right that these resources be made available to the public and there is prestige to be gained by an individual or institution seen to be giving their work away.

What could this vision of OERs mean for the cascade framework? Definitely some food for thought for the coming months as we revisit the pilot OER programme in more detail and engage in further conversations. 

Initial thoughts on the cascade support framework

In the midst of sorting out administrivia for the OERII cascade project, we are trying to wrap our heads around the concept of the cascade support framework - after all, this is one of the key tasks for the project and hopefully will be one of the project's lasting achievements. Below are some of our initial thoughts - and as always, feedback would be appreciated!

We started off by engaging with into the most current debates on Open Education and Open Educational Resources, brilliantly summarised in a talk by Brian Lamb who gave the keynote closing speechat the JISC Open Educational Resources International Symposium in July. One of the models that Lamb mentions is EduPunk - a new instructional style that is defiantly student-centred, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance, something definitely of interest especially if the OER phase II projects want to keep up their promises of involving students in the process of co-creating and reviewing OERs. Not to mention that one of the elements of our own cascade project involves engaging the students in the processes of curriculum design and reviewing the cascade support framework.

Thus, one of the questions we might want to ask in the context of the C-SAP project is ways in which the students understand and engage with (or don’t engage, if that’s the case) OERs. After all, in the US context open educational resources as a component of “DYI university” are often hailed as a remedy for students living in the age of “the education bubble”, who found themselves burdened by student loans debt or priced out of higher education altogether. When it comes to engaging our own students with OERs, where do we stand with regard to the current debates on employability and the economic value of a degree?  Not to mention the thousands of students who are going to miss out on higher education altogether this year? On top of that, what often gets forgotten in the debates on open education/OERs is that Open course material on the Internet may be free, but getting it there definitely isn’t, for instance, Yale has spent $30,000 to $40,000 for each course it puts online (the push towards OERs in the UK context wouldn’t be happening without the funding, either). Moreover, as with virtually all courses relying on OER material, students can get academic credit only if enrolled at an institution that deems to award it. How do we incorporate these concerns into our cascade support framework?

Welcome to this blog and the Open Cascade project

This blog will support the  C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics) project: Cascading Social Science Open Educational Resources.

The project will run from September 2010 until September 2011 as part of the wider Open Educational Resources Programme Phase II. It seeks to cascade support for embedding Open Educational Resources within the social sciences curriculum, focusing on the relationship between the use of OERs and student engagement. Within the project framework, C-SAP seeks to embrace an open curriculum where learners have the flexibility to select a range of individual units/courses to suit their personal needs for the development of expertise. Thus, through engagement with partners from both HEIs and HE in FE institutions, we will explore the ways in which OERs can be integrated sustainably into curriculum design processes in a manner which effectively engages the students.

We will use the blog to post updates on the project and communicate with the OER community, share our thoughts, resources and latest discoveries in the field of open education/learning technology. We see this space as a collaborative effort and welcome any feedback - watch this space for more contributions coming shortly!