C-SAP cascade project final report

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The Higher Education Academy (HEA)/JISC Final Report

Project Information
Project Identifier To be completed by HEA/JISC
Project Title Cascading Social Science Open Educational Resources
Project Hashtag #csapoer
Start Date 30 August 2010 End Date 30 August 2011
Lead Institution C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Sociology,
Anthropology and Politics)
Project Director n/a
Project Manager Anna Gruszczynska (from 1 February 2011), Darren Marsh (until 30
January 2011)
Contact email a.gruszczynska@bham.ac.uk
Partner Institutions Teesside University, University Centre at Blackburn College, Bangor
University, Cardiff University

Project Web URL Csapopencascade.wordpress.com
Programme Name Open Educational Resources Phase 2
Programme Manager Heather Price/ Maggie Stephens
Document Information
Author(s) Anna Gruszczynska
Project Role(s) Project manager
Date 22 August 2011 Filename

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Document title: HEA/JISC Final Report Template

Last updated: May 2011 - v1

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URL n/a
Access This report is for general dissemination

Document History
Version Date Comments
1.0 17 August 2011 Draft version
1.1 19 August Version incorporating feedback from Helen Howard, C-SAP
director
1.2 22 August Version incorporating feedback from the project team –
Richard Pountney (project consultant) and John Craig (project
partner)


Last updated: May 2011 – v1

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Table of Contents

......................................................................................... 1
1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................... 5
2. PROJECT SUMMARY ............................................................................................................ 5
2.1. PROJECT OUTPUTS AND OUTCOMES ................................................................................. 6
2.2. OVERVIEW OF PROJECT METHODOLOGY ....................................................................... 12
2.3. THE CASCADE FRAMEWORK ............................................................................................ 13
2.4. OVERVIEW OF CASCADE TOOLS....................................................................................... 13
2.4.1. INFLUENCES FROM THE PILOT PROJECT .................................................................................13

Reflexive tasks in the pilot phase..............................................................................................13

The relevance of pedagogical frameworks .............................................................................14

Existing OER resources developed in the context of UKOER pilot phase ............................14

2.4.2. CASCADE TOOLS: REFLEXIVE TASKS ......................................................................................14

2.4.3. CASCADE TOOLS: WEB 2.0 TOOLS ........................................................................................16

2.4.4. CASCADE TOOLS: STUDENT ENGAGEMENT .............................................................................17

2.5. APPROACH TO EVALUATION ........................................................................................... 17
3. PROJECT FINDINGS AND LESSONS LEARNT: EMERGING THEMES ................................. 19
3.1. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OERS AND THE CURRICULUM ...........................................................19

3.2. STUDENT ENGAGEMENT............................................................................................................21

3.2.1. Account of student engagement at Bangor University ...........................................22

3.2.2. Account of student engagement at Teesside University .........................................23


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3.2.3. Account of student engagement at University Centre at Blackburn College ......24

3.3. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: HE IN FE ........................................................................................26

3.4. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: TEACHING THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF WELSH .................................29

3.5. CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH OERS ........................................................................................30

4. IMPACT .............................................................................................................................. 32
4.1. IMMEDIATE IMPACT .................................................................................................................32

4.2. FUTURE IMPACT.......................................................................................................................33

5. CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................... 33
5.1. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................33

5.2. CONCLUSIONS RELEVANT TO THE WIDER COMMUNITY ..............................................................34

5.3. CONCLUSIONS RELEVANT TO THE HEA/JISC ............................................................................34

6. RECOMMENDATIONS........................................................................................................ 35
6.1. GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS .................................................................................................35

6.2. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE WIDER COMMUNITY ...................................................................35

6.3. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE HEA/JISC .................................................................................35

7. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE .................................................................................... 35
8. REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 36
9. APPENDICES ...................................................................................................................... 37
9.1. APPENDIX 1: ANALYTICS.................................................................................................. 37
C-SAP CASCADE RESOURCES ON SLIDESHARE.......................................................................................37

C-SAP PROJECT BLOG: NUMBER OF VIEWS ..........................................................................................38

9.2. APPENDIX 2: DISSEMINATION EVENTS ........................................................................... 38
DISSEMINATION EVENT AT UNIVERSITY CENTRE AT BLACKBURN COLLEGE, 1 SEPTEMBER 2011 ........................38

DISSEMINATION EVENT AT TEESSIDE UNIVERSITY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2011 ........................................................41



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1. Acknowledgements
The “Cascading Social Science Open Educational Resources” was undertaken as part of the second
phase of the HEA/JISC-funded UK OER programme. The C-SAP project team would like to thank a
number of individuals and groups who have contributed to the project, including:

- All project partners

- Richard Pountney (project consultant)

- Helen Jones (project critical friend)

- Sahm Nikoi (project evaluator)

- C-SAP team – Helen Howard, Frances Worrall and Laura-Jane Harvey

- Other projects participating in the second phase of the UKOER programme, who contributed
their insights and kindly offered feedback at various programme meetings

2. Project Summary

This project sought to cascade support for embedding Open Educational Resources within the social
sciences curriculum, focusing on the relationship between the use of OERs and student engagement.
The project worked with a small cluster of academic staff from three HEIs, including an HE in FE
partner and relied on a collaborative methodology embedded within the paradigm of communities
of practice. Accordingly, the project team worked alongside project partners and supported them to
develop their own understandings of the cascade framework rather than offer prescriptive
templates or ready-made solutions. Reflection was at the core of project methodology and so
partners took part in a series of reflexive tasks posted on the project wiki, built around prompts
designed to introduce partners to OER-related concepts, explore their understanding of open
education as well as aid them with articulating the emerging cascade framework.

Throughout the lifetime of the project, we focused on three priority areas closely linked to project
objectives; which were student engagement, OER release and cascade framework. The
collaborative nature of the project methodology meant that our work within those areas was also
informed by issues that project partners identified as relevant to their own practice, such as
challenges specific to HE in FE or the Welsh-medium context in the curriculum. We believe that our
work emphasises the relevance of addressing issues related to pedagogy and tacit elements of
academic practice, and that crucially, those are as important as issues related to technical
development.


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The cascade framework developed in the context of the project is a model of release, discovery and
reuse of Open Educational Resources which can be “cascaded”, that is, taken up and incorporated
into new contexts by academics wishing to engage with Open Educational Resources. The model
offers a set of tools, all of them available from project wiki, which will allow academics to reflect
upon their own practice and examine conditions in which their teaching resources can be
used/reused and shared, including but not limited to their institutional culture, technical skills,
knowledge on how to find/(re)use OERs and their individual orientation towards pedagogical
innovation. This way, the C-SAP cascade model focuses more on the “why” rather than the “how” of
OERs; that is, it emphasises the broader context in which OERs are created and (re)used and any
resulting issues and/or tensions rather than addressing solely the technical aspects of opening up
teaching resources.

2.1. Project Outputs and Outcomes

Output / Outcome Type Brief Description and URLs
Knowledge and expertise
Cascade framework
http://cascadeoer2.pbworks.com/w/page/44124084/About%20the%20C-
SAP%20cascade%20framework
into new contexts by academics wishing to engage with Open Educational Resources. The framework
is based upon a critical understanding of OERs where users can examine their own academic practice
and subsequently articulate a rationale for using OERs, with use interpreted quite broadly in terms
of identifying, locating, releasing and embedding Open Educational Resources into curriculum.
Methodology for developing a cascade framework
http://cascadeoer2.pbworks.com/w/page/41288922/Project%20methodology
Building on our experiences from the OER pilot project, we have developed a collaborative method
of working with our partners, with an emphasis on reflection in the process of learning about OERs.
The cascade project methodology was based around a critical engagement with OERs, embedded
within the social sciences framework of knowledge production. It encouraged an exploration of tacit
elements of OER creation, with an emphasis on issues related to pedagogy.
Articulations of the cascade framework



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In the process of developing the cascade framework, project team has produced a number of draft
versions of the cascade schema.
Draft of cascade framework
http://prezi.com/mkkn3_k6-zgb/cascade/
This Prezi—based presentation formed part of our efforts to articulate the emerging cascade
framework.
OER cascade
http://voicethread.com/?#q.b1815037
In this presentation, the cascade project consultant uses VoiceThread to articulate the “problem
space” for the cascade framework, focusing on issues of pedagogy.
Mindmap of the cascade framework
http://www.mindmeister.com/78727474/cascade-framework-draft
This mindmap was created to help the project team visualise the emerging cascade framework and
identify priority areas.
Cascade framework tools



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Cascade tools
http://cascadeoer2.pbworks.com/w/page/44124727/Cascade%20tools
The C-SAP cascade framework model offers a set of tools which will allow academics to reflect upon
their own practice and examine conditions in which their teaching resources can be used/reused and
shared, including but not limited to their institutional culture, technical skills, knowledge on how to
find/(re)use OERs and their individual orientation towards pedagogical innovation. The tools are
described in more detail in section 2.4. of this report.

Reflexive tasks
Reflection has been a core element of our project methodology. Through reflection,
academic practice can be critically reviewed and better understood and helping to make this clearer
to others and to oneself, in order to enhance the potential of OERs to be shared and re-
used. Through the use of reflexive tasks, the project team aimed to develop a collaborative
framework for cascading OERs within the social sciences. The tasks, posted on the project wiki, were
built around a series of reflexive prompts designed to introduce partners to OER-related concepts,
explore their understanding of open education as well as aid them with articulating the emerging
cascade framework. The project wiki hosts both the full text of partners’ responses to the tasks as
well as an overview of issues emerging from a reflexive approach towards OERs.

All tasks have been released as OERs on project Slideshare account:
Task 1 - Introducing Open Educational Resources
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/cascadetask1forpartnersintroducingoe-rs
Task 2 - Exploring Open Educational Resources
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/cascadetask2forpartnersexploringoe-rs
Task 3 – Developing the cascade framework
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/csapoer2reflexivetask3developingcascadeframework
3-feb2011
Task 4 – Peer review
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/cascade-reflexive-taskpeer-review
Web 2.0 based outputs
Project wiki
http://cascadeoer2.pbworks.com
The wiki provides an overview of the tools and approaches which comprise the C-SAP cascade
model. It also documents the process (and the resulting challenges) involved in developing the
cascade framework. During the lifetime of the project, the wiki functioned as a space for
documenting our ideas, storing relevant documents and resources and maintaining a small
community of practice, which was part of our small-scale attempt at creating shifts and cultural
changes across the sector. It remained closed to the core project team until the end of August 2011,


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when a revised version aimed at a more general audience was released as one of project outputs.
Cascade project blog
Csapopencascade.wordpress.com
The project team has used the blog as a space to inform the wider OER community of work-in-
progress on the cascade project as well as to comment on issues of relevance to the larger
programme such as open textbooks, accessibility, challenges specific to the HE in FE institutions etc.
For information about blog analytics, see Appendix 1, page 37.
Project Twitter account (@csapoer2)
http://twitter.com/#!/csapoer2
The project team has used the Twitter account to interact with the wider OER community and to
publicise information about resources produced in the context of the project
Project slideshare account
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre
All resources produced in the context of the project have been uploaded to our Slideshare account
under a Non-Commercial-Attribution-Share-Alike Creative Commons license.
Project netvibes account
http://www.netvibes.com/csapoer2
For the purposes of the project, we created a dedicated netvibes account to manage information
coming through blogs created by projects within the UKOER programme as well as wider OER
community.
Project delicious account
http://www.delicious.com/csapoerphase2
Online resources of relevance to the cascade project have been bookmarked on our delicious
account.
Presentations
OERs Across Sectors (FE)
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/oers-across-sectors-csap-oer-cascade
This presentation was delivered as part of an Elluminate session that took place on 12 April 2011 and
focused on challenges specific to HE in FE in the context of the cascade project.
Mapping the curriculum through shared representations of intentions to teach
http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer11/abstracts/1162.html
This presentation was delivered by the cascade project consultant, Richard Pountney as part of the
OER2011 conference (11-13 May 2011, Manchester) and focused on the development of a
curriculum mapping toolkit over two phases of C-SAP OER projects. The presentation focused on the
potential of the toolkit for integrating OERs within curriculum design and review as part of the
cascade framework.
Leaflets



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OER fact sheet
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/oerfactsheet15-oct2010
The fact sheet provides an overview of the aims and objectives of the OER programme (both pilot
and second phase), introduces some of the OER key initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseware, Jorum
and MERLOT repositories. It also focuses on key points and benefits of OERs as well as issues realetd
to IPR, copyright and Creative Commons licensing.
Resources on open textbooks
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/csapoer2cascaderesourcesonopentextbooks31-
jan2011
The leaflet covers major US-based open textbooks initiatives, including the Open Access Textbooks
Project, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources and College Open
Textbooks. It also signposts relevant resources on finding, authoring and sharing open textbooks.
Open Educational Resources: Cascading Knowledge
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/open-educational-resources-booklet
The leaflet is aimed at a general social sciences audience and provides information about the
involvement of C-SAP in the UK OER programme.
Working papers
Accessibility issues in the context of C-SAP cascade project
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/accessibility-issues-in-the-context-of-csapoer2-
project
This working paper makes the case for developing OER-specific accessibility guidance and focuses on
incentives for embedding accessible practice. It also discusses the relevance of communities of
practice framework for supporting accessibility in the context of OER programme.
Reports
Student engagement activity at University Centre Blackburn College
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/csap-student-cascade-activity-feedback
This report documents the involvement of students at University Centre Blackburn College (C-SAP
cascade partner) with OER-related cascade activities. Two groups of students were invited to
undertake an activity based around searching for and evaluating OERs. A total of 19 students were
invited to complete the activity, 14 students accessed their documents in the shared folder, and 7
successfully completed the tasks.
Focus group with members of staff at Teesside University
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/focus-group-with-staff-at-teesside-university-csap-
cascade-project
The focus group was conducted by Michael Teague and John Craig from Teesside University who
were involved in the project as academic partners and their aim was to explore how the publication
and use (and reuse) of OERs is perceived within their institution.



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Teaching resources deposited into Jorum
Welsh partners (Bangor/Cardiff University)
Cyflwyniad i Ddulliau Ymchwil (Research methods)
http://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/15794
Welsh Medium resource designed to provide a set of reusable and repurposable resources for
students and lecturers to introduce research methods.
Dulliau Ymchwil Meintiol (Quantitative Research Methods)
This course is a set of reusable and repurposable Welsh medium resources designed to introduce
students to the use of Excel and SPSS in quantitative research methods.
Teesside University partner
Doing Policy
https://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/15796
Understanding Public Management
https://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/15797
Both modules were created as part of the Foundation degree in Community Governance and Public
Sector Management, a course delivered by the Politics team at the University of Huddersfield
between 2002 and 2009. The repurposing and publication of these learning materials as part of the
OER project has been approved by the University of Huddersfield.
The course was designed and
delivered in partnership with local authority employers and third sector organisations.
University Centre Blackburn College partner
Creativity for edupunks
“Creativity for Edupunks” is a pbwiki-based resource aimed at HE in FE staff that comprises of eleven
activity-based sessions, covering issues related to identifying, locating, releasing and putting OERs
into curriculum, understanding the concept of “openness” as well as pedagogical issues around
student engagement and in particular innovative assessment. This resource seeks to develop OER
literacy and encourage the use, reuse and subsequent production of such resources, putting forward
‘anarchogogy’ as a pedagogical position. In its entirety, it is intended to be a staff development
programme for lecturers working at HE in FE institutions but its composite parts can be individually
used by anyone interested in different approaches to teaching and learning.

OER release: overview of partner deposits
http://cascadeoer2.pbworks.com/w/page/44567490/OER%20release%3A%20Overview%20of%20pa
rtner%20deposits
This dedicated wiki page provides additional information about resources deposited within the
cascade project, including an overview of pedagogical approaches and motivations.



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2.2. Overview of project methodology
The project worked with a small cluster of academic staff from three HEIs, including an HE in FE
institution. Building on our experiences from the OER pilot project, we have developed a
collaborative method of working with our partners, with an emphasis on reflection in the process of
learning about OERs.

In the context of the project, the project team strove to create opportunities for the partners to
reflect on the process of opening up teaching materials and explore issues around tacit practice, that
is, the “story” of what is being taught, the institutional and pedagogical context in which the
teaching process takes place, etc. Those opportunities included a set of four reflexive tasks (see
section 3.4.2, page 14 for more information) addressing issues related to OER release, pedagogical
frameworks, curriculum design and quality assurance. Through the tasks, project partners were
encouraged to expose and challenge some of the tacit assumptions about academic practice and
sharing teaching resources. There were also a number of opportunities for interaction between the
partners through face-to-face meetings, workshops and phone conversations aimed at supporting
partners in the process of developing their understandings of OERs and articulating their approach
towards OER creation and re-use.

Face-to-face meetings took place in October 2010, January 2011 and June 2011. Project partners
also had a chance to participate in an additional workshop in May 2011 devoted to technical issues
such as the use of VoiceThread and depositing Blackboard-based content into educational
repositories. Furthermore, the project team (project manager, consultant and critical friend) proved
on-going support as and when requested by the partners. All outputs produced in the context of
reflexive tasks and partner meetings were captured on the project wiki which functioned as a (closed
and password-protected) space for documenting ideas, storing relevant documents and resources
and maintaining a small community of practice. The public blog was used by the project team to
document the process and the resulting challenges involved in developing the cascade framework as
well as address issues of wider relevance to the cascade project.

Importantly, the project team supported the partners in making the transition from being “cascaded
to” to becoming “cascaders” and so provided opportunities for academic partners to get involved in
the activities of the UK-based OER network. For instance, we supported the participation of our
UCBC [University Centre at Blackburn College] partners in the OER2011 conference, which enabled
them to broaden their academic network and importantly to get in touch with other HE in FE
lecturers undertaking OER-related research. Our partners then drew on those networks when
organising a dissemination event due to take place in September and two of the invited speakers
(keynote speaker Diana Laudrillard and a SCORE fellow, Esther Ehiyazaryan based at an HE in FE
institution, for more information about the event see section Appendix 2, page 38) are contacts
made whilst at OER2011. The event will hopefully demonstrate that the framework we developed in


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the context of the project is transferable and reproducible; the nature of that framework will be
expanded upon in more detail in the following sections.

2.3. The cascade framework
into new contexts by academics wishing to engage with Open Educational Resources. Through
development of the C-SAP model (i.e. the “cascade framework”) the project sought to develop a
critical understanding of OERs where users can examine their own academic practice and
subsequently articulate a rationale for using OERs, with use interpreted quite broadly in terms of
identifying, locating, releasing and embedding Open Educational Resources into curriculum. The
model offers a set of tools which will allow academics to reflect upon their own practice and
examine conditions in which their teaching resources can be used/reused and shared, including but
not limited to their institutional culture, technical skills, knowledge on how to find/(re)use OERs and
their individual orientation towards pedagogical innovation. The next section provides an overview
of tools, all of which can be accessed from the project wiki, which comprise the cascade framework.

2.4. Overview of Cascade tools
2.4.1. Influences from the pilot project
The first tool that we relied upon when developing the cascade framework was the conceptual
approach and project methodology we developed in the context of the C-SAP pilot phase project
(“Evaluating the practice of collective endeavour in opening up key resources for learning and
teaching in the social sciences”), which took place between April 2009-April 2010. The pilot project
adopted a critical social science perspective on the processes of sharing digital educational
resources, as well as related challenges. The project team has endeavoured to explore ways of
making educational resources more “open” and less reliant on tacit pedagogic practice by using
insights gained from the process of peer review and social science knowledge production. Within the
cascade project, we have embraced and/or expanded upon the following elements of the pilot
project:

Reflexive tasks in the pilot phase
Within the pilot project, we were experimenting with tools that would aid the partners in
articulating tacit elements of their academic practice and decided to experiment with a peer
supported review exercise. We paired up the partners and asked them to review a sample module
from the other partner’s contributed materials. The pairings were made on the basis of overlaps in
partners' discipline, pedagogic approach and topics covered. This review was based around a


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checklist and series of prompts. The exercises yielded in-depth accounts of ways in which
pedagogical practice is challenged by the process of opening up teaching resources. We built upon
this approach in the cascade project, where reflexive tasks (see section 3.4.2.) were a core element
of the project methodology and were designed to support the partners in articulating a rationale for
embedding OERs within their individual and institutional context.

The relevance of pedagogical frameworks
The pilot project generated rich discussion and debate amongst the project team about pedagogical
frameworks to support releasing material in the social sciences, and questions of the intended users
and what types of contextual information (both tacit and explicit) about the “history” of the
materials is required to support discovery and re-use. We built upon those discussion in the cascade
project when designing reflexive tasks; for instance, cascade reflexive task 4 (“Peer
review”) explicitly focused on pedagogical approaches in the context of student engagement with
OERs.

Existing OER resources developed in the context of UKOER pilot phase
In the spirit of Open Educational Resources, throughout the cascade project we drew on resources
developed in the context of the pilot phase. For example, in cascade reflexive task 2 (“Exploring
OERs”) we signposted project partners to materials on searching for, reusing and repurposing open
teaching resources produced by projects in the pilot phase rather than (re)create new materials
from scratch.

2.4.2. Cascade tools: Reflexive tasks
As mentioned earlier, the use of reflexive tasks as a cascade tool can be traced to a conceptual
approach developed in the context of the C-SAP pilot project. Overall, reflection has been a core
element of cascade project methodology. Through reflection, academic practice can be critically
reviewed, better understood and tacit understandings can be made clear to others and to oneself,
enhancing the potential of OERs to be shared and re-used. Through the use of reflexive tasks, the
project team aimed to develop a collaborative framework for cascading OERs within social sciences.
The tasks were built around a series of reflexive prompts designed to introduced partners to OER-
related concepts, explore their understanding of open education as well as aid them with
articulating the emerging cascade framework.

The tasks followed the principle of increasing complexity, while being progressive and formative in
nature. The first task (“Introducing OERs”1) was aimed at introducing colleagues to the concept of
OERS and the idea of examining academic practice in a reflexive and critical way. The second task

1
All tasks can be accessed from project wiki, see section 3.1. for more information.



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(“Exploring OERs”) was designed to equip project partners with relevant technical skills in
preparation for creating/repurposing their own teaching resources and depositing them as OERs as
part of the cascade process. The task also addressed issues related to accessibility, licencing and
tagging. The project tasks then shifted the emphasis from the focus on individual aspects of
academic practice and relevant technical skills to the more communal facets of open education.
Accordingly, the third task (“Developing the cascade framework”) was aimed at supporting
colleagues with the development of the cascade framework, with a view to creating a framework
that could then be cascaded on to other academics past the end of the project funding. Finally, the
fourth task gave the partners an opportunity to engage in peer review and discuss their practice with
a colleague. All of the conversations related to the reflexive tasks have been captured and
contextualised in the project wiki and we anticipate that they can be of use to the wider community
and anyone interested in adopting a similar approach or wishing to reuse/repurpose that element of
the cascade framework in their own context.

The use of reflexive tasks as a cascade framework tool stemmed from our social science orientation
and the belief that creating a space for reflexivity and conversation between colleagues opens up a
space where ideas can be raised to the surface, shared and to some extent shaped. The potential
benefits of this approach are reflected in a comment posted on the wiki after one of project
meetings:

The event demonstrated one of the most powerful aspects of the OER movement, namely
the benefits arising from open communication between colleagues. The illustration of
various tools such as wallwisher was helpful but the sharing of teaching and learning
experiences was the most beneficial part of the day. The discussion about assessment
methods was particularly useful as it demonstrated support for the creative interpretation of
regulations but also revealed the different approaches adopted by different institutions with
regard to things such as assessment criteria.

Furthermore, we believe it is within the space of conversation/reflection that tacit ideas related to
academic practice can be teased out, exposed and then possibly challenged. This would hopefully
lead to long-lasting changes in academic practice so that teaching resources are designed with
openness in mind and sharing is more of forethought rather than a costly and problematic
afterthought. While the reflexive approach has not been without its challenges, as will be
demonstrated in the section devoted to evaluation issues, nevertheless we believe that the critical
and reflexive approach towards OERs has been one of the strengths of the project. This approach
was accompanied by a strong engagement with Web2.0 based tools, which will be described in more
detail in the next section.



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2.4.3. Cascade tools: Web 2.0 tools
Web2.0 tools constituted another important element of our methodology and the cascade
framework and so we have maintained a Wordpress-based project blog
(csapopencascade.wordpress.com) to document work-in-progress and reflect on issues of broader
significance to the OER programme. All of the relevant online resources have been bookmarked on
our delicious account (http://www.delicious.com/csapoerphase2) and we also have created a
dedicated netvibes account (http://www.netvibes.com/csapoer2) to manage information coming
through blogs created by projects within the UKOER programme as well as wider OER community.
Any resources produced in the context of the project have been uploaded to our Slideshare account
(http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre ) under a Non-Commercial-Attribution-Share-Alike
Creative Commons license. We have used tools such as prezi and mindmeister in order to capture
the process of developing the cascade framework.

In particular, Twitter is one of the tools that the project team embraced quite early on in the project
and found it to be an extremely useful project management tool. We used a dedicated Twitter
account (@csapoer2)2 both as a tool for getting access to vetted, high-quality resources coming
through the broader OER network as well as a method of communicating work-in-progress and
signposting to resources produced in the context of the project. We also successfully used Twitter
during project meetings to demonstrate its potential for offering space to explore issues around tacit
practice and to reflect on the processes involved in opening up teaching resources:

The project meeting yesterday saw a renewed commitment to Twitter on the part of our
academic partners. While we continued our conversation about pedagogy and critical
approaches towards OERs, we simultaneously tweeted some of the questions that arose
(using the #csapoer hashtag for the meeting) and this way went from sitting in a small room
with six people to interacting with a much broader audience who retweeted our comments,
responded to some of the questions and kept the conversation going (Gruszczynska, 2011).

Both Twitter and our project blog have given us a chance to increase involvement with the wider
OER network (UK-wide and beyond) and the quotes below demonstrate some of the conversations
that took place as a result:

2
As of August 17th 2011, the statistics are as follows: 72 followers, 115 following, 68 Tweets



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Great post, interesting initiative. OER in different languages, and within different cultural
contexts, is a very interesting question to explore. (…) I am very happy to hear that there are
plans to localize OER into Welsh, very exciting! (Haklev, 2011).

Your point on research is spot on – (…) OER I can imagine are similar – during teaching I
always found resources not quite what I wanted so continued the never ending search! I’d
appreciate it if you could let me know when and where the wiki will be available – it will
definitely be worth a read! (Habib, 2011).

Overall, our engagement with Web2.0 tools was closely related to our attempts at modelling best
practice with regard to copyright and open education, especially given that one of our project
objectives is sharing and developing deeper and wider expertise in the significance of social science
open educational content.

2.4.4. Cascade tools: Student engagement
Student engagement was a core element of the C-SAP cascade framework, given that the project
strove to articulate a rationale for using open resources to help lecturers develop modules that are
more engaging of students as well as work with students to evaluate and reflect on use of OERs in
curriculum development. Where possible, partners have incorporated OERs into their teaching,
offering their students a chance to provide feedback through surveys and focus groups. Students
were also involved in user testing of the resources being developed in the context of the project.
This aspect of the cascade framework will be addressed more in detail in sections 4.2., which
presents different approaches to involving students with OERs taken by partners in the context of
the project.

2.5. Approach to evaluation
Our reflexive approach towards the project methodology also extended to evaluation. We arranged
for an external evaluator3 to undertake summative evaluation of the project and specified within the
brief that the evaluator should explore partners’ understanding of the collaborative/reflexive
approach towards developing a cascade framework.

At the same time, formative evaluation has been on-going within the lifetime of the project and so
partners had the opportunity to engage in informal evaluation through reflexive tasks designed by
the project team and offer feedback on their emerging understanding of the cascade framework.
Furthermore, through partners’ responses to the reflexive prompts within the tasks, as well as

3
Our formal evaluator was Dr Sahm Nikoi, previously involved with the University of Leicester’s pilot
phase project OTTER and currently academic services librarian at Aberystwyth University.



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follow-up phone conversations, the project team had a chance to gain an insight into partners’
contributions to the project and their progress. This is where the contributions of the project
consultant were particularly valuable in terms of drawing out the tacit elements of partners’
pedagogic practices in the context of OER production.

Yet another element of formative evaluation was the internal evaluation undertaken by project
critical friend in April 2011 which focused on issues around project methodology. While only two of
the partners took part, those conversations offer a useful insight into partners’ perceptions of
project methodology, as reflected in the quotes below:

There are times that I would sooner focus on getting the resources into the correct format
for JORUM rather than take the time to complete tasks but they have been useful and my
response at the end of the project will probably see the tasks much more positively.

When the project first began it all seemed quite daunting and uncertain. As the project has
progressed we have grown in confidence and we have really benefitted at a local level and
even at the level of being able to spend time working together (…) Overall the project‘s
methodological approach has been very positive experience and there is a sense that
partners do not want the project to end as that will return them to the ‘real world’.

The above quotes reflect some of the issues involved in adopting a more reflexive approach to OER
creation/release as well as some potential problems with the transferability of the cascade
framework outside of the context of OER programme. The C-SAP cascade framework seems to be
challenging what our partners consider to be part of their “normal” academic practice and pushing
them beyond their comfort zones. There are some positive elements to being challenged in that way
– hence possibly the comment about unwillingness to return to the “real world”. At the same time,
the approach we have chosen could be seen as potentially too time-consuming and at odds with the
needs of busy lecturers who might only be interested in gaining technical competence in creating
OERs. This was also brought up in the context of formal evaluation (Nikoi, 2011) , where one of the
partners reported that they joined the project simply to develop OERs but found themselves
involved in activities for which they had not budgeted time for. Furthermore, while not mentioned
here explicitly, the institutional diversity of our academic partners might have made it more difficult
at times to engage in reflexive activities and identify commonalities in that context. At the same
time, both partners quoted above seem to recognise the long-term potential of the C-SAP cascade
approach and the perhaps less tangible awards of being able to spend some time on reflexive
activities and focus on the “why” rather than “how-to” of OERs. Those issues will be further explored
in any future conference and research papers emerging from the project.



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3. Project findings and lessons learnt: emerging themes
Throughout the lifetime of the project, we focused on three priority areas closely linked to project
objectives: student engagement, OER release and the cascade framework. The collaborative nature
of our project methodology meant that our work within those areas was also informed by issues that
project partners identified as relevant to their own practice, such as challenges specific to HE in FE or
the Welsh-medium context in the curriculum. Accordingly, those issues are reflected in the OERs
that the partners have released (for more information, see section 2.1Error! Bookmark not defined.)
as well as the project blog.4 In addition, our engagement with issues related to the social sciences
curriculum has focused mostly on exploring ways in which institutional context affects “readiness”
for OERs and the process of OER creation and (re)use. In the context of the project, we have also
explored the challenges of engaging students with OERs, especially when those resources are
positioned outside of the core curriculum. The next section of the report focuses on themes which
emerged in the context of partner engagement with the cascade priority areas, starting with issues
related to the relationship between OERs and the curriculum.

3.1. Relationship between OERs and the curriculum
Curriculum development is defined as the activities and processes by which courses are designed,
reviewed and updated on an on-going basis, within institutional and national requirements. The C-
SAP cascade project aimed to gain a better informing of the process of using OER to support
curriculum development and the role of pedagogical insights in this process. Overall, our
engagement with curriculum issues has taken the form of examining the impact of institutional
context on academic practices which shape the curriculum and their relevance for OERs. It has to be
noted that the given the short timeframe of the project, especially when contrasted with the overall
length of the curriculum lifecycle, project partners were unable to formally embed OERs within their
own curricula. Much longer funding period would be needed to create conditions where project
partners could for instance design and validate a new course based around OERs, and so the cascade
project relied primarily on partners using OERs as supplementary materials with regards to existing
core curriculum. At the same time, we believe we can offer relevant insights into factors that could
potentially have an impact on the process of embedding OERs within the social sciences curricula.

For instance, our Bangor University partner, when reflecting on previous experiences of attempting
to validate a course that would be based on materials developed at a different institution, pointed to
the problems involved with sharing OERs at the granularity of the module. The courses she was
teaching on (BA in Sociology and Social Policy and MA in Policy) had been validated at Bangor
University. When she attempted to incorporate into her teaching a module that was developed at
Trinity St. David's University (prior to the beginning of the cascade project) this turned out to be

4
See posts tagged under “cascade framework”
http://csapopencascade.wordpress.com/category/cascade-framework/


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problematic – the module had to be revalidated and there were questions raised about payment for
the students taking the module at a different institution. This example illustrated ways in which
institutional constraints clash with the vision of an open curriculum based on OERs where learners
have the flexibility to select a range of individual units or courses to suit their personal needs for the
development of expertise (Yuan, et al. 2008).

Yet other aspects of institutional constraints on the process of curriculum design and delivery have
been revealed in the context of our work with the UCBC partner. During one of our partner
meetings, we encouraged the participants to share the “typical” process of developing a new
module and embedding it within the curriculum. The quote below illustrates quite starkly the
contrast between the relatively more open approach taken at an HE institution (a post-92 university)
with the rigid and micro-managed context of HE in FE sector:

John [Craig, Teesside University partner] described the process of creating a new module at
Huddersfield which started with a very general brief to create "something international".
While planning the course, he kept asking himself the following questions: what should
somebody at the end of level 4 know about local/global politics? What level are they at
now? What do they expect from the course? What would academic colleagues expect a first
year student to study? The course covered some rather basic issues - what is a war, how
many wars are there, what is the UN, what are the other international organisations, what is
globalisation etc. In the second term, there were more case studies looking at China; Iraq
war; there was also a week that was left blank in the curriculum and students voted on what
they wanted to see covered.

Phil’s [Johnson at University Centre Blackburn College] experiences of curriculum
development at his institution are quite different as at Blackburn this is a very top-down
process. The initiative to develop new courses will usually stem from managers who identify
potential areas of growth, such as for instance security management. The process of writing
new courses is all about the procedural elements - get the keywords in, assess, apply, put
together the book list, there is very little creativity involved and then people within the
college have to teach what Phil has written. Phil had only one opportunity within 15 years to
develop his own course which looked at forensics.

Those differences in academic practice will undoubtedly have an impact on how lectures are
approaching OERs and on their readiness to work with open content. Issues of tacit practice are
contextually bound by the institutions and relate to the following aspects of practice: what is taught;
how it is taught and ways in which teaching is organised and managed. At the same time, our UCBC
partners were at least able to begin a dialogue with their curriculum development team, as
evidenced by the following account from an e-mail correspondence:



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I’ve kept our curriculum development team informed throughout the year about the
research and they have supported our plans for developing our work in future years. This
support has not yet extended beyond verbal approval but discussions are taking place for a
more formal level of support. Curriculum development organised a meeting for staff in July
in order to promote the use of OERs in enhancing teaching and learning. The feedback was
positive and several people subsequently told me they found the whole approach to be
thought provoking.

Yet another element of curriculum design and delivery which emerged as relevant to the OER
context had been that of disciplinary context (as mentioned previously, the project emphasised the
specificity of social sciences disciplines), as reflected in the comment from Teesside University
partner posted on the wiki:

When we are thinking about what works best as an OER, we are invariably asking questions
about our discipline and how we think about teaching and learning. (…) students might bring
to the study of criminology representations about victimisation, offending, and the major
criminal justice agencies which respond to offending, as found in the media (…)I have a very
clear idea of what works in that face to face situation, and that has been honed each year by
the responses of students. There are often debates within criminology about how best to
teach, conceptualise and explain the subject. (…) This raises wide ranging questions about
learning and teaching in criminology, and how we might acknowledge these questions in
OER design.

This comment emphasises the relevance of the approach undertaken by the C-SAP project that
attempts to articulate the tacit understandings of academic and pedagogic practices within social
sciences disciplines. At the same time, the above quote also points to the importance of considering
the disciplinary context in which OERs are produced and (re)used. The next section expands on
themes related to student engagement in the context of the cascade framework.

3.2. Student engagement
As mentioned previously, student engagement was one of the cascade framework priority areas and
so the C-SAP project strove to create opportunities for project partners to incorporate engagement
with student perspectives on the use of OER to support learning. Furthermore, as mentioned in the
project bid, in the context of developing the cascade framework we were also keen on cascading a
rationale for using open resources so that lecturers can develop modules which would be more
engaging of students.

To start with, the theme of student engagement was a running thread through the reflexive tasks
and the discussions we had with the partners throughout the project. Accordingly, with the first


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reflexive task we encouraged the partners to start thinking about the ways in which they would
explain/introduce OERs to their students. In the third reflexive task partners were prompted to
envisage ways in which students as key stakeholders could be involved in the development of the
cascade framework. Finally, the fourth task (based around peer review) included the following
prompts:

In our draft mindmap of the cascade framework, we have indicated a number of approaches
to using OERs with students: “hand-picked”, “letting students loose” and “students as
producers”. Each of these implies rather different priorities for content production and
release, as well as for reuse of content. Which approach have you adopted when introducing
OER resources and/or open education-related concepts to your students? Have you
identified any particular resources, strategies etc. that others might find useful? Finally, what
conditions need to be met to enable students to understand the purpose and their
relationship with OERs and how might we deal with any issues they might have about loss of
contact with teachers?

The next section of this report provides accounts of the ways in which project partners have
incorporated elements of student engagement in the context of the project.

3.2.1. Account of student engagement at Bangor University
The first approach, taken by the Welsh partner, was that of involving students in the evaluation of
the open teaching resource, where the resource in question was a 10-credit SPSS module in Welsh
to become part of the MA in Language Policy and Planning (see section 2.1. for further information).
Students were expected to provide comments on the resource itself as it was being developed as
well as on the questionnaires that they would be producing after working through the resource. The
intention of the partners was to utilise the questionnaires and the resulting discussion as teaching
material within the future versions of the SPSS resource.

The cohort of core students on that course was quite small, with five students, where two were
based at the host institution and studying full time, while three others were geographically dispersed
and studying part time alongside full time employment. Importantly, the students were very
engaged with the course and interested in utilising the SPSS resource to develop their skills in
quantitative research methods, and also to apply the newly gained skills in their day-to-day working
environment. This way, they were more likely to remain committed to engaging in a participatory
way with the resource by providing comments and contributing to the online discussions.

Partners reported on a number of issues that emerged in the first couple of months of working on
the resource, where students failed to contribute because of difficulties with accessing the
university’s Blackboard, where the discussion forum accompanying the resource was hosted, or the



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relevant version of SPSS. Therefore, student engagement in that context highlighted the relevance of
technical infrastructure as key in terms of students successful (or not) engagement with OERs.

3.2.2. Account of student engagement at Teesside University
The Teesside University partners took a different approach to student engagement. Given that the
resources repurposed during the cascade project were not originally developed at Teesside, they
decided instead to organise a focus group to explore how students used technology and what
experience, if any, they had of OERs. The group was conducted by Michael Teague and Philip
Makinson (Education Officer at Teesside Student Union) in March 2011, the report from that focus
group was later posted on the project wiki and subsequently released into Slideshare.5

In general, students have not been exposed to the concept of Open Educational Resources and
initially argued that they had never used OERs in their learning. At the same time, further discussion
showed that they had in practice often used learning, teaching, and research resources that were in
the public domain, given that this definition included course materials (often but not always
accessed via the VLE), YouTube videos, streaming videos, textbooks including Google books, and
other material which provided knowledge and information. Therefore, it could be argued that the
students were using “grey OERs” – that is, resources in public domain which are freely accessible
online and often shared informally but not licensed in a way that would allow for reuse or
repurposing (Brent, 2011).

As the Teesside partners reported, the students in the focus group did not feel that a greater
emphasis on OERs (for instance, by formally incorporating them into the curriculum) might assist
them. In fact, one of the students articulated the perception that the use of OERs by staff might
somehow be “cheating” because those resources would not have been explicitly designed with the
needs of particular students in mind. Within this understanding of OERs, open resources are seen as
lacking in the personalised element of the interaction between the students and the lecturer and
therefore inferior. We believe this is a relevant finding in terms of indicating student preconceived
notions of OERs and potential barriers to larger uptake of this type of resources, especially given the
impending changes to tuition fees. Within the changing funding landscape, where students are
conceptualised as consumers, the perception of OERs as “less than” the actual interaction with
lecturers in an institutional context might create barriers to supporting the inclusion of OERs within
the curriculum. The experiences of the UCBC partner discussed in the next section provide further
insights into student perceptions of OERs.

5
The report is available from http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/focus-group-with-staff-
at-teesside-university-csap-cascade-project



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3.2.3. Account of student engagement at University Centre at Blackburn College
In terms of student engagement at UCBC, project partners had two quite contrasting experiences,
which provided relevant insights into student preference for personalised and/or “hand-picked
OERs” offered in the context of guided discovery and their reluctance to engage with OERs within a
less structured, informal learning context.

At the outset of the project, one of the UCBC partners (Craig Hammond) hoped to explore the
pedagogic potential open education and the concept of students as creative co-producers of
knowledge (Neary and Winn, 2009; Winn, 2011). This rather radical vision clashed with students’
general unwillingness to engage with OERs even at the level of use, let alone re-use and creation.
This was illustrated very vividly through the findings from an informal focus group aimed at
introducing students to OERs, which included an overview of OER repositories as well as ideas
around open education such as edupunk (Downes, 2008). While initially the students seemed to
appreciate the concept of using OERs, their interest was short-lived:

virtually all members of the group had not really interacted with the materials in any way
whatsoever. So, I asked them why this was the case, and the various (though quite standard)
responses related to the ‘context’ (or perceived rationale) to actually embark upon such
activities. The group (even the few students who had made at least some attempt to access
the OERs) identified as part of their feedback, that, as undergraduates, their preference is to
focus upon specific and directed research, self-directed activities that can ‘clearly’ (and
positively) influence the grades attained in assignments (and exams).

Thus the main issue was that students struggled to see the relevance of OERs and perceived them as
extracurricular and external to their learning. Overall, this is an important finding in terms of
positioning OERs within the curriculum, at the same time the quote points to challenges involved in
realising the full potential of OERs for learning and teaching.

The second attempt at engaging students with OERs at UCBC took place towards the end of the
project as part of a guided activity for third-year students on a research methods module6. As part of
the activity, project partners emailed the students with instructions to access a Word file containing
a set of prompts inviting them to evaluate three different OER resources:

• How useful/accessible did you find the presentation of the information in these resources?
• Explain the likelihood of you using this/similar resource(s) as part of your future studies (i.e.
in assignments, presentations etc.).

6
Full report which includes links to OERs mentioned in this section can be accessed from project
Slideshare account at http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/csap-student-cascade-activity-
feedback


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• Would you recommend the use of these OER resources to other students/learners? Please
explain your answer.
• What could be ‘improved’ (if anything) in order for you to use/recommend these OER
resources as part of future studies?

Two of those resources were Voicethread-based presentations uploaded to vimeo, where a UCBC
lecturer explained how to create a contents page, and how to reference using Word 2007. The third
resource was an OpenLearn module on the topic of French Revolution. At the outset of the task,
students were provided with basic information on OERs and the OER movement. That information
emphasised the potential benefits of OERs for student learning and offered a rationale for students
to engage with OERs both in the context of the task and beyond:

The Open Educational Resources (OER's) movement has received major backing from
governments in both the UK and USA and has the potential to do to the education industry
what the web 2.0 has done to other information industries such as news, music and
publishing. Education will have to increasingly confront (and utilise) these changes; (…) The
OER field is evolving and it is therefore prudent for us to engage with it now, so that we, as
students and educational practitioners can be prepared to meet the immediate and future
changes in H.E.

The most important finding stemming from that activity was that students overwhelmingly
enthusiastic about the video-based resources produced by a lecturer that they knew in comparison
to the opinions expressed about the OpenLearn resource. The reactions to the videos were very
positive with students claiming that they would use the resource again for their own learning:

Easily accessible and extremely useful, particularly if students are embarking on their initial
assignments and need guidance ... (Student 1).

I would use these resources for other things in my studies. I think they are really helpful, and
I especially like how I can access them so easily at home and watch as many times as I
needed to ... Moreover, I would use them as it gives me the opportunity to pick my learning
environment to ensure I get the most of the information, unlike in a classroom where I am
less likely to learn it. (Student 2).

The reactions to the OpenLearn resource were mixed and significantly more critical:

The likelihood of using a similar resource in a future assignment would be quite high as there
is a lot of information given and you would be able to reference it. However it would take up
a lot of time to read which could potentially put people off! (Student 3)



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I’d say it’s highly unlikely that I would use this type of source to try and teach myself any
new skills but I may use it to extract the odd reference from. (Student 4).

The difference in format might explain some of the difference in reactions especially as other
research points to student preference for video-based resources which might be connected with the
fact that it offers a means of catering to different learning styles (Kuhn et al., 2010). It has to be
noted that student comments about their intention to reuse any of the resources are purely
speculative and have to be taken at face value. It is quite possible that the approach of the students
would be exactly the same as in the first rather unsuccessful attempt of project partners at engaging
students with OERs described earlier in this section. At the same time, the results of this activity
clearly demonstrate student preference for OERs which are “home-grown” and personalised - the
two videos in question have been produced by a lecturer that the students knew in order to address
the gaps that the lecturer had identified in student study skills.

This poses somewhat of a dilemma in terms of how best to cater for this preference – given the
abundance of already existing teaching resources in the public domain, it would not be sustainable
or cost-effective for lecturers to invest time and resources in producing new OERs from scratch
instead of re-using ones that are available. At the same time, those findings should be interpreted as
an encouragement for lecturers to openly share their teaching materials with the students and
design those materials with openness in mind, to avoid costly retrofitting. Furthermore, student
feedback indicates that OERs should be introduced in a supported and structured way to increase
the likelihood of students incorporating open resources into their learning. Finally, it is important to
spend time exploring student perceptions and attitudes on OERs (with a view to perhaps start
challenging them) in addition to equipping them with relevant technical skills. It would also be
beneficial to explore ways in which personalisation can be achieved when lecturers use OERs created
outside their institutions. The next section will shift the focus to exploring the role of institutional
context with regard to the processes around OER production and release.

3.3. Institutional context: HE in FE
One of the aims of the project has been to examine and critique the ways in which the use of OERs
within the curriculum impacts on boundaries between HE and HE in FE contexts. The experiences of
our UCBC partner point to a number of challenges specific to that sector; at the same time, the
cascade project has demonstrated that it is possible to successfully cascade OERs within that
challenging context.

Some of the challenges specific to HE in FE reported by our partners included the previously
mentioned lack of flexibility in terms of curriculum development (see section 4.1., page 19) and very
high teaching workloads leaving little time to engage in research. This was coupled with an


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institutional culture where lecturers were micro-managed and for the most part discouraged from
being creative or innovative in their teaching practice. At the outset of the project, one of the UCBC
partners commented on the institutional barriers he encountered on a daily basis in his academic
practice, and the ways in which those barriers could impede the uptake of OERs:

I am not sure that the administrators in my institution will see the benefits in OER as the lack
of a transparent financial reward may be an obstacle in encouraging them to provide the
time for colleagues to contribute. However, I will argue that the current drive to use OER
means that if my institution seeks an inclusive image then relevant support should be given
to participating colleagues.

At the same time, despite those anxieties, our partners were hoping that their participation in the
project will equip them with skills and knowledge that will have a positive impact not only on their
colleagues but also their students:

I will encourage my students to get involved via stating that extra resources could help with
their grades and I would give examples of where OER has benefited the learning experience
in terms of increasing communication skills and confidence levels. I hope that the students’
involvement will mean that their confidence levels improve as this can be a common
problem for HE in FE students and hope that this self-empowerment will develop their levels
of critical thinking and creativity.

Thus OERs were seen as having the potential to address some of the challenges that the partners
experienced with regard to teaching in a context where retention was a huge problem and a large
proportion of the students had never undertaken A-levels, or were mature students making a
second attempt at education. In particular, our partners were concerned about the low level of
digital literacy skills, as evidenced in the exchange from the development workshop in May 2011
quoted below:

Phil mentioned that his students are not very digitally advanced and he wondered what
relationship this had to his students’ class/socioeconomic status. At the same time, Richard
mentioned that the situation at SHU is similar and the general level of Blackboard use is very
low-level; there are also issues around accessibility/readability when it comes to the
postgraduate students he works with. Similarly, John mentioned issues that he discovered in
the context of the foundation degree, in particular social access to IT.

Thus through participation in the cascade project, the UCBC partners were able to have some of
their assumptions challenged, such as the belief that the low level of digital literacy of their students
was unique to their institutional context. Therefore, the C-SAP cascade project strove to focus more
on the strengths of HE in FE sector, such as an emphasis on teaching and student satisfaction as well


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as high level of pastoral support for students, and potential synergies with the HE sector rather than
view these sectors as diametrically opposite.

Accordingly, project partners have responded quite creatively to the restrictions imposed on them
by their institutional context and decided to use the space of the project to create a staff
development resource which will be used at UCBC as part of staff research-protected time (at UCBC,
staff receive a 33 hours release from teaching duties to engage in broadly conceived scholarly
activity). “Creativity for Edupunks” is a wiki-based resource aimed at HE in FE staff that comprises of
eleven approximately 3-hour long activity-based sessions, covering issues related to identifying,
locating, releasing and putting OERs into curriculum, understanding the concept of “openness” as
well as pedagogical issues around student engagement and in particular innovative assessment.
More broadly, the resource also encourages reflection on the space of research in the working lives
of teaching professionals. The resource is also a way of cascading what our partners have learnt in
the context of the project both to colleagues within their institution and beyond.

Furthermore, throughout the process of developing the resource and seeking formal accreditation
so that it can be used for staff development purposes, our partners have engaged in a dialogue with
one of project key stakeholder, senior management at their institution. Our partners drew on
insights from that dialogue when organising a cascade dissemination event due to take place in
September 2011. Accordingly, the event will focus on the time-saving qualities of OERs as well as
express OERs' ability to improve curriculum design and review processes, as reflected in a comment
received in an email during the planning process:

We would like the event to convey a sense of the powerful potential of OERs and how
'openness' could reduce the replication of work already done before, probably on numerous
occasions.

As regards 'powerful potential' we feel that OERs can improve the visibility of HE in FE and
have potential for increased student numbers and improved engagement and retention. The
audience will presumably know little about the amount or types of OERs and this kind of
information will be extremely useful for lecturers with weekly teaching responsibilities of 24
hours a week.

As the experiences of other projects in the context of the UKOER programme have shown, senior
management buy-in is crucial in terms of ensuring long-term support for OERs.



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3.4. Institutional context: teaching through the medium of Welsh
The Welsh-medium context featured quite prominently in the context of the cascade project. Our
colleagues argued that overall, Welsh-speaking academics should in general be quite receptive to
the ideas of OERs due to a cultural context within which sharing is essential to sustain teaching the
medium of Welsh, they also pointed to the potential synergies between the development of Welsh
Medium HE teaching and the OER agenda, as evidenced in the write-up of one of the reflexive tasks
quoted below:

The Welsh Medium teaching is undertaken across a number of HEIs in Wales. However, even
in those institutions with a strong tradition of Welsh Medium teaching initiatives in the past
have been piece meal and dependent on the active engagement and enthusiasm of a small
number of Welsh speaking staff who are committed to delivering education in Welsh. This
context is changing as the Welsh Government has committed to the establishment of a
Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, which will provide increased resources and national strategic
planning for the development of Welsh Medium HE. As part of the emerging Welsh Medium
agenda colleagues have become increasingly interested in developing and sharing Welsh
Medium resources – and in securing an effective repository for material developed for
particular courses that may be retained and / or reused in the future.

Our colleagues added that because there are so few resources in Welsh at the moment, there is a
higher chance for reuse since importantly; OERs are seen as a means by which the curriculum can be
accessed and also to facilitate the development of Welsh language skills. The experiences of our
Welsh partners emphasise the need to examine the cultural context in which teaching practice is
realised; it is also imperative to build on already existing examples of good practice and support
those efforts in an organised manner to move from a piecemeal, scattergun approach to a more
encompassing one.

Our involvement with the Welsh partners also demonstrates the relevance of taking into account
the cultural context of sharing with regard to repositories and technical infrastructure. Our partners
located within the Welsh Federal College (http://www.colegcymraeg.org/) are creating and
repurposing OERs in the context Y Porth learning gateway (http://www.porth.ac.uk/en/), which has
been developed to allow universities across Wales to share Welsh medium resources nationally and
deliver cross-institutional university modules using innovative e-learning technologies. There are
complexities in terms of three levels of access to Y Porth, which hosts resources that are freely and
openly available to anyone regardless of their institutional affiliation; resources available to any
student or member of staff across the federation of Welsh colleges and finally resources that can be
accessed only by students and staff on a particular module. While it could be argued that resources
hosted within Y Porth are not truly open, nevertheless, the repository meets the needs of its users


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and supports the creation of a Welsh medium academic community in which students can receive
high quality Welsh medium university education. The Welsh case study has also prompted an
exploration of issues related to the predominance of English with regard to OER production and
(re)use and future funding might be needed to address the challenges of offering courses in a
bilingual teaching context.7

3.5. Critical engagement with OERs
The reflexive approach undertaken by the project team meant that there was space for both
partners and stakeholder involved in the project to voice opinions that were at times quite critical of
OERs. Some of these contributions also brought up a number of doubts and fears related to OERs. At
the same time, opening up the debate means that it becomes possible to challenge assumptions that
are being taken for granted or misconceptions related to sharing resources openly.

For instance, members of the focus group undertaken with members of staff at Teesside University
(see section 3.1., page 6, for more information) have brought up a number of concerns around OERs,
some of which were rooted in a lack of understanding of copyright in the context of sharing
resources openly:

Is it not risky? Could things not be stolen? I was just thinking about what has been on the
news, that New College of Humanities, are they not plagiarising? There must be a risk, if
your stuff is there as an available resource.
I’ve got stuff now from when I taught in Manchester, which was given to me by a colleague
who was there. Sharing resources doesn’t bother me... but something about it being
available to anybody, anywhere, is quite strange. You have put quite a lot of time and energy
into thinking about how you might deliver and share those resources with students. I don’t
know how I would feel about sharing them.
What about staff from other universities? If you are at a different university and thinking,
how can we attract postgraduates? If you’ve got a lovely course, well thought out, and the
reading list is there... I think it’s a bit barmy, to be honest, to give it away. It’s more about it
being copied by other institutions – I think that’s the more dangerous thing. You want to
differentiate yourself in the market. How do you defend that? I don’t know.

7
See also related blog post “Parlez-vous OER? Open Educational Resources in multilingual contexts”
http://csapopencascade.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/parlez-vous-oer-open-educational-resources-
in-multilingual-contexts/


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While there is an acknowledgment that informal sharing is a common and widespread practice
within academia (for instance, reliance on existing materials when teaching a course for the first
time), the responses above indicate a rather high level of anxiety around the risk of plagiarism,
stealing intellectual property or losing competitive edge. Some of those fears could easily be
dispelled by educating academics about the nature of Creative Commons licensing; this could be
achieved by for instance signposting colleagues to existing case studies which document the
experiences of academics involved with OERs and the quite often positive impact of sharing
resources on their practice.8 At the same time, there is a clear need for an intervention which would
go beyond the level of individual practice where ideally OERs would be incorporated into formal
mechanisms of reward and recognition. This way, the emphasis would shift from perceiving
engagement with OERs as a risky endeavour where the academic is likely to lose out (for instance by
having their ideas stolen or their effort unacknowledged) to a practice which enhances student
experience and the profile of the institution as a whole.

Acknowledging the effort related to creating/reusing/teaching with OERs would also support
lecturers in taking risks with their pedagogy, and this is an area where a number of anxieties have
surfaced in the context of the project, as evidenced in the following comment from one of the
partners:

one of the dilemmas myself and Craig talked about on the way here and we talked before, is
the dilemma of the tutor and that the OER you are recommending is better than you, now,
you know, I think now, I can cope with that kind of criticism but if I was new to teaching, no
way.

This comments points to the relevance of the approach undertaken by the C-SAP cascade project
where a discussion of pedagogical frameworks was an essential element of creating and repurposing
OERs. We also see the value of the project in approaching OERs in a critical and reflexive way and
challenging some of the taken for granted assumptions when it comes to entrenched academic
habits.

8
One example would be case studies developed in the context of C-SAP pilot project which are
available from the project website http://www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/oer/case_studies/index.html



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4. Impact

4.1. Immediate Impact
While we have experienced a number of challenges when it comes to realising the full potential of
project methodology (and by implication, OERs), we can already report on a number of positive
changes related to our participation in the UKOER programme. To start with, the formal evaluation
report has concluded that the participatory process of the C-SAP project of cascading support for
OER embedding has had a positive impact on partners as shown in the following interview
comments.

- This project has exceeded our expectation in the sense that it has enabled a deep
level of thought that I did not think would have been possible.
- The reflexive approach of this project was the right choice although difficult at first.
- Anything that brings people together and gets them to work together is a good
thing.
- I am more aware about a variety of OER production tools such as Voicethread and
Prezi.
- The project has influenced us with regards to OER.

Partners have plans to cascade the knowledge gained in the context of the project in their respective
institutions and are organising dissemination events due to take place in September 2011. We see
those events as an essential element of “cascade in action” where partners adapt elements of the
cascade framework to suit their needs and reflect their institutional context. The events also
demonstrate the realised potential of the cascade framework to make an impact on academic
practice in terms of embedding OERs on an institutional level. The event organised by University
Centre Blackburn College partners involves colleagues from local colleges and focus on challenges of
open education in the context of HE in FE. The Teesside partners plan to emphasise issues related to
the disciplinary context for embedding OERS within the social sciences curriculum (for more
information about these events, see Appendix 2, page 38). In organising these events, partners
strove to engage the project key stakeholders and so both events will feature current SCORE [Open
University Support Centre for Open Resources in Education] fellows. Any resources produced in the
context of these events will be deposited on the project wiki and released openly.

Importantly, we are embedding OER-related issues into other areas of work undertaken by C-SAP,
such as our early careers workshops aimed at PhD students and post-doctoral researchers within the
social sciences. During the 9-10 June 2011 workshop we included a session on OERs and copyright.
Following positive feedback from the attendees, the session on open education will now be included
in the forthcoming early careers workshop planned for November 2011. We are also ensuring that


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the booklet “OERs in social sciences: cascading knowledge” produced in the context of the cascade
project is added to delegate packs for all C-SAP events. OER dissemination will also be embedded
within events planned for later this year, including a C-SAP showcase day planned for 24 October
2011. Importantly, all participants at that event will be encouraged to release their posters and
presentations openly and so the joining instructions include guidance on Creative Commons
licensing and the benefits of sharing resources9.

4.2. Future Impact
We are aware of our obligation to maintain the resources for three years past the end of project, at
the same time, C-SAP will be wrapping up its activity in December 2011, given the restructuring of
the Higher Education Academy. At the moment, we are finalising plans for maintaining the resources
after the closure of the centre; one option being considered at the moment includes depositing
relevant resources (such as for instance the set of cascade tools) into JISC Design Studio.
Importantly, all of the resources produced in the context of the project are offered with
contextualising materials, guidance notes, and observations on institutional differences etc. so that
they can be easily reused and repurposed by others.

All of our partners have expressed their plans to continue their involvement with OERs past the end
of the project funding, whether in the form of creating and releasing more resources or
disseminating the results of the project via academic papers and presentations. For instance, UCBC
partners are planning to write an article outlining their experiences of releasing the “Creativity for
edupunks” resource and the challenges of embedding OERs within the HE in FE sector. Similarly,
project manager will begin a SCORE fellowship in October 2011 where she will focus on ways in
which images are repurposed in the context of creating and releasing OERs.

5. Conclusions

5.1. General conclusions
Overall, we believe it is important to encourage a broader discussion on issues related to the open
education principles and the transformative potential of OERs for pedagogic and academic practices.
The suggested reflexive yet critical approach towards OERs should also engage with the question
considering under what conditions individuals will take risks with their pedagogy. Given our
emphasis on teasing out tacit elements of academic practice we believe it is vital to make space for
those critical voices and anxieties and include them as part of a debate on the understandings of
OERs and even more broadly, the meaning of open education. This is of particular importance

9
The full text of guidance has been uploaded to C-SAP slideshare account
http://www.slideshare.net/CSAPSubjectCentre/guidance-on-creative-commons-licensing


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especially in view of the forthcoming challenges in the higher education sector and the climate of
heightened student expectations.

5.2. Conclusions relevant to the wider community
We believe that our work has identified some problems related to the current academic practice of
viewing OERs as supplemental. The implications of this practice are two-fold – first of all, it informs
student attitudes towards OERs and results in their rather low uptake; secondly, viewing OERs as
supplemental means that issues around assessment, accreditation or embedding OERs within the
core curriculum fail to be adequately addressed. Our project has offered relevant insights into
student preference for personalised and/or “hand-picked OERs” offered in the context of guided
discovery and their reluctance to engage with OERs within a less structured, informal learning
context. Our work has also revealed that certain assumptions about using online resources remain
unchallenged, such as for instance the belief on the part of staff that sharing resources is inevitably
connected with the risk of plagiarism or intellectual property theft or the concerns voiced by
students that OERs are inferior to other types of teaching methods and could be seen as a “cop-out”
on the part of lecturers. These assumptions need to be articulated and challenged so that students
and academics stop missing out on a chance to enhance their digital literacy skills and engage with
more innovative teaching and learning practices.

5.3. Conclusions relevant to the HEA/JISC
Our work has demonstrated that there is a need to address the institutional, cultural as well as
disciplinary context in which OERs are produced and re-used. Importantly, we believe that there
should be more of an emphasis on addressing issues specific to the HE in FE sector. At the same
time, we have attempted to highlight not just the challenges experienced by our colleagues in FE
institutions such as for instance very high teaching workloads, low priority given to research
activities etc. but also potential contributions that they could make to the sector in general, given
the high priority of teaching and providing support to the students. On a related note, our colleagues
have suggested that within HE in FE institutions OERs could function as a valid alternative to
publishing in a situation where producing peer-reviewed research is often not a feasible option
because of a huge teaching workload. Therefore, there is a clear need to explore ways in which OERs
would be incorporated into formal mechanisms of reward and recognition.



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6. Recommendations

6.1. General recommendations
Overall, we would also like to emphasise the relevance of discussing issues around pedagogy and
recommend a continued engagement with examining tacit aspects of academic practice and their
relationship to OER (re)use. Importantly, future work should explore contradictions between
teacher-centred pedagogic models prevalent at higher education institutions and the ethos of open
education which calls for a more learner-centred and decentralized approach.

6.2. Recommendations for the wider community
Given the experiences of some of our project partners, we would welcome the development of
guidelines and/or toolkits aimed at making the case for OERs with senior management and high-
level stakeholders. While similar toolkits have been developed in the context of the US-based Open
CourseWare consortium project (OpenCourseWare Consortium, n.d.), it would be useful to have
access to guidelines that recognise the specificity of the UK HE/HE in FE sector.

6.3. Recommendations for the HEA/JISC
Finally, based on our experiences, we would recommend that any future JISC/HEA projects are
actively encouraged to take up Web2.0 applications as project management tools; in particular, we
would recommend the use of Twitter for dissemination purposes as well as creating and sustaining
research networks and the use of blogs to communicate work-in-progress. Given how important it is
to achieve senior management buy-in at an institutional level, we would also suggest that the use of
OERs becomes a discussion point for the PVC network run through the HEA to discuss barriers and
solutions to sharing and repurposing materials.

7. Implications for the future
We believe that our work emphasises the relevance of addressing issues related to pedagogy and
tacit elements of academic practice, and that crucially, those are as important as issues related to
technical development. Overall, the purpose of this approach is to enable cultural change, not just to
produce materials but to create a space for understanding the current HE sector needs.

Furthermore, our work emphasises the need to explore student attitudes towards OERs and so it
might be beneficial to undertake further work which focusing around student understandings of
OERs and factors that could influence a more active engagement of students with those resources.
On a related note, further work on the implications of embedding OERs within the curriculum should
address issues around accreditation/assessment.



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C-SAP cascade project final report

C-SAP cascade project final report

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