Project Identifier:
Version: 1
Contact: , ,
Date: 28 June 2012
The Higher Education Academy (HEA)/JISC Final Report
Project InformationProject Identifier / To be completed by HEA/JISC
Project Title / Sustainable Texts & Disciplinary Conversations
Project Hashtag / Twitter name is @SustextsOER
Start Date / January 2012 / End Date / July 2012
Lead Institution / UCL
Project Directors / Jane Hughes, Colleen McKenna, Ulrich Tiedau
Project Managers / Colleen McKenna, Jane Hughes
Contact email / ;
;
Partner Institutions / HEDERA (HE Development, Evaluation & Research LLP)
Project Web URL / http://sustainabletexts.wordpress.com
Programme Name / OMAC – Embedding Strand
Programme Manager / Sarah Cutforth
Document Information
Author(s) / Jane Hughes, Colleen McKenna, Ulrich Tiedau
Project Role(s) / Project Co-directors
Date / June 2012 / Filename / OER_PhaseThree_SustainableTexts_FinalReport.pdf
URL / http://sustainabletexts.wordpress.com/documents/
Access / This report is for general dissemination
Document History
Version / Date / Comments
1 / June 26 / Submitted to programme manager for feedback
2 / July 276 / Submitted to programme manager
3 / August 7th / Minor edits by project’s critical friend
4 / September 27th / Final version with edits accepted
Table of Contents
1 Acknowledgements 3
2 Project Summary 3
3 Main Body of Report 4
3.1 Project Outputs and Outcomes 4
3.2 How did you go about achieving your outputs / outcomes? 4
3.3 What did you learn? 6
3.4 Impact 7
4 Conclusions 7
5 Recommendations 8
6 Implications for the future 8
1 Acknowledgements
Sustainable Texts was funded by the HEA and JISC, in the OMAC strand of UKOER Phase 3. The project has been undertaken by UCL, as the lead institution, and HEDERA (HE Development, Evaluation & Research LLP). We would like to acknowledge the help of the UKOER support team and particularly the OMAC programme staff, David Mossley, Sarah Cutforth and Sarah Morrell. Many thanks also to:
· Our ‘critical friend’, Teresa Connolly from the Open University, for investigating eBook formats, arranging our attendance at an OU eBook event and for general support and encouragement;
· Members of our advisory network: particularly Holly Smith, Fiona Strawbridge;
· The academics who contributed to the Sustainable Texts eBook
· David Kernohan, for encouragement, ideas and support for promoting our eBook.
2 Project Summary
The project has two main strands:
· Collecting and sharing academics’ narratives about learning and teaching;
· Engagement with institutional policy surrounding open education.
Subject discipline is a key part of academic identity. Narratives are important in learning and professional development. Excellent student writing submitted for assessment should reach wider audiences. Sustainable Texts and Disciplinary Conversations is about all these things and, through working on them, has increased the reach of open practices and engaged with institutional policy makers.
Academics often find stories from their own disciplines helpful in developing their teaching. We have provided a collection of these in an eBook, including written and spoken stories about teaching, as well as materials relating to learning and academic practice.
The contributors wrote early drafts of the eBook texts as participants on a Postgraduate Certificate course, so this is their writing as students. Most had no previous OER experience. The project has, therefore, not only enabled them to publish openly about teaching and learning but also extended their experience of Open Educational Practices (OEP) and suggested a model they could follow with their own students.
Work on the eBook is helping us to develop a “toolkit” for embedding OEP in institutions. Other project outputs include the creation of a blog[1], delivering a webinar, presentations and numerous papers. We have followed up findings of our earlier UKOER project, CPD4HE[2], by researching the experiences of (the then) novice OER creators, reporting preliminary findings about them at conferences (Cambridge 2012, Eurocall SIG Workshop); publications arising from these presentations are forthcoming.
The project has connected with different strands of strategy and activity in a research intensive Higher Education institution. The UCL lead partner in our project team is the institutional Open Education Knowledge Transfer Champion and has engaged with senior policy-makers in relation to an OER repository project. The HEDERA partners have been associated with e-learning strategy development, interviewed academics and liaised with the editor of the teaching and learning website to raise the profile of Open Education.
3 Main Body of Report
3.1 Project Outputs and Outcomes
Output / Outcome Type(e.g. report, publication, software, knowledge built) / Brief Description and URLs (where applicable)
Dissemination / 1) Webinar: This event was held as part of the international Open Education Week (5-10March 2012, http://www.openeducationweek.org/) and attracted some 25open educators from around the world on the day: http://sustainabletexts.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/thoughts-emerging-from-webinar/. The recording is freely available via the project website.
2) Pursuing possible article in HE press (e.g. THES)
3) Plan for article on UCL Teaching and Learning portal and newsletter to coincide with eBook launch
4) Further possible dissemination at OER13 and by sending project information to the OER Knowledge Cloud via Athabasca, Canada, perhaps linking this to eBook launch.
Content / eBook: written and spoken narratives about academic practice. Provisional launch date November 13 2012.
Communication and networking / Blog and Twitter feed: http://sustainabletexts.wordpress.com/
Knowledge shared / Heightened awareness of Open Education and OER amongst academic staff. Many of the contributors to the eBook were unfamiliar with Open Education before working on this project.
Policy influence / Articulation of the significance of Open Education in institutional strategy document: This project ran alongside the drafting of an institutional 5-year strategy for e-Learning and we were able to have input into that process and to help foreground the relevance of Open Education to the strategy. At the time of reporting, there is an explicit item on the role of Open Educational Resources in the strategy. Project staff also had an input into scoping the development of an institutional OER repository, complementing the existing Open Access policy for research outputs.
Knowledge shared / Conference workshop at HEA/SEDA event (Birmingham, 20 July 2012)
Knowledge built and shared / Open Practices Embedding Toolkit: arising from reflection on what we learned from the project.
Marketing and dissemination material / Vodcast for HEA/SEDA event
EBook launch and webinar November 2012
Knowledge built and shared / Journal article – forthcoming. This article, which is exploring the impact of OER upon the academics who create them, is underway. We have carried out a pilot study and spoken about that at 2 conferences (see above) and we are now engaging in a bigger piece of research along with one of the members of our advisory network (Holly Smith) with a view to completing a text in the Autumn.
Dissemination and marketing: / eBook launch event. Online launch, planned for autumn 2012 in conjunction with an institutional launch at an autumn term ‘Open Education@UCL’ event.
3.2 How did you go about achieving your outputs / outcomes?
The partnership between UCL and HEDERA enabled us to make contact with a wide range of stakeholders and linked activities around the eBook (i.e. influencing OER practices) with those of the UCL Knowledge Transfer Champion for Open Education and the drafting of a new e-learning strategy (i.e. influencing policy).
We worked together to raise awareness of the project in the institution; we gave the project a presence on the OER@UCL website (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/oer), made contact with the editor of the UCL teaching and learning portal and hosted a webinar. We contacted possible eBook contributors, asking their permission to use their work and to interview them. We talked to the head of e-learning, the previous leader of the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching & Learning in HE (PGCLTHE) course, from which many of the eBook texts originated, and the Vice Provost responsible for teaching and learning. Ulrich Tiedau also liaised with the Head of Library Services with a view to developing an OER repository as an extension of UCL’s progressive Open Access policy for research outputs (‘UCL embraces open access with institution-wide mandate’, Times Higher Education 04June 11[3]). A scoping group, also involving representatives of other UCL-based UKOER projects, has been established.
We set up a blog (http://sustainabletexts.wordpress.com) and twitter account (@SustextsOER) which have been kept up-to-date. We attended a number of OER events to widen our network of contacts: webinars during Open Education Week (March 2012), the EUROCALL Workshop on Open Educational Practices (March 2012), the Cambridge joint OER/OCW 2012 international conference (April 2012), the ‘Educational Uses of eBooks and Mobile Learning eBook’ workshop at the Open University (June 2012), the SCORE ‘Learning from OER Research projects’ event (January 2012); the SCORE Sustaining OER Activity (March 2012); and the SCORE fellows showcase event (July 2012).
We made other helpful connections through:
· Our webinar in Open Education week. (Participants became our twitter followers and we subsequently made contact in other events, such as the SCORE events and OER/OCW 2012 – see above.)
· Developing materials for the University of Bath OMAC Disciplinary Thinking project;
· Including Sustainable Texts and other OMAC projects in our design of a survey of educational developers, funded by a SEDA research grant;
· Conference contacts: SEDA conference (Chester), HEA Conference (Manchester), HEA/SEDA event (Birmingham).
· Our critical friend, Teresa Connolly (Open University and the University of Cambridge).
At the moment of writing, we have collected texts and are working towards releasing the eBook. We were able to show the current version and discuss sample texts with participants at our workshop on July 20th 2012 (at the HEA/SEDA event). For maximum impact in the institution and beyond we do not want to launch in the summer when so many staff are away from their institutions, so we are planning a launch in November.
Our blog records some of the issues we have engaged with along the way, such as:
· Topics and ideas discussed in our launch webinar that included:
- alliance between Open Access research policies and OER
- aninterest in the disciplinary approach that this project is taking
- the potential for using eBooks as a model for student writing and publication and the extent to which this could be linked to assessment practices
· Extremely helpful discussions at the OER programme meeting held at the Royal Mint, with particularly useful input from Dr Simon Ball from JISC TechDis.
· An unexpected 100% positive response to our requests for contributions to the eBook from previous postgraduate certificate course participants.
· The technical nature of the eBook, with associated questions about the format and the tools for creating it. We thought about support for multimedia, openness, accessibility and flexibility. We received invaluable help in this area from our critical friend, Teresa Connolly, who not only investigated eBook approaches amongst her Open University colleagues but also arranged for us to attend a seminar on eBooks and iBooks at the OU. We were initially attracted to the iBook format and use of iAuthor to create the book. We decided, however, on ePub as the format because it is accessible on a wider range of platforms. We used software such as Pages, Kitabu, and Calibre to edit the materials. We are considering making some of the individual texts available in other formats as individual OER, to enhance usability.
· Licensing: We decided on Creative Commons attribution-only (CC-BY) licences. Our attitudes towards licensing have developed since we worked on the UKOER Phase 2 project, CPD4HE, and we are now comfortable with less restrictive licences.
· Discipline: We were lucky to be working with the University of Bath on the Disciplinary Thinking project. There has been an excellent cross-fertilisation of ideas because the two projects complement each other very well without overlapping. It also means we have some access to the dissemination routes for that project, which we can use to help publicise Sustainable Texts – e.g. the Disciplinary Thinking blog site (http://disciplinarythinking.wordpress.com/) and twitter feed, workshops (at SEDA and HEA conferences), JISCMail list, and the project team.
· Evaluation: the writing in the eBook has already been through an assessment process; the contributors have an opportunity to edit; we are including a question about the project in the SEDA survey; we shared and discussed eBook extracts with participants in our workshop at the HEA/SEDA conference on July 20. Members of our advisory network will provide formative feedback on the toolkit. We also received early and ongoing formative feedback about the project through our webinar, blogsite, and twitter.
· Research: We have been following up on tentative findings from the CPD4HE project, by exploring the impact of engagement with OER on OER novices. We reported this research at two conferences and found others with similar interests. One of the conference presentations has been developed for publication in ‘JIME’. We are in the early stages of extending this research into a national study of the impact of OER development upon authors of OER.
· The eBook narratives as oral history or a snapshot of 21st Century HE; their potential to interest an audience beyond the original target group.
· The Open Practices Embedding Toolkit arises from reflection on what we have learned from the project (see next section).
3.3 What did you learn?
We have learned:
· Where Open Education as both a concept and set of practices can be aligned with existing and developing institutional strategies (in order to increase the likelihood of successful adoption and implementation);
· What types of strategy documents might usefully be targeted to address OER (in this case the e-learning strategy);
· Who are the key people who might be able to effect change in relation to OERs within an institution. (e.g. Head of Library services, Head of E-learning, Vice-provost for Education, all of whom we spoke with about this project);
· How to find support in subject areas and programmes that have a potential interest in open education and digital disciplinary narratives (e.g. MA Digital Humanities and a new liberal arts type interdisciplinary BA/BSc Arts and Sciences programme, both at UCL);
· That academics from a range of disciplines are happy to engage in open publication;