CC-BY 4.0 Bea de los Arcos Beck Pitt CC-BY

OpenEd14: Achieving the

Potential of Open

Creativity with Control:

Improving the quality of open

education research through a

blended project management

environment

Gary Elliott-Cirigottis

Claire Walker

How do you create the right project

environment to

• accommodate the CREATIVITY

required to discover brilliance

But

• also provide the CONTROL that

delivers what was requested?

Our Hypotheses Keyword Hypothesis

Performance OER improve student performance/satisfaction

Openness People use OER differently from other online materials

Access OER widen participation in education

Retention OER can help at-risk learners to finish their studies

Reflection OER use leads educators to reflect on their practice

Finance OER adoption brings financial benefits for students/institutions

Indicators Informal learners use a variety of indicators when selecting OER

Support Informal learners develop their own forms of study support

Transition OER support informal learners in moving to formal study

Policy OER use encourages institutions to change their policies

Assessment Informal assessments motivate learners using OER

Traditional waterfall/planned approach

– assumes events are predictable and

activities well-understood, follows

sequential flow, phases once complete

won’t be re-visited.

This is research – you don’t know what

you’re going to find

Project Management Challenge 1

Project Co-PILOT

• Distributed collaboration model

• Researchers assigned to specific

sector and collaborations

• This nature of model had risk of

lack of PM oversight of what project

was delivering.

Project Management Challenge 2

OER Impact Map

http://oermap.org

• Need for all researchers to work

together to produce some of the

project products and deliverables

Project Management Challenge 3

• Risk of project having multiple

perspectives and voices rather than

one voice for some of the

overarching deliverables

• Global Research Remit

Project Management Challenge 4

• Size, scope and open approach

means possibility of researchers

following tangential ideas putting

coherence of research at risk

Blended

Methodology

Traditional

Project ManagementAgile Principles

Gary

Ellio

tt-Cirig

ottis

CC

-BY

Gary

Ellio

tt-Cirig

ottis

CC

-BY

So what's Agile?Agile = iterative, incremental

approach, learning from each

cycle, dynamically adjusts to

changing requirements.

4 Principles of agile (Beck et al, 2001):

1. individuals and interactions over process

and tools

2. working software over comprehensive

documentation

3. customer collaboration over contract

negotiation

4. responding to change over following a plan

Product Backlog

As prioritized by Product Owner

Sprint Backlog

Daily Scrum

Meeting 24 Hours

30 days

Product Increment

Backlog

tasks

Agile Scrum & Sprint Cycle

Sprint Cycle

Claire Walker CC-BY

Claire Walker CC-BY

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4Initiation Project Close

Traditional Project Management Methodology

Stage 1

So what did we learn?

• We need the foundation of the

traditional method

• Easier to change focus in agile

• We delivered better quality via blended

• Clearer perception of project status in

agile

Questions?

Thank you for Listening!

http://oerresearchhub.org

http://oermap.org

Twitter: @OER_Hub

in service of The Open University

in service of The Open University