Breaking down barriers - Greenwich APT Conference July 2014

Regulatory

• No policy
• Lack of senior-level buy in
• Content ownership issues

Engagement

Benefits of OEP

• Unaware of benefits
• Barriers

Regulatory

• Widening access
• Building communities of practice
• Time saving
• Innovation

Policy should:

- legitimise practice

- be clear, knowable, and public

- contribute to awareness and mainstreaming

“The basic policy position... can be summed up very easily: A free license like CC BY or CC BY-SA... should be adopted for all publicly funded educational content." (EOEPP, 2013)

Defining OEP

• Employment of 'openness'
• Reuse/revision/collaboration
• Transparency

Open Education

“...the new wave of policy and advocacy initiatives focus on transparency enabled by the adoption of open educational practices." (Alevizou, 2012)

Openness

Increasingly important, but why?

• Encompasses many activities
• Continuous, rather than binary

Skills

• Use/reuse
• Development
• Licensing
• Social/collaborative technologies

Anne, Countess of Chesterfield, Blogging, after Thomas Gainesborough. Mike Licht, 2008. CC BY 2.0. https://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/2560551726

Skills

• Staff development
• Signpost supporting communities
• OEP embedded in teaching qualifications

"The unit aims to explore definitions of what Open Education might mean and the implications of moving towards open online social spaces for learning... to explore existing and create new OERs that stem from participants’ own teaching practice and may include learning content and software tools that can be freely and openly shared on the web using a Creative Commons Licence."

- http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/open-practice-unit-ual

Technical

“Encourage the development of user-friendly tools to locate and retrieve OER that are specific and relevant to particular needs. “ (UNESCO, 2012)

• Poor design
• Unintuitive
• Access issues

Technical

Repositories of OER around the world

Repositories must improve potential to SEARCH, SHARE, REUSE, COLLABORATE

Cultural

• Identify cultural issues
• Work to effect change

Cultural

TESS India UP M&E Workshop and Gurariya Haweli 2 20 Sept 2013 - Dev Testing, via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The invisible barrier: time?

• Lack of understanding of benefits
• Lack of peer support
• No reward
• Cultural differences

Eternal clock, Robbert van der Steeg. CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AEternal_clock.jpg