OPEN EDUCATIONAL

RESOURCES

CASCADING KNOWLEDGE

Open Educational Resources The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) are collaborating in the context of UK-wide Open Educational Resources (OER) programme with the aim of enabling higher education institutions, consortia and individuals to share learning materials freely online. The programme explores cultural, technical and pedagogical issues involved in the development, discovery and use of Open Educational Resources (OER).

C-SAP’s on-going involvement in the UK OER programme is tied to our core mission to support teaching and learning within the discipline areas in the social sciences. We

are also keen to empower institutions and individual academics to improve the student learning experience by producing relevant resources, and coordinating a series of activities to help share and recognise effective practice. Through the OER projects we are also addressing national themes in teaching and learning, in particular student engagement, enhancement of learning through technology and curriculum design.

Evaluating the Practice of Opening up Resources for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences (April 2009-April 2010)

This project has adopted a critical social science perspective on the processes of sharing digital educational resources, as well as related challenges. The project team has endeavoured to explore ways of making educational resources more “open” and less reliant on tacit

pedagogic practice by using insights gained from the process of peer review and social science knowledge production. The project team has also developed a toolkit for capturing pedagogical decisions about release and sharing of modular teaching content. The toolkit allows you to create a snapshot of the curriculum, that is, map your teaching practice and put together strategies to aid reuse of the teaching resources. The project website includes a downloadable version of the mapping toolkit as well as the case studies compiled by our project partners, offering insights into their experiences of using open resources.

• Project website: www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/oer

• Project supporting wiki: https://csapoer.pbworks.com/

Cascading Social Science Open Educational Resources (August 2010-August 2011)This project 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. Our aim is to develop a better process of using OER to support curriculum development in the social sciences domain. It puts a particular emphasis on embracing a participatory pedagogy and aims to create a space for students to become involved in creating new course material as open teaching resources. For the most up-

to-date information about our progress, see our project blog http://csapopencascade.wordpress.com/

Discovering Collections of Social Science Open Educational Resources (August 2010-August 2011)

Here we are seeking to make open collections of social sciences research methods available by embracing Web 2.0 technology and OER-related, sustainable solutions. The rationale for the project stems from the recognition that there is a wide range of OER materials available to support social research methods. However, despite advances across the sector, academics and students often have problems

locating and accessing good quality, peer-reviewed resources appropriate for their particular needs. The project aims to examine which of the Web 2.0 technologies are best suited to support dissemination of research methods OERs. Our aim is to explore how staff (and students to some extent) discover, use, and potentially re-adapt online/digital materials

in their research methods teaching. For the most up-to-date information about our progress, see our project blog http://csapopencollections.wordpress.com/

Further information

All our resources (fact sheets, leaflets, presentations etc.) are freely available through

C-SAP slideshare account http://www.slideshare.net/csapsubjectcentre These resources include information on licensing and copyright, producing accessible open educational resources as well as reflexive activities aimed at members of staff, encouraging them to become involved in producing and re-using open educational resources.

If you would like any more information on C-SAP’s involvement in the OER programme, please contact C-SAP OER project officer, Anna Gruszczynska: a.gruszczynska@bham.ac.uk

Project partners talk about Open Educational Resources:

Developing a new module is always a tricky process, in that I find that you cannot always be sure what will work and what won’t. I am always really interested in finding out more about how others approach this, and learning different ways to make teaching and learning more successful. Consequently my motivations for getting involved in this project were premised on a need to partly to get time inside other people’s teaching practices (Pam Lowe, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University).

Maybe we could start viewing OERs more as a “sharing” rather than as a “taking” process. Another way of understanding the concept of repurposing is to think in terms of a shift from owned to borrowed

material, and we discussed the ways in which most teaching is actually borrowed as it builds on ideas from mentors, students etc. what we really mean by “re-purposing” is finding a new purpose’ for an open resource – thus “re-purposing” is the dynamic action that encapsulates this process (Phil Johnson, The School of Law, Justice & Community Studies, University Centre at Blackburn College).

In the context of my own teaching practice, I want to use openly accessible resources to encourage students to be “syllabus independent”, or, less grandly, to be able to find good quality materials in a convenient electronic form, to wean them away from their current inefficient search

strategies, which consists of typing key terms into Google and using whatever comes up (Dave Harris, University College Plymouth St Mark & St John).

Every time I confront myself about giving my work away and being used by others and disaggregated I find myself having to confront the fact I feel uneasy with some levels of sharing. Having said that, however, I am fairly comfortable, about sharing a lot of my work (…)Open access creates a new context for sharing, and our constructions of academic personhood, value, intellectual rights, struggle with adjusting to it, it is like an elephant trying to get through a needle hole. I think that to release and share

infuses teaching with new perspectives and it creates new pedagogical positions, not easy ones at first, but ones we should attempt to think about and respond to (Mª Àngels Trias i Valls, Institute of Contemporary European Studies, Regent’s College, London).

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