If you have any questions about the project please contact the eLearning team at oer@bath.ac.uk.

To gain a better understanding of the experience of those involved in the project, participants who prepared materials for release were asked questions about working with OERs. A summary of feedback and lessons learnt from the OSTRICH project was then developed from the views expressed by participants and from themes and issues arising in conversations with other project stakeholders that took place during the life of the project.

Key points have been highlighted by the OSTRICH project that could guide ongoing OER work at the University of Bath in the future:

• There is interest in releasing a variety of learning materials as OERs; these range from ‘big’ OERs such as entire unit level resources, to a more granular approach of  ‘little’ OERs that are made up of smaller reusable chunks of material.
• Different motivations for engaging with the creation of OERs can be found; from personal beliefs about the openness of education and a culture of sharing, to opportunities for offering ‘taster’ or marketing materials for prospective students.
• Creation or conversion of materials for OER can potentially be time-consuming and resource heavy. Building open practices into existing processes and making the most of planned changes and reviews could make the process more sustainable. The Design for Openness process (based initially on the CORRE model from the OTTER project) was developed by the institution to demonstrate a possible integration of OER into learning design.
• Concerns about copyright and other intellectual property (IP) rights need to be addressed with adequate support and guidance.  In light of this, the project has created a variety of support resources in this area and has developed solutions to IP issues specific to OER at the University of Bath.

The OSTRICH project has left the institution well-placed for future OER developments. The OERs made available in the OSTRICH repository will offer examples of good practice for future contributors. With expressions of interest in releasing learning materials as OER continuing to be directed to the e-Learning Team, the support resources and processes developed during OSTRICH should prove to be valuable reference points for both the team and for individual content developers.

Questions for OER creators

Engaging with OERs
o    Why have you decided to release content as OER?
The process for creating and releasing OERs
o    Did you convert existing content, create new content or release both?
o    What did you find easy/straightforward about creating or converting your OER resources?
o    What challenges did you encounter?
Perceived impact of OSTRICH project
o    How has engaging with the OSTRICH project impacted on your OER practice?
o    Has there been a wider impact beyond the scope of the OER project?
o    Now you have released OERs, how do you envisage they will be used and by who?
Sustainability of OER production
o    Do you believe there are particular barriers or enablers to engaging with OER?
o    For further engagement with OERs, what support will be required?
o    Where do you see OERs fitting in with your learning and teaching practices in the future?

Project Stakeholders
o    OER team
o    e-Learning developers
o    e-Learning team and Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office
o    Academics and content creators
o    Senior management
o    Institutional Services (Legal, Library, Web)
o    Students

• 73 views for Exploring Self-Development
• 69 views for Information for Decision Making
• 68 views for Skills for Study website
• 60 views for Assessing Performance and Providing Feedback
• 46 views for The Law of Art and Antiquities
• 35 views for E-Marketing

For those that want to install a distributed repository for Open Educational Resources identical to that used by the OSTRICH project at http://ostrich.bath.ac.uk the files required to build a repository have been made available as an OER that includes the Drupal 7 codebase and database, in the form of a MySQL dump file.

The day’s focus on the ‘Changing World of Higher Education’ provided the perfect forum for introducing Open Educational Resources to a wider cross-section of the university community and for highlighting the OSTRICH project within the institution.

The workshop ‘OER: Opening up the World of Learning‘ gave participants an overview of the international, national and local OER communities. It offered the chance to search for and evaluate OERs, and highlighted the CORRE process and issues of quality in creating OERs. Participants then investigated the creation or conversion of their own open learning materials and concluded the session by reflecting on the benefits and challenges of engaging with OERs.

The workshop and all associated materials to support it have been made available as an Open Educational Resource in the OSTRICH repository at: go.bath.ac.uk/wd4h.

Participants with varying degrees of prior experience of working with OER took part in the session and some lively discussion gave great insight into attitudes and awareness. Colleagues involved in the OeRBITAL OER project shared their experiences with us and we were fortunate to be able to gain a wider international perspective from the active participation in the workshop by members of the Faculty of Science at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai who were visiting colleagues in our University’s Department of Biology and Biochemistry.

Once again, echoing themes from previous discussions with contributors to the OSTRICH project, concerns were expressed about Intellectual Property, the resource intensiveness of the process of converting existing materials, and the discoverability of appropriate quality resources. However, all participants were positive about the prospect of finding open materials that might aid their learning and teaching and were interested in sharing their own resources openly with other educators.

As part of the OSTRICH project the Division for Lifelong Learning is releasing a variety of Xerte materials created for units in a Chartered Management Institute programme of study.

• In an OER on Exploring Self-Development:
  • Start from where you are
  • Your SWOT analysis
• In an OER on Information for Decision Making:
  • Choosing an Issue
  • Information to Make Decisions

Rather than make available entire units of study, the Division for Lifelong Learning team have opted to release elements of the unit. These are in the form of individual Xerte learning objects that make up interactive self-directed learning within the course.

Links to materials that are viewable online are provided, whilst a zipped version of the Xerte toolkits file is made available for those end-users wanting to edit the content for their own learning and teaching context.

These OERs are released in conjunction with a unit overview and activity plan to give a pedagogical background that would allow their reuse in similar contexts. However, their granular nature and more generic subject matter could make them easily reusable and highly compatible ‘building blocks’ for other courses of study.

• Intellectual property rights and copyright issues
• What makes a reusable OER: an understanding of audience/end-user and of the use and reuse cycle
• The sustainability of the OER creation/conversion process

Many of these themes were echoed in discussions at last month’s dissemination event for UKOLN.  This talk with an invited audience and live stream online saw myself and Alex Lydiate (Educational Software and Systems Devloper in the e-Learning Team) explaining the context of the OSTRICH OER project, describing the build of the OSTRICH repository and highlighting the emergent themes at this mid-way point in the project.

The audience was a mix of information professionals, research staff and data managers. It made for some interesting discussions that mirrored many of the themes that have been raised both in the Synthesis and Evaluation stage of the pilot JISC programme and in recent conversations at programme level events for Phase Two.

The discoverability of resources was considered of great importance. It was useful to hear an end-user perspective on this in the form of Library Services staff who advise academic staff on locating suitable resources and struggling to find their way through the maze of available OERs.

This was followed by a debate about metadata; the need to get the balance right between adequate metadata to ensure discoverability of resources and the impact that providing this information has on staff time and their willingness to engage with OER.  This naturally led on to a technical discussion around the automation of metadata collection and options for the presentation of metadata to enhance discoverability of OERs.

It was really useful to engage with a wider OER audience in this way and the conversations we had will provide a valuable input into our evaluations of the project and the processes we’ve been developing recently.

The learning resource in question is the fifth element of a Moodle unit on Academic Writing and comprises an Exe learning object on ‘How to Avoid Plagiarism’. The learning resource has 21 pages of content that include text, images, and multiple-choice questions.  The main CORRE elements that impact on the conversion of these learning materials will be:

Content

Screening

* Media and Format - The learning resource is currently offered as an Exe learning object. The University has recently moved to working with Xerte for the creation of this type of resource and so it may be rebuilt in this format.  The author and other members of the original project team are also considering the release of the Xerte project file so that end users can make any institution-specific amendments that would be useful in their context.

* Structure and Layout – In places the content is difficult to read because of font size, spacing and background colour.  If the resource is rebuilt this is likely to be taken into consideration.

* Language, Learning Design – On revisiting the resource the original author has already found elements of the text that he would like to rewrite before release as an OER, such as simplifying the text in some places to make it more accessible to a wider range of students.

Openness

Rights Clearance

* Copyright – there are a limited number of third party images in the resource with no signposting to their origin.  It was decided that it would be best to replace these with CC images and guidance will be given on where these might be sourced.

Transformation – Decoupling

* Numbering of the pages/elements is currently related to the fact that this is the fifth module of a wider course (e.g. 5.1.1) and will need amending to reflect the learning resource as a standalone object (e.g. 1.1.1).

* Text that currently refers back to other elements of the Academic Writing Moodle unit will need amending

* At one point the resource opens the student’s Journal Activity for the Moodle unit as a live window for the student to record their reflections – this approach will need revisiting if the resource is to be offered outside Moodle.

* On each page there is a link back to a Glossary of Terms in the overarching Moodle unit – the author has suggested that the terms relevant only to this Academic Writing module could be reproduced within the learning resource on a separate page towards the end so that this can be linked to from each page instead.

Something that came out quite strongly from our discussions around preparing this resource for release as an OER is the impact that the process can have on future quality and a drive for redevelopment that this can set in motion for an author.  The ‘breathing space’ between its initial creation and this reassessment point can provide an author with a more objective impression of a resource’s strengths, and can more clearly highlight those elements that might benefit from a rewrite or new approach.

And from the module author’s perspective…

‘The original team look forward to receiving guidance in ‘repurposing’ a single module taken from a suite of six modules designed for a single institution where the user group is well known. We are ‘testing the waters’ by using a small, fairly self-contained module to see whether we might ultimately repurpose the whole suite in a more sophisticated form as an OER.

As a writing academic, a learning developer and a professional writer, my involvement in the project has already highlighted personal challenges. On the one hand, I embrace the scholarly tradition of ‘intellectual knowledge’ and the creation of a web (network) of sourced and credited knowledge that is the hallmark of a discipline. On the other hand, there are the practicalities of creating and sharing educational material to as wide an audience as possible.  I look forward to seeing how this dichotomy plays out in the weeks ahead.’

For those interested in the technical set up, our developer Alex Lydiate has blogged about the initial construction in Drupal 7 and the underlying data structure here.

We’ve been calling this a distributed repository since it’s designed to link out to OER resource files held elsewhere (see the blog post on the initial plan here), but we’ve since been given the name ‘referatory’ by John Robertson at JISC and that does a much better job of describing its functionality…

We’ve referred to the JISC OER Programme Phase 2 Technical Guidelines and the JorumOpen bulk upload deposit options while planning both the repository and the data to be collected for each OER.

The detail of this planning has been set out in the following document, and while this probably raises as many questions as it answers (some of which we still as a team have to answer!) it may be of help to others who are going through a similar planning process.

The 2-page paper ‘Open Educational Resources : Getting Started‘ is ideal for staff wanting to use or create OERs, or who would like to find out more about the OSTRICH OER project at the University of Bath.

The Xerte Training Day will revolve around creating  learning content using Xerte Online Toolkits, an easy to use browser-based tool developed by the University of Nottingham.

Previous experience of using Xerte is not required.

Download PDF of Xerte Day flyer

If you have any questions regarding the event please contact Julian Prior (j.prior2@bath.ac.uk) or Julia Taylor at the RSC-SW (juliataylor@rsc-south-west.ac.uk).

There are 50 places available at a cost of £40 per delegate and a booking form can be found here.