Kate Borthwick, University of Southampton

What HumBox did next: real stories of OERs in action from users of a teaching and learning repository for the humanities

Kate Borthwick, University of Southampton

Abstract (500w)

The HumBox is an online space for managing and sharing teaching and learning materials related to the humanities. Membership of the site is open to all and is entirely voluntary. It was created, as part of the HumBox project, with funding from phase one of the JISC OER programme and was kick-started by a collaboration of ten different UK HE institutions and 4 Higher Education Academy Subject Centres. Within the space of the project year (2009-2010), HumBox caught the imagination of many UK academics and by the end of the funding period it had a healthy 1100+ resources and 200+ users. It had become the hub of an active community of humanities professionals who were engaged in re-using and reviewing each other’s resources and making connections with each other through the HumBox system: it had become a teaching and learning repository that people actually used.

Once project activities and funding had ceased, HumBox was driven almost entirely by the activities of its registered and unregistered users, and it continued to grow steadily. The number of registered users has more than trebled since the launch of the site in February 2010 and resources continue to be contributed at a slow but steady rate (currently 1514). The site is viewed by an ever-increasing number of visitors from around the world and the community activities of depositing, re-using and reviewing others’ resources continues. HumBox remains persistently popular.

This paper will report the findings from a range of monitoring activities which sought to understand how the HumBox and its resources were being used, and whether such usage could indicate changes in teaching practice. Monitoring activities included web tracking, a survey and follow-up interviews conducted with HumBox users exploring motivations for using the site, the different ways that users were engaging with the site and for what purposes. It will summarise the answers given to illustrate why people have responded positively to HumBox and the notion of publishing their work openly, and describe the areas of community activity which have not been adopted as broadly as the original project team hoped (e.g. reviewing/commenting). It will give a selection of case study examples of both resource usage and user experience to illustrate the range and variety of approaches to OER which can be facilitated by one repository.

The paper will conclude by analysing how responses in user feedback indicate changes in teaching and academic practice and by reflecting on how these responses relate to aspects of the repository design to lead to HumBox’s continued success as an academic community repository.

Keywords

HumBox, humanities, OER, open practice, repository, teaching, learning

Introduction

The HumBox is an online space for managing and openly sharing teaching and learning materials related to the humanities. It contains materials primarily, but not exclusively, for study at Higher Education level. Membership of the site is open to all and is entirely voluntary. It was created, as part of the HumBox project, with funding from phase one of the JISC OER programme and is the result of a collaboration between four Higher Education Academy humanities Subject Centres (Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies; English; History, and Philosophy and Religious Studies) and a consortium of 10 partners in Humanities Departments, Schools and Research Centres in a range of UK HE institutions, as well as relevant Subject Associations.Within the space of the project year (2009-2010), HumBox caught the imagination of many UK academics and by the end of the funding period it housed a healthy 1100 resources and could claimmore than 200registered users. It had also become the hub of an active community of humanities professionals who were engaged in re-using and reviewing each other’s resources and making connections with each other through the HumBox system: it had become a teaching and learning repository that people actually used (Dickens et al, 2010).

Once project activities and funding ceased, HumBox continued to be managed by the LLAS Centre, and hosted and maintained by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Management of the site has been light-touch and has mostly consisted of responding to enquiries. Technical maintenance of the site has been ongoing but low-key and a limited number of technical enhancements have been implemented since the end of the project. However, the HumBox website and its community havecontinued to grow steadily and this growth is driven almost entirely by the activities of its registered and unregistered users. The number of registered users has more than trebled since the official launch of the site in February 2010 and resources continue to be contributed at a slow but steady rate (currently 1531). The site is viewed by an ever-increasing number of visitors from around the world and the community activities of depositing, re-using and reviewing others’ resources continues. HumBox remains quietly but persistently popular.

Method

Over the last year, the HumBox team has used a range of methods to monitor the HumBox in an attempt to understand who is using the site and its resources, and for what purposes.It was hoped that an analysis of usage data may shed light on how open educational resources are being used ‘in the wild’ amongst the humanities community, and whether engagement withopen educational resources through the HumBox had led to identifiable changes in teaching practice.

The methods used to monitor and assess usage of HumBox were:

• Monitoring of statistics inherent in the humbox.ac.uk website itself

• Tracking through GoogleAnalytics
• Data-mining ‘through the back door’ of HumBox.
• An online survey was distributed to all registered users of the HumBox, publicised through the HumBox project network and posted on the front page of the HumBox site. The survey had 55 respondents.
• Interviews with a small group of registered HumBox users. Telephone or face-to-face interviews were conducted with thirteen users who had deposited resources in the last year. Six of these were members of the original HumBox project group and seven were not.

Findings

Data from GoogleAnalytics (Table 1) and from HumBox shows that the number of registered users has more than trebled since the launch of the site in February, 2010 (+351). The majority of these new users have joined the site since the end of the JISC-funded HumBox project, which indicates ongoing, voluntary interest in the HumBox and implicit support of its aims and ethos.

The number of unique visitors to the site and pageviews of the site have increased considerably over the two years since the launch of the HumBox and average at 1642 per month and 8632 per month, respectively. Visitors come from a wide range of countries (152) and from a range of sources, mostly via Google or direct entry. The presence in the top ten (sources of visitors) of the search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the UK national repository, Jorum, indicate that HumBox and its resources are becoming easier to find and are being referred to in commonly-used websites.This indicates that the site continues to be popular and is reaching an ever-wider audience.

Table 1: Data on usage of HumBox (Googleanalytics and HumBox)

Totals from inception of site (Aug 2009*) to official launch of site, Feb 26th 2010 / Totals from launch of site (26 Feb, 2010) to Feb 28th, 2012
Registered users / 153 / 591
Number of ‘resources’ deposited** / 1005 / 1531
Unique views of the HumBox site / 64,662 / 207,187 (average 8632 per month)
Number of countries yielding visitors to HumBox / 131 / 152 (top five: UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Australia)
Number of unique visitors to site / 7867 / 39,403 (average: 1642 per month)
Source of visitors / Visitors came from 150 different sources or media (Google is 1st and direct entry 2nd). / Visitors came from 661 different sources or media (Google is 1st and direct entry 2nd)

* The HumBox site was put online and used for the HumBox project from approximately August 2009. The site was used during the project by participants, and was actively promoted. It was officially launched for open use on 26th February, 2010.

** A ‘resource’ in HumBox can consist of multiple files – so the number of resources deposited is not an accurate reflection of the number of actual files in the system which could be shared and re-used.

Recent deposits to the site were made by HumBox users of long-standing indicating a continuing interest and relationship with the site. There are also recent deposits from new users. There have been 526 resources added since the end of the official launch of the site. The total number of items in HumBox is actually far greater than the system cites – at approximately 3000. This figure differs from the number of cited resources, because some items may consist of several files, but under HumBox terminology, they would still be considered as one ‘resource’. 341 items have been created but never published ‘live’ to the world. It is not clear why users have chosen to do this, and this is an area which needs further investigation.

If Google and HumBox data is analysed over the time period from the launch of the HumBox site in February, 2010 to February 2012, it can be seen that certain resources have been particularly and persistently popular. Interviews with the creators of these resources suggest that the reason for their continuing popularity is that they are actively used in teaching, either by direct reference to the resource in HumBox, or referred to in class and then sought out by students working independently. Depositors made clear from an early stage in the creation and use of HumBox that it would be tool for publishing material for their students to use, particularly videoed material. [See below for case histories on selected resources].

Two resources stand out in terms of numbers of individual views and downloads: ‘American Pop Culture 3.2’ ( and ‘A History of Logic’ (formerly known as ‘The Logic Gallery’ (Borthwick, 2011). Both resources were deposited by a user living in the USA and they register consistently high views and downloads. The resource ‘A History of Logic’ proved wildly popular in the first few year of HumBox’s life, but downloads and views of this resource have recently declined. This may be due to a change in the way the creator of this resource presents his material in an attempt to realise commercial gain from it. [See below for the case history of this resource].

Findings: survey and interviews

An online survey was distributed to all registered users of the HumBox, publicised through the HumBox project network and posted on the front page of the HumBox site. The survey had 55 respondents (Borthwick et al, 2011). This small sample yielded interesting and positive results in regard to usage of OERs amongst the humanities community, although it should be noted that any respondent to such a survey is likely to be favourable to the HumBox and to the concept of open practice in general.

It was heartening to note that the most popular way that users have found out about HumBox was from ‘the recommendation of a colleague’ (30.9%). This indicates that knowledge of and ownership of the HumBox site is moving beyond the original core project group. Of those who have registered for an account, more than half (50.9%) have uploaded resources, which is a positive sign that users are attracted to the site, understand its ethos and feel encouraged to participate in an active way by sharing their teaching materials. Similarly, more than half of respondents (51.9%) indicated that they had downloaded and saved HumBox resources for their own use. This is a high number given that HumBox’s preview screen gives immediate accessibility to a resource without the need to download it. However, when asked if respondents had used any HumBox resources directly in their own teaching, the majority (78.2%) had not. This seems to indicate that users are discovering and downloading resources to keep for future use, development or interest rather than with a specific and immediate teaching purpose in mind.

Of those who responded that they had used HumBox resources directly in their own teaching, 50% noted that they had downloaded and edited the resource for their own context. It is this kind of activity that the OER movement hopes to encourage on a wider scale, but our survey data indicates that within the HumBox community, editing and repurposing is still at a fledgling stage. A small sample within the main group of respondents indicated that they have sent students directly to HumBox to look at resources in situ (20.7% in class, and 24.1% for independent study).

When questioned about the nature of the resources users were uploading to the HumBox, 43.9% of respondents indicated that their resources had been used previously with students (i.e. were ‘tried-and-tested’). However, a significant proportion of respondents (39%) indicated that such resources had neither been used, nor were intended to be used (in this academic year). This suggests that users may be sharing fresh, experimental materials or materials that have been created and not used, but would otherwise have been ‘locked away’ in their computer. This is a positive sign that perhaps HumBox users are embracing the ethos of the site, and are keen to share teaching and learning materials of all kinds, and also that users are engaging with the site as discipline professionals, intent to make an impact through the materials they have created either recently or in the past.

Reasons for using HumBox

The survey and interview asked respondents to indicate why they used HumBox and how they perceived its usefulness. A summary of responses is listed below:

• to see what other institutions and practitioners are doing
• to share practice on standard aspects of learning e.g. study skills
• can find useful resources to adapt for own students
• helps practitioners reflect on their own teaching
• a good way to get ideas to improve/enhance one’s own practice by seeing new/innovative ways of presenting material
• a good way of keeping up with developments in the discipline
• to store collections of related material and share it publicly (e.g. at conferences)
• good for early career researchers to demonstrate teaching experience and communicate research work: “my main purpose for using HB was self-promotion. I was in a research fellow position when I joined and wanted to move to a lectureship position. I saw HumBox as an opportunity to advertise my teaching (and research) and make examples […]available to potential employers.”- an interviewee
• opportunity to see things from the perspective of other humanities disciplines
• offers a more targeted search return for educational copyright-clear material than e.g. Google
• enablesteaching to have a public dimension both in terms of publishing teaching materials and engaging students in publishing their own work
• to contribute to open practice: “I like sharing and I don’t like things locked behind passwords” – an interviewee

Respondents noted a wide variety of examples of how HumBox resources had inspired or influenced their work, causing them to create new material, understand new methods or adapt their existing resources e.g:

“How to use online dialect resources, I would have found this difficult to do myself, [as I’m] not as technically advanced.”

“The Goethe podcast (such as resource 739)…a text in German, read by a German native speaker with a translation. After seeing this, I produced the same sort of exercise for French politics.”

“I have used a ppt on sociolinguistics as a springboard to design resources which are relevant to my students.”

“The recorded lectures of English History were very interesting and are making me think that I need to do the same. The resources with Articulate have also caught my attention as they look extremely professional and very suitable for dissemination to wider audiences. The Hull Fair collection has given me ideas for my work. Also, some of the simplest resources, for instance a set of questions for discussions in seminars or film analysis (English), or pictures of historic sites or symbols (French) helped me to reflect upon my own teaching and I have used more these strategies.”

Feedback such as this indicates that HumBox is being used in dynamic and interesting ways to support teaching practice, and that cross-disciplinary sharing is also taking place. Users clearly seem to find the site a generally rich source of ideas and resources.

Comments and reviewing

Tracking shows that the use of the ‘comments’ feature in HumBox continues to be underused, with no new comments put on resources in recent times. The use of this feature is still in infancyand although there are a considerable number (429) of comments in the system (Borthwick, 2010),they exist on only 341 resources, and such activity is largely confined to members of the original HumBox project team.