OER@UCT

  by  muramatsub 

Guest post by Glenda Cox

During the first week of May I was fortunate enough to attend the annual Open Courseware Consortium Global conference in Hanoi, Vietnam. UCT is currently a member of the OCW Consortium which includes Open education resources from over 200 universities.  The terms Open Courseware and Open Education resources are both used in this community but we tend to use Open Education Resources (OER).

From around August this year I will be responsible for the UCT OpenContent Directory.  I am currently being eased into this role and learning from the current OER team. I went to Vietnam to find out what the current issues are in the OCW community, to get up to speed with what is happening in OCW around the world and to find out what the benefits are for UCT to be a member of the Consortium.

Just over 200 delegates attended the event from 20 different countries. From the beginning there was a relaxed feeling of community and sharing and the type of openness one would expect from academics who believe passionately that courseware or educational resources should be shared freely and re-used to the benefit of the user. While the bustling, magical city of Hanoi scooter hooted through the warm and muggy week the conference venue allowed us a peaceful and comfortable venue where there were many useful presentations and conversations.

The conference covered the areas of Sustaining OCW, Using OCW and Building OCW.  I went to a range of presentations and I will highlight a few key aspects.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the founding organizing of the Consortium.  They began putting courses online from 2002. The number of courses in their directory increases at around 200 per annum and is currently at approximately 2000 courses.  This vast scale is not comparable to where UCT is or even where we will be in 8 years time. However MIT sets an example worth watch to see what they have achieved and how they can sustain themselves into the future.

MIT’s suggestions for sustainability are: to use some of the OCW as certified distance courses (a subset was the term used) but this needs to be done carefully as it obviously goes against the principle of OER. Secondly, they are trying to find a clever, subtle way of doing some advertising.  The caution here is that this goes against various academic principles and there will need to be a clever balance if this is to work. Thirdly they plan to add interactive tools that have not been part of their directory to date. And lastly they will continue to work on attracting corporate gifts and donor support. They plan to keep arguing “value added” to the MIT board and therefore it is key to continue the high traffic rates (Millions of visits per annum). The biggest challenge: how to develop revenue and continue to have faculty support.

The Open University (distance learning institution) in the UK is built around the concept of open access to all whether you have the qualifications or not and as Andy Lane indicated in his presentation it was a natural fit to make materials Open.  Open Learn is the name of their directory. The Open University focuses on bridging the formal and informal learning space. Content is the hook and learners can mix and match and work at their own pace. Learners can look at resources and decide what they want to do and find out more about what the options are and how difficult the material is.  The OU are finding the lower socio economic classes are also looking for materials online and Andy Lane presented some interesting case studies illustrating this use.

In terms of sustainability the Open University do sell some of their materials to other universities, they make sure that OER are embedded into day to day business and that they have good arguments around how the open resources add value in terms of research and development.

Gary Matkin from the University of California, Irvine suggested (with conviction) that in 5 years every university will have Open courseware. His take away message was that OCW will be essential to marketing your university both locally and internationally. This global presence will entice students to students to register.

There were two presentations around research into staff attitudes and clearly this is an area where we need more research. The first was by Joseph Hardin of the University of Michigan. He ran a survey in 2009 and 2010 with a significant sample of over 1000 staff and graduate teaching assistants. The emphasis in the survey was on ‘contribution’ and not user studies.  So the questions were around: Have you heard of OER? Would you contribute to OER? He divided the participants into four groups: graduate students, tenure academics (research focused), clinical faculty and lecturers (judged on teaching). 50% over the two surveys had never heard of OER.  Professor Hardin also feels at this point in Michigan’s OER journey that word of mouth is still key as is the role of Heads of Departments in supporting faculty in making their materials opens.

Andy Beggan from the University of Nottingham also presented on staff attitudes. He ran a survey earlier this year with 6% staff rate and also conducted focus groups with 20 academics across faculties and levels. He found three key drivers

1. strategic drivers eg. social responsibility
2. promotional opportunities
3. cost efficiency

During the focus groups found that social responsibility is a key strategic driver. Nottingham work with OER Africa and have created OER shopping list to support African HEI’s (specifically in Ghana). The benefits for staff included that they were sharing best practice and not really using other people’s materials. In terms of discoverability they have found (as have we) that being part of consortia like EDU commons and OCWC has been essential. His closing remarks was that whatever you do their experience shows that if the technology for accessing materials is easy to use and the materials on a usable and recognizable format then staff are more inclined to use the resources.

And lastly Sir Malcolm Read the Executive Secretary of JISC in the United Kingdom presented the final plenary session of the conference. He talked about the UK experience but also shared his global experience about OER.

His challenge to the OCW community was that they need to embrace the bigger open agenda and that OER must be used across all educational sectors. He outlined how Open Source software had set the stage in that it had set the ethos for the platform for openness, standards have allowed some measure of interoperability and that access was becoming less of an issue. The access he was referring to was accessing content using the example that academics can no longer make the argument that no one will understand my paper or what I am doing as if you have a degree in the subject you will be able to understand.

His vision is that open science and innovation is right around the corner and this will change the way science and innovation has traditionally been performed.

He feels that all can benefit from the ‘taste of higher education that OER provides…if you don’t have a web presence you do not have a presence”. So in the UK they are developing an OER information tool kit for all universities to use. Low throughput rates are often related to the students simply not being aware of what academic study involves.

He highlighted two new challenges:

1. Discovery and use of OER, he feels the library also has a key role here
   
2. Impact of OER on learning process and student experiences

The conference made me realize that Open Education Resources are essential not a nice to have if UCT is to be part of this powerful movement. Our Open Content site can be used to showcase our university and attract students not only in South Africa but also across Africa and across the world.