What do academic libraries have to do with Open Educational Resources?

Theme: Long term sustainability of open education projects

Open Ed 2010 Barcelona, November 2-4 2010

R. John Robertson 

JISC CETIS, Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, University of Strathclyde

robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk

Outline

Introduction Context A role for libraries Survey results Reflections

2

JISC CETIS JISC CETIS is one of three JISC

Innovation Support Centres (ISC), supporting the sector through: participating in standards

bodies, providing community forums for

sharing experiences in using particular technologies and standards

providing specific support for JISC funded development programmes such as the UKOER programme.

Background and context: UKOER Programmes

The Open Educational Resources Programme is a collaboration between the JISC and the Higher Education Academy in the UK.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) provided an initial £5.7 million of funding, for a pilot programme (April 2009 to March 2010) and a subsequent £5 million of funding (August 2010- August 2011) for a follow-up programme both of which explore how to expand the open availability and use of free, high quality online educational resources.

Open Education, OERs, and ‘institutions’ - context Open education and OERs are not the

same thing; mostly I’ll be talking about issues around OERs

‘Institutions’ will play a vital role in Open Ed and OER .

If nothing else they provide jobs to people with expertise and experience who may be able to involved in Open Education

5

embedding, sustaining, and scaling

Project funding is nice but it doesn’t last So ‘what’s next?’ How do we embed, sustain, and scale? Wider discussion but questions around:

How do we make this part of what we do anyway? How can we be efficient? Who does this sort of thing already?

One answer is to consider Open Education Practices – eg OPAL (http://132.252.53.70/ ) and wider discussions

Another may be to consider the possible role of libraries and librarians (among others)

6

Academic Libraries: possible connections

OSS community often discussed as a model for Open Ed and OER release

What if we consider models around Open Access? like OSS there are some natural links, perhaps closer links given OSS community are developers and OA community are academics...

[there are lots of massive questions about the validity of either as a model, which we’ll elide]

In the context of my work on UKOER asking the question about the relevancy of OA led to considering the role of the library

7

Academic Libraries: Open Access role

In OA libraries are highly involved in: Advocacy Establishing permissions and managing IPR Running and supporting software required Providing services to faculty and students to

support OA and adding value Often, increasingly ties into institutional

research management and may contribute to raising research profile

8

Academic Libraries: relevant skills?

Metadata and resource description Information management and resource

dissemination Digital or Information literacy (finding and

evaluating OERs) Subject-based guides to finding resources Managing Intellectual Property Rights and

promoting appropriate open licensing

9

Academic Libraries: digital literacy – example

What do students need to know to find and use OERs? Find it Evaluate it Understand what they actual need Know how to engage with/use it in a way

that will help them

10

Academic Libraries: digital literacy – example part 2

Some of those skills and knowledge fit directly with ‘traditional’ information literacy courses which librarians often provide and it would be possible to easily include OERs as examples in those classes

Some of those skills and knowledge fit naturally with ‘traditional’ study skills providing by other units on campus

An opportunity for libraries to collaborate and embed

11

Academic Libraries: questions and pitfalls Libraries can be slow to adapt and support new

services or modify existing ones OERs are often ephemeral and require a lighter touch

and different forms of access than traditional research materials [a danger of cataloguing to death]

Managing OERs is like herding cats, can libraries afford the time and effort?

New skills may be required OERs require a degree of risk management , not just

risk avoidance – libraries are traditionally risk averse

12

Academic Libraries and OERs survey: audience and caveats Responses and incompletes Audience

survey of OER initiatives (not libraries as such)

but went out more widely Design of last question caused some

confusion in responses

13

Survey respondents: 36

14

About 52% librarians, all based in libraries

Academic Libraries and OERs survey

15

Academic Libraries and OERs survey

16

Academic Libraries and OERs survey

17

Academic Libraries and OERs survey

18

Academic Libraries and OERs survey Infancy on involvement More involvement in release than use. Spectrum of types of activity being carried out data here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AuN3UUVNPUJ1dEdkY0k0dU9kRG9PMHpLYTBsUGtoRnc&hl=en#gid=0

UKOER experience. 8 responses 50/50 but noticed institutional vs subject centre projects Too soon to tell which has thus far been sustainable, but...

Very positive comments, but need to consider more than libraries

19

What’s next?

Following up with expressions of interest in this work Thinking through a wider follow up survey of librarians Trying to identify more closely the challenges and

opportunities afforded by library involvement Identify other possible collaborations Ongoing support for UKOER phase 2

20

Further Information

http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/oers-and-libraries/ http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk//topic/oer http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Educational_Content_OER Belliston, C. Jeffrey. Open Educational Resources:

Creating the instruction commons C&RL News, May 2009 Vol. 70, No. 5 http://tinyurl.com/yhoezak