On Monday I was at Our Dynamic Earth, by the Holyrood Parliament in Edinburgh, for a day meeting on the Promise of Open Education. This was the final event of the Open Educational Practices in Scotland project (OEPS), which (according to the evaluation report):
involved five universities in leading a project based in the Open University in Scotland. Its aims were to facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland, and to enhance capacity for developing publicly available online materials across the tertiary education sector in Scotland. The project particularly focused on fostering the use of open educational practices to build capacity and promote widening participation.
There have always been questions about this project, notably the funnelling of money to the OU without any sign of an open bidding process, but at least it was there. With the OEPS finishing, two things caught my attention: how do we get political support for open education, and what open educational practice is current in Scotland. To paraphrase Orwell: if there is hope, it lies in the grass roots [hmm, that didn’t end well for Winston].
Open Education in Policy
Good places to start looking for current practice at both policy and operational levels are the ALT-Scotland SIG and Scottish Open Education Declaration. There are strong links between the two: key members of ALT-Scotland (notably Lorna M Campbell and Joe Wilson) are involved in developing and promoting Scottish Open Education Declaration; and OEPS also supported some of this work. The Scottish Open Education Declaration and ALT-Scotland have been successful in supporting policy in Scottish HE around open education, and beyond, but it would be nice if this success were recognised and supported from outside of the Open Education community.
It’s disappointing that there’s been no substantive engagement with this from Scot Gov, how do we get this up the agenda? #beOpen https://t.co/sbbAiF4FNE
— Natalie Lafferty (@nlafferty) September 11, 2017
It seems you only get recognised at a political level if you claim to be able solve big problems: local and global inequalities, widening educational participation. Anyone who says Open Education will solve these inequalities is a charlatan, anyone who believes them is gullible. As Pete Cannell of OEPS said, open as in licensing content is not the whole answer (to widening participation) but it is important part of answer.
Open Education in Practice
More hopefully, there is a lot happening at grass roots level that is easy to overlook. Edinburgh University are leading the way, with central support and a vision. As I saw, they are producing some fine OERs created by student interns.
.@EdinburghUni open content intern Tomas Sanders showcasing his work to @philbarker #BeOpen #oer pic.twitter.com/vra1o8a7uP
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) September 11, 2017
A similar model for production is being used in my old workplace of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, but with less by way of strategic support. A small team of content interns, working under Lisa Scott, have been using open tools (WordPress, H5P, Lumen5) to create learning resources for the new Graduate Level Apprenticeship programme in Software Development. The actual course is closed, delivered in BlackBoard, but the resources are openly licensed and available to all (this not only allows the team to use CC:SA resources in their creation but saves the hassle of setting up access management to the collection).
Like Edinburgh, Glasgow Caledonian University has a policy for OER and a repository replete with resources, but the examples I found seemed locked for local use only. That’s not a criticism (and I may just have been unlucky in what I tried to view) because the important thing is that here is an example of open supporting the work of one of our Universities.
In Dundee, Natalie Lafferty runs a student selected component of the medical course on The Doctor as Digital Teacher for which students create a learning resource. Here’s an example of an iBook created by one student using original and openly licensed resources, and an account of its creation.
Fran Ranaldi: #OER ‘not a high level piece of research that actually practitioners didnt know how to use’ #BeOpen
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) September 11, 2017
(@philbarker)
There are probably other examples from Scottish F&HE that I don’t know or have forgotten (sorry about that–but do use the comment box below to remedy this), but one of the key messages from the Promise of Open Education meeting was that Open Educational Practice is not just about Universities giving access to resources they create, valuable as that is. There were great examples presented at the conference of OEPS working with Dyslexia Uk and Education Scotland, and working with Parkinson’s UK. And in the final discussion Lorna Campbell did a great job of highlighting the variety of open educational practice in Scotland, from Scotland’s three Wikimedians in residence and networks such as Girl Geek Scotland. And that really is just the tip of the iceberg.
.@lirazelf is WiR at @SLIC1991 and Susan Ross is Gaelic WiR at @natlibscot, and of course @emcandre at @EdinburghUni
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) September 11, 2017
The end?
So, in conclusion, this was not the end of open educational practices in Scotland. The future lies not just in continuing the legacy of one project, but in the ongoing efforts of a great diversity of effort. But you know what, it would be really nice if those efforts got the recognition and support from national policy makers.
[Acknowledgement: the feature image for this post, which you may see in Tweets etc, is the conference pack for OEPS Promise of Open Education. Courtesy of OEPS project.]
The post The end of Open Educational Practices in Scotland appeared first on Sharing and learning.