1. Open Educational Resources (OER) at UCT: Innovating Pedagogical Practices Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Michelle Willmers & Michael Paskevicius HELTASA Colloquium 6 October 2009

2. Who are we? OER UCT Project at the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT OER UCT Project Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, building on a previous research project, OpeningScholarship OER UCT aims to: – Audit potential OER at UCT – Create a directory listing the UCT collection of OER which will go live from February 2010 – Showcase the teaching of UCT academics – Share lessons learned through a case study

3. What is OER? Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials (usually digital) that are shared freely and openly for anyone to use and under some type of license to repurpose/ improve and redistribute. ShareUse Repurpose or improve Redistribute

10. Alternative Copyright Licensing A range of financial models Affordances of the Internet Change in philosophy SocialTechnical LegalFinancial What has enabled OER?

11. Change in philosophy The Open Source Software movement led the way in showcasing the value of openness and the ‘ architecture of participation ’ (O’Reilly 2003) OER is based on the philosophical view of ‘knowledge as a collective social product and the desirability of making it a social property’ (Prasad & Ambedkar cited in Downes 2007:1)

12. Affordances of the Internet OER is premised on the ‘simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge’ (Hewlett Foundation)

13. Alternative copyright licensing Previously copyright was binary: All rights retained or public domain Now alternative licensing options such as the GNU General Public License and Creative Commons provide a range of options where some rights are reserved Copyright © Public domain Copyright © Some rights reservedPublic domain

14. Creative Commons: making OER possible http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DKm96Ftfko

15. Degrees of openness

16. Financial models Donor funding – e.g. Hewlett Foundation Marketing budget – e.g. Open University Commission – e.g. MIT and Amazon Endowment – e.g. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Membership – e.g. Sakai Consortium Government – e.g. UK £7.8 million grant

17. Why now? Globally Institutionally Individually

18. Why now – globally? Advance knowledge by unlocking information for the benefit of all Provide open access to high-quality educational content to educators and learners Provide a model demonstrating the value of openness Provide an opportunity to display various perspectives – not only Northern/ Western perspectives Global

19. Why now – institutionally? Increase institutional visibility, advancing competitiveness, attracting students and resources Promote effective social responsiveness Improve learning experience by selecting materials in pedagogically sound and innovative ways Improve recruitment by helping the right students find the right programmes Enhance teaching coherence across courses Ensure better long-term archiving, curation and reuse of teaching materials Attract alumni as life-long learners Institutional

20. Why now – individually? Profile teaching as well as research Create record of teaching for teaching portfolio Foster connections between other colleagues, departments and even other universities (especially cross-disciplinary studies) Increase impact of teaching materials Extend use of teaching materials to high school learners and life-long learners Individual

21. Discussion Incentive Undermining potential publication for profit Quality assurance Attendance at lectures

22. Incentive Why would academics spend their time doing this? Giving away their intellectual capital freely? It is voluntary (even at MIT and OU) MIT provides additional help in learning design and copyright clearance Teaching grants would be ideal Demonstrates teaching ability and contribution to social responsiveness Keeping copyright on own materials and updating when necessary

23. Undermining potential publication for profit ‘Evidence that OCW publication in fact promotes the sale of related faculty publications, as it both widens the market for those publications, increases name recognition and demonstrates uses to which those publications might be put in the classroom.’ (MIT website)

24. Quality assurance Individual academic Institutional materials development and copyright clearance ‘team’ Other authorities (e.g. use of ‘lens’ strategy at Rice University) Use and ratings by users – post-publication review as it were

25. Attendance at lectures In the UK the Joint Information Steering Committee (JISC) manager of the OER pilot says: ‘Putting material online could potentially result in fewer students attending lectures. But I think higher education is starting to move towards the idea that it doesn't matter how the learning is facilitated; the important thing is whether it works for the student’ (Attwood 2009)

26. Conclusion ‘Today, a confluence of events is creating the perfect storm for significantly advancing education. With a growing inventory of openly available educational tools and resources, and with an increasingly engaged and connected community, transformative opportunities for education abound. The good news is that the emerging open education movement in higher education and beyond is beginning to change the way educators use, share, and improve educational resources and knowledge by making them open and freely available.’ (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008:2)

27. References Attwood, R (2009) Get it out in the open. Online: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408300 24 September http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408300 Downes S (2007) Models for sustainable open educational resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects 3: 29-44. Iiyoshi, T & Kumar, MSV (Eds) (2008) Opening Up Education: The collective advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. O’Reilly, T (2003) The Architecture of Participation. Available online: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3017 (Checked 4 October 2009) Yuan, L, MacNeill, S and Kraan W (2008). Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education. JISC CETIS. Available at http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/0/0b/OER_Briefing_Paper.pdf [Accessed 4 February 2009].

28. OER UCT Links Visit the OER UCT open Vula site (this presentation is listed there too) vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/openuct vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/openuct Read the OER UCT project blog blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct For information regarding related workshops and seminars www.cet.uct.ac.za/projects#OER www.cet.uct.ac.za/projects#OER

29. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/2.5/za/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.