Lamb’s argument was that when so many experts have failed to stop financial crashes and other disasters, only transparency and collaboration can bring together the knowledge we may already have, so it can be used to improve society. One of the keys to that is OER, as are open web standards, such as wikis and RSS feeds, as well as open source projects such as WordPress. To support his argument, Lamb provided numerous examples of how collaborative technologies have created knowledge and expanded OER.

Unfortunately, he said, open web standards are losing traction in certain areas such as the mobile space. Together with the ‘increasing criminalisation around IPR’ and the erosion of the net neutrality, this trend could inhibit the power of the internet.

So as a message to take away with them when they left, he challenged the audience to become advocates of open standards, particularly OER.

‘If we really believe the internet is transforming how we acquire and disseminate knowledge – and that it may even been affecting the way the brain is wired – don’t we in higher education who have a traditional mandate as guardians of knowledge need to lead this?’

Following a symposium that had showed the power of OER, the way it can be implemented and used in practice, and its many benefits, we can only hope that many of the audience will go on to do just that.

The infoKit tag cloud

JISC infoNet is designed to promote good practice through the dissemination of ‘infoKits’. After an analysis of OER practices and adoption in the UK that ended in April, infoNet launched the OER infoKit in June. It provides guidance not just for getting OER adopted and some of the myths about OER that need to be overcome, but on how to manage  OER processes.

Users can navigate around the infoKit using the sidebar, a search engine or the infoKit tag cloud. As well as an overview of OER, the kit is broken down into separate areas for management, learning and teaching, technical issues, the legal aspects of OER and the various HE Academy and JISC OER programmes. Since the kit is also a wiki, users can leave comments if they feel that an area needs improvement of further information.

Belshaw says the idea is to ensure that OER isn’t something that’s ‘done for a year then abandoned’. With the infoKit growing almost every day, finding information on OER implementation shouldn’t ever be a problem.

Google, repositories, iTunesU, feeds, aggregators…There are numerous ways to find OER online. How about the ‘phone a friend’ option? It’s surprisingly popular, revealed John Robertson of JISC CETIS. When it comes to it, many people simply ask someone when they want to find something out, whether by picking up the phone, popping down the corridor, or putting a request on Twitter, on Facebook, by email, on an email list, or through a blog. It has its advantages: it’s personal; builds community; supplies recommended resources; is usually quick, and it’s easy to refine the search (you ask another question). But it’s also difficult to scale, can become annoying – in which case you may just get ignored – it can be erratic and it’s also a ‘closed’ search – only as good as the people you know.

That’s why people like Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons Global are trying to make it easier to find out, through an online search, if a resource is open. Creative Commons’ new prototype of a search for OER, DiscoverEd, takes a curation approach. Curators are asked to identify educational resources and, optionally, add metadata. The search includes information about who has labelled the material as OER so it will be possible to limit queries to specific curators. “Education is test domain but the tool is generally useful,” said Yergler.

Exposure to search engines has been high on the agenda of Jorum, the free online service that provides access to learning and teaching resources contributed by staff on UK universities and colleges. Jorum was involved in the pilot phase of the OER programme. Resources had to be deposited or represented in Jorum in some way (a web link to a resource, for example) and tagged as #UKOER.

As part of its involvement in the programme, Jorum built a new system – JorumOpen – reduced metatdata profile, introduced bulk deposit methods, exposing content to search engines such as google, and developed a content package preview. With Jorum lined up to support the next round of OER projects, future plans include new licensing options, a search widget and a new visual identity.

While Jorum had a deliberately relaxed policy towards around the technical demands and guidelines they imposed on the UK OER programme – “we just wanted to get the stuff out there, to turn on the tap and see what would happen,” explained Lorna Campbell from CETIS – the organisation did give a strong steer to using web 2.0 technologies and making use of RSS capabilities.

Lisa Rogers of CETIS, who was involved in two UK OER phase one projects and additional OER technical work agrees that making OER discoverable through RSS and APIs is a “viable solution for building smaller collections”.

She used the Flickr API to upload pictures, used RSS feeds to bulk upload resource descriptions and links to Jorum and explored using Yahoo Pipes. Her table of usage results was impressive: the 128 videos uploaded to YouTube garnered 17,417 views, and the 860 images on Flickr received 25,940 views.

From international organisations such as Creative Commons to individual OER projects within UK institutions, it’s clear that real imagination is going into efforts to make open content more discoverable. And who knows – perhaps for many people the result of these efforts will mean that taking the ‘phone a friend’ option will no longer be the final answer…

Joss Winn from Lincoln University kicked off. He led the individual strand project Chemistry FM, which delivered a 30-credit course on introductory chemistry for forensic science.

His take on sustainability was couched in the language of Marxist critical theory and was far removed from the ‘business model’ approach often associated with discussions about sustainable resources.

“Nothing is sustainable in our world at the moment – why should OER be sustainable?” said Winn. “I do truly believe this and so sustainability in my view is not about money but about the way we wish to love, live, eat, work, play and learn – it’s about what we want in our world.”

For Winn, OER is part of the struggle against traditional forms of private property and the movement represents a radical change away from what universities are right now. Open Education is “in, against, beyond” the university and, at Lincoln, is pegged to three fundamental propositions: ‘student as producer’ – about collaborative relations between student and teacher and research-engaged teaching; ‘mass intellectuality’ – the university as a social form; and ‘pedagogy of excess’ – students not just performing their role as students but also making links between wider issues in society.

According to Winn, if the ChemistryFM project is to be sustainable within Lincoln then it has to work within these themes.

In contrast, for Simon Thomson from Leeds Metropolitan University, “sustainability means that you need to be adaptable. Our approach was about that.”

Thomson was representing the Unicycle OER project that tried to implement an OER strategy within the institution in the space of one year, and explained that his team sought to make the strategy sustainable from the outset by embedding it as part of processes the institution already had. Although the project set up a Central OER Support Unit, the two people in that team focused their energies on building up links with other people in the institution such as the copyright clearance office and the repository development team.

“Think about what your institution already has and how you can engage with them, and then use that mechanism to push out to other areas of the university,” advised Thomson.

Key to the plan were the faculty coordinator roles – senior lecturers in each department who were entrusted with long term tasks: to manage content locally; oversee quality; cascade IPR advice and support; coordinate events and workshops; raise awareness; submit content to repository; liaise with the central OER team; feedback on progress; and share good practice.

By working with all the faculties and teaching them how to manage quality control and submit resources to the repository, the OER project was putting in place a structure that would enable the work to continue even after the Central OER Support Unit was wound down.

“It was not about creating anything new but just bringing a new subject to all these places in the institution,” explained Thomson. “Communities of interest are great, especially for profile and awareness-raising but you need more than just enthusiastic individuals because communities of interest can die out. You need some underlying strategy within the institution to keep it going.”

Adam Mannis, from the Materials Subject Centre, agreed that a focus on sustainability from the outset is important, but, as his was a subject-based OER project (CORE-Materials), a community of interest was crucial. The project had 20 partners including higher education bodies, industrial agencies, and international partners and they found that the promotion of CORE-Materials through the national subject centre, UKCME, was one way to get the active people involved and raise awareness and get them to be the future contributors.

Mannis highlighted the benefits of web 2.0 tools for their “added value dimension” and also their greater functionality and marketing potential. “Move beyond the mindset of the project,” he urged. “Once the resources are up and running, the project website shouldn’t be the original website with all the project documentation up front. Instead, get into marketing mode and show what your audience what they are there for – the resources. Make a gallery in Flickr, put animations on YouTube, make portability a subset of openness.”

Mannis told the story of a colleague in Swansea who had released some of his animations as OER on web 2.0 sites and then tracked the usage of them. Through that tracking he realised that they were fulfilling a need in the oil industry in the North Sea and also in Dubai. He got in touch with the people using them, discussed their needs and, as a result, developed a short course for them which became an income stream.

“That was only possible because he put those resources out there, used web 2.0 and interacted,” said Mannis. “Those are the kinds of stories we need to capture”.

‘We saw the future coming,’ says programme manager Christina Bunce. ‘Online is the way to go.’ To do this though required a huge organisational shift, she says. As well as the training needed to allow course tutors to create content, since many of them only work part-time for the university, their man job being in the creative industries, the content they use in their courses is very much their ‘bread-and-butter’ according to lecturer Alex di Savoia.

‘We’d not indulged deeply in the nitty gritty of IPR before,’ says Bunce and di Savoia says there’s ‘no quick fix’ to dealing with it. So to understand all its legalities, Falmouth partnered with specialists including the University of Loughborough, resulting in the resources being released with a licence that made the coursework shareable but with no commercial usage or derivative works allowed.

‘If someone produces a derivative work of lesser quality, that can affect the person who produced the original work,’ says di Savoia.

The advent of OER at Falmouth is also causing a change in all the university’s internal systems and making it re-evaluate how it runs courses. Contracts for new staff are being reconsidered to look at IPR; the university is looking at the possibility of MA courses that don’t require tutors; OER could even become part of the norm for all courses and the first phase of a mobile learning application is being planned. The university is also looking at how to fund these changes, with MIT’s donation model being one option considered, alumni being asked to donate small sums to support the move.

However, the university is clear on one thing: to develop meaningful OER, it has to come from the tutors, says Bunce – without them, it wouldn’t have the quality.

Steve Stapleton of the Open Learning Support Office at the University of Nottingham says his university has had considerable successes with OER since starting ‘U-Now’ in 2007. He found that to get adoption of OER required senior management, academic boards, and teaching and learning committees to buy into the idea. Importantly, OER also had backing from the pro vice chancellor, who even recorded a YouTube video backing the idea: ’When people asked, “Can I really give this away?’, all I had to do was point them to the video,’ says Stapleton.

As a result of the U-Now initiative, the university’s school of politics has agreed to publish all of its handbooks and reading lists online, and it already has YouTube Edu and iTunes U channels carrying original content. Across the university, 150 academics are now engaged with OER, with open learning workshop teaching new academics how to find and publish material correctly and legally. It has also developed tools for creating OER content, including Xerte and Xpert.

Both Falmouth and Nottingham are at the beginning of a revolution. Neither has yet been able to work out a way to calculate a return on investment, although both have anecdotal evidence that OER is helping them. But neither are they sure what the long-term effects of OER will be, other than to change the institutions themselves. Says Bunce, ‘It’s going to take us into the future and places we don’t even know about.’

Sarah Porter set the context for the day with an introduction that highlighted the progress that has been made with Open Educational Resources. “It’s an exciting time for OER and open,” Porter said, but emphasised that “we have to be very clear about the case we’re making and why we’re making it. There has been lots of good work but there are also barriers and issues to tackle”.

Without a doubt, one element of the “good work” has been JISC’s OER programme that, thanks to funding from Hefce, has been exploring the potential of OER through projects from three different perspectives: subject-based (14 projects), institutional (7 projects); and individual (8 projects) with the aim of learning about the best approaches. “It’s a programme, not a set of projects,” emphasised Porter – a coherent and combined effort that has brought people together to learn from each other, with a support function, evaluation and synthesis.

The second phase of the programme is now underway and will focus on areas such as teacher skills in HE, studies to see how to get the most impact from OER and different business models, putting resources into cascade support with people from the first phase helping others to build up their knowledge, and building UK OER into the global community.

The global community was Mary Lou Forward’s focus for the hour that followed as she took the audience on an exhilarating whirlwind tour demonstrating how open courseware is being taken up across the globe, from Europe and America to Africa and Asia.

She kicked off with a brief explanation of her organisation, the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Its mission is

“to advance formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality education materials organised as courses”

and it is global itself with 250 members around the world and 13,000 courses in about 20 different languages. The open movement is “taking off” said Forward, and she sees the current roles of Open Courseware as:

• expanding access to education;
• showcasing quality of education available in different countries and institutions; strengthening teaching and curricular alignment with an institution;
• providing services to students and institutions

Gazing into her crystal ball, she also suggested some of the future areas where OER will become increasingly important. She believes that it will have a role as a bridge between secondary and higher education for those that are concerned about making the shift; it will be critical in meeting the need for workforce retraining; it will aid faculty engagement and global knowledge generation through examining critical global issues; and it will promote cultural understanding and citizen diplomacy.

But the keynote really took off when Forward started to provide some concrete examples of the different ways in which OER is working in practice and making a difference in countries right now. Forward’s background is in African studies and she started her voyage with the African Virtual University. Created by an inter-governmental charter, the AVU brings together six African nations who decided to think about what was most relevant for African learners and create networks for localised content and sharing. The courses, which are in English, French and Portuguese, are geared to the kinds of things that African universities said they were interested in rather than importing courses from Canada and Australia. For example, a teacher education project was created with modules to train teachers in various subjects – all 73 modules are open.

In contrast to the institutional approach is South Korea‘s governmental take on OER. Forward explained that, in South Korea, a high value is placed on education and university ranking is a big factor in economic and social success. A huge amount spent on private tutoring to supplement state education with high income families spending 11 times more than poor income families. The government looked at the figures, recognised that the income divide will only perpetuate social divide – and its solution was OER. Initiatives include a free college prep course from which the college entrance exam is taken, a government-sponsored open courseware site called K-OCW, a project to use OER as a means to improve teaching and the quality of education, and a grant programme to 10 universities to put materials online. The next step – a very big step – is getting openness to be part of the university ranking system.

In Brazil, there has been a grassroots movement which has sought to influence Parliament – notching up a success in just the last two weeks with a congressional hearing that has produced a recommendation of a five point strategy.

From a country to a town and Manor, Texas has a population of around 6,000 and not a lot going on in terms of economic growth. Leaders decided that the way to improve Manor is through innovative, interactive technology, with participants (perhaps through blog feedback or other contributions) rewarded with Innobucks – virtual online currency that can be traded for tangible products from the Manor Labs Store. Now Manor Labs has announced it will reward individuals for participating in open courseware programmes, giving them a certain amount of Innobucks per course.

Moving eastwards, and the International University of Iran is interested in an OCW consortium – it feels it might help to break down some of the stereotypes about the country – while Israel is very active with open textbooks. The Thomas Edison project in India is a group of dot.com investors who are working on an e-learning programme for rural areas based on handheld devices, and Japan is taking a societal approach with institutions looking to partner with industry to move the open programme on.

It’s an impressive roundup but, said Forward, “there is still a lot to be done…”

Her list of futures areas of work encompasses:

• the need to promote research into OER and disseminate it
• the need to show the impact on a global scale
• the need to continue OER advocacy – keep pushing
• the need to make sure people are re-using material
• the need at an institutional level to say that the value is not who developed the materials but how they are having an impact on students
• the need to work on metadata and categorise things so people can find them

The list may be long but Forward ended on a rallying cry to the troops in the room: “One person CAN make a difference in OER. One person’s tenacity CAN move things on in this area. Continue to be part of the learning revolution!”

She says that these cases fall into four areas. Individuals can be persuaded that OER can help them showcase their materials, which can offer both early and late career benefits, either demonstrating their skills or leaving a legacy to future generations. Institutions can be persuaded that they’ll attract new students and be more influential. Community members can get reciprocal benefits from other members. And with OER only likely to grow in importance, many groups see the benefit of building up the capacity to develop and produce OER now for future expansion. To back up these cases, Beetham says, there is ‘huge evidence about what works and what doesn’t', as well as evidence that OER can enhance learner opportunities.

In the case of the University of Exeter, a desire to bring in more international students and improve the university’s reputation internationally was enough to get the necessary sign-off for the OER project. ‘It would have a positive impact on the brand, attract the best international students and help us in league tables, particularly with promoting the best of our research,’ he says.

Most of the institutional concerns were about IPR and whether the university was giving away its crown jewels. Staff concerns related to motivation for producing OER, in particular the amount of time necessary. In the majority of cases, these objections were solved, sometimes with the advice of lawyers; the issue of time was solved by pointing out that courses can be set up much quicker from cold using OER material. However, says Browne, there was never a single argument that could be used to explain the importance of OER to everyone. ‘General solutions never seem to apply.’ Browne is now trying to get teaching on the benefits of OER and how to create it incorporated into staff training programmes.

Although the research is still in its early stages, the results of Beetham’s work as well as the experience of Browne suggest that OER can bring benefits for both the institute releasing the OER and the staff producing them.

We’ll be seeing presentations from all across the programme – the three strands (institutional, subject consortium, individual), the support strand and evaluation and synthesis project. These will both be looking back at what has been learnt during the pilot phase, and forward at how UKOER will be continuing and growing in the years to come.

Bookending these programme sessions will be two excellent keynote presentations (from Mary Lou Forward of OCWC and Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia), helping to put the UKOER work in the context of what is becoming a truly global movement.

Although UKOER10 has been a popular event, we appreciate that a large number of people are not able to attend the day. We’ve looked into a number of “amplification” options, including live streaming, and have decided on the following:

• use of the #ukoer10 tag for related blogs, updates and images
• audio recordings of all sessions and keynotes, available a few days after the event
• a small team of conference bloggers, reflecting here on sessions, keynote addresses and informal conversations with speakers and delegates

We decided against live streaming, as we preferred to concentrate on making reusable resources. All resources around #ukoer10 will be made available under a creative commons license (CC-BY-SA) for use, reuse and repurposing.

With nearly all global organisations using Open Source software today, the industry faces a challenge of properly understanding the development, contribution, and communities instrumental to creating an enterprise-grade Open Source policy and ensuring its successful adoption.

At the same time with increasing pressure from funding bodies and institutions to show an increased impact from research activities the sector faces a challenge of matching impact with research objectives.
Impact is interpreted in so many ways it can be difficult to understand just what is expected of modern research projects.

The use of open source software licensing and development models for sustaining software outputs of research projects is becoming increasingly common. OSS Watch have been funded since 2003 to assist with these activities and open innovation is a term that is commonly heard in discussion about increasing the impact of research projects.
However, we were surprised that there are so few events dedicated to connecting open innovation-driven people, processes, and technologies, specifically those that promote solutions that directly impact business.

We created TransferSummit to bring top researchers, academics, business leaders, organizations, and technologists together to discuss core requirements, challenges, and opportunities in the use, development, licensing, funding, and promoting future innovation in Open Source.
We’re focused on the comprehensive impact of open innovation across a range of disciplines and applications, participants share, discuss, and discover strategic opportunities that accelerate growth.  TransferSummit streamlines the innovation and resource discovery process, cultivating partnerships, and accelerating the process of commercialising products.

Join the conversation at Keble College in Oxford 24-25 June and stay on for the complimentary BarCamp on 26 June.

We’re finalising the speaker lineup; our roster includes representatives from organisations such as: Amazon, The Apache Software Foundation, CodePlex Foundation, Day Software, GNOME Foundation, Google, Joint Information Systems Committee, LIMO Foundation, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Nottingham University, OSS Watch, SalesAgility, Seneca College, Sirius Corporation Plc, Sourcesense, Taunton’s College, University of Cambridge, and Wikimedia.

We’re passionate about fostering interactions amongst participants and are working towards ensuring the right environment for both learning about open innovation in practice and for enhancing your own engagement with open innovation. TransferSummit is expected to sell out: register today to take advantage of our Early-Bird rates, and continue to explore concepts addressed during the event at the BarCamp the following day.

For more details and to register see http://www.transfersummit.com

We look forward to seeing you!

- Ross Gardler, Chair, OSS Watch and the TransferSummit team

Tuesday 25 May 2010
LIBRARIES, RESOURCES & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT FOR EXTERNAL ENGAGEMENT
Lakeside Conference Centre, Aston University

Wedneday 26 May 2010
EXTENDING IT SUPPORT FOR EXTERNAL ENGAGEMENT
Lakeside Conference Centre, Aston University

Both workshops are aimed at anyone with role working in (or with) these key institutional services (there is no requirement to be currently performing a specialist “engagement”-related role).

Each workshop brings together staff from services to discuss some of the key issues emerging from engagement with the community and businesses outside of their institutions. You can find out more about what this might mean for you and how these events might help here

Attendees will get a chance to share their experiences as well as an opportunity to find out about the practical support available to help identify, understand and further develop their own external engagement strategies and actions.

The range of engagement activity types and descriptions can also make it difficult to relate them to wider initiatives which could be providing key support and funding. These workshops should help people to make those connections and more importantly, better identify support that is already taking place – but is perhaps not currently recognised.

The workshops are being delivered by JISC Netskills, through the “BCE – Awareness and Education for the Wider JISC Community” project which is specifically focused on the issues for key enabling and support services, within UK HE and FE institutions.

Find out more about the project

The project is itself, part of the JISC-funded “Business and Community Engagement (BCE) programme”, which aims to provide practical help for institutions to develop their engagement strategies, as well as the systems to support them.