[Open-education] Is there still an OER movement?

Fri Aug 22 12:49:39 UTC 2014

Hi all, and many thanks for mentioning Leicester City Council's open education/OER work. I very much enjoyed the post about the schools situation in Germany - there are many similarities with schools in the UK. 

The work here forms part of a broader approach to the use of technology in schools, and school staff digital literacy. I won't go into that much here apart from to say that it's been a project requirement that all schools working with us release their resources and outputs under a Creative Commons licence. 

As part of the project, we've surveyed school staff to find out how they are using technology to supporting learning and learners, and identify strengths and gaps across the city and at the level of individual schools. On the whole the results have been really positive, however, the research clearly identifies the gap discussed in Zetana's post - with the majority of school staff not having any explicit familiarity with a range of approaches and practices, in particular open education, open licensing, and Creative Commons. I'd also say that this unfamiliarity is in the context of a workforce that is by and large quietly anxious around copyright. 

Open practice should be mainstream in terms of publically funded organisations and public sector information and resources, but that isn't going to happen unless people working in those organisations have some level of confidence around what an open licence actually is, and in the schools sector, what an OER is. There is a big divide between the marvelous conversations taking place at open knowledge events, and copyright policy, knowledge and practice within the schools sector. 

In order to begin to address this in schools here, we've been introducing open licensing in a limited way through through our staff development project licencing requirement, and earlier this year I commissioned Bjoern and his team to deliver introductory guidance for school staff, focusing on the practical aspects of finding, using, creating and sharing OER. 

In order to move beyond this initial awareness raising, policy issues around of permissions and IP rights have to be tackled. For the vast majority of schools in the city, Leicester City Council is the employer and as such, the IP rights holder of work created by school staff in the line of employment. So I'm currently also taking forward proposals internally to provide school staff with the ability to openly licence educational resources. It's currently in committee at the moment. 

Both these pieces of work should be out in the open by October. 

Best, Josie 

On Friday, 22 August 2014, 12:25, Marieke Guy <marieke.guy at okfn.org> wrote:

> It feels that there's is a big disconnection between innovative / trendy areas of open education and the coal-face work of outreach and implementation. I guess that's the conclusion of the article above. I'd be interested to know more about projects working to address this. 

Yes!

This is something I've been talking about off-list - trying to
    engage teachers - or basically meet teachers in the spaces where
    they are working. See this post on why teachers aren't using OER in
    Germany: http://education.okfn.org/open-education-germany/

There is an initiative in the UK that is doing this:
http://lccdigilit.our.dmu.ac.uk/2014/05/12/understanding-open-educational-resources-information-for-schools/
The plan is to educate teachers so they can use OER more
    effectively. Bjorn who works on the project was involved with http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT and http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OER4Schools

Marieke

This is something On 22/08/2014 10:52, Mick FM wrote: 

>
>On 22/08/14 09:44, Marieke Guy wrote:
>
>
>>
>>One talk I attended at OER14 was about how OER is moving away from something academia does to something that is led by practioners. The talk was called When two worlds don’t collide: the marginalisation of open educational practices outside academia and used the example of OERs created about autism by autism experts and doctors (not academics).  Again maybe this isn't a movement, but it could make for a sustainable model.
>>
>>I suppose there is a question to be asked about whether there
          needs to actually be a movement as such or whether OER work is
          about something more practical - getting appropriate, open
          licensed resources to those who need them. So do we need a
          community of practice rather than a movement?
>That's a good article!
>
>It does feel like all the research does suggest that it's time for
      OER to get real and become an embedded tool for communities of
      practice. 
>
>So has the research end of OER movement achieved it's aims? If so,
      it's still seems like there is a big gap between the theory and
      the practice 
>
>For example, at Wednesday's session for Duct Tape Uni in the
      evaluation at the end of the day, one of the community media
      trainers who was very experienced, shared that one of his
      take-aways from the session was that he was happy to have learned
      about OER and that there were searchable repositories available.
      This was news to him. 
>
>It feels that there's is a big disconnection between innovative /
      trendy areas of open education and the coal-face work of outreach
      and implementation. I guess that's the conclusion of the article
      above. I'd be interested to know more about projects working to
      address this. 
>
>So another question for you guys.
>
>Are edu-punk innovators who jump the OER ship to move on to new
      territories before finishing the job helping or harming open
      education? 
>
>nice one, 
>Mick
>
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-- 

Marieke Guy
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