Sustainable policies, sustainable resources and predictions for sustainable re-use: lessons from the OOER project
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Presentation at SCORE event 'Making Open the easiest option' at Leeds, 13 May 2010 - speakers Megan Quenin-Baxter Thomson and Suzanne Hardy, Newcastle and OOER project
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Sustainable policies, sustainable resources and predictions for sustainable re-use: lessons from the OOER project
- 1. Sustainable policies, sustainable resources and predictions for sustainable re-use: lessons from the OOER project Dr Megan Quentin-Baxter Director, Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (MEDEV) Suzanne Hardy MEDEV Senior Advisor and OOER Project Manager Newcastle University www.medev.ac.uk
- 2. Subject strand projects www.medev.ac.uk
- 4. OOER: iterative improvement cycle www.medev.ac.uk
- 5. OOER: readiness categorisation pyramid www.medev.ac.uk
- 6. Good practice compliance table (managing risk) www.medev.ac.uk Good practice compliance table (managing risk) Explanation Risk of litigation from infringement of IPR/copyright or patient consent rights Action 3 Institutional policies are clearly in place to enable resources to be compared to the toolkits. Low. Institution follows best practice and has effective take down strategies. Institution able to legally pursue those infringing the institution’s rights. Periodically test resources against policies to keep policies under review. Keep abreast of media stories. Limited liability insurance required. 2 Compliance tested and policies are adequate in most but not all aspects to allow the compliance of a resource to be accurately estimated. A small number of areas where policies need to be further developed for complete clarity. Medium. Ownership of resources is likely to be clear. Good practice is followed in relation to patients. Take down and other ‘complaint’ policies are in place and being followed. Review those areas where developed is required, possibly in relation to e.g. staff not employed by the institution e.g. emeritus or visiting or NHS. It may be that a partner organisation requires improvement to their policies. Some liability insurance may be necessary. 1 Compliance tested but too few policies available or insufficiently specified to allow the compliance of any particular resource to good practice guidelines to be accurately estimated. Medium. It is unlikely that the ownership and therefore licensing of resources is clear. Resources theoretically owned by the institution could be being ripped off. Collate suite of examples of best practice and review against existing institutional policies. Follow due process to amend and implement those which are relevant to the institution. Take out liability insurance . 0 Compliance with the toolkits unknown/untested. Compliance has been tested and materials failed to pass. High/Unknown. Risk may be minimal if resource was developed based on best practice principles. Institutional policy status (ownership, consent) is unknown. Establish a task force to test some resources against institutional policies; then follow 1-3 below. Take out liability insurance.
- 7. Toolkits–asking necessary questions with links to sample policy documents/further information www.medev.ac.uk Sample policy documents Y Start Identify content type Image/video/audio? Patient data? Y Y Text? N N N Refer to WP3 workflow Refer to WP2 workflow Refer to WP5 workflow Is the IPR status clear? Y N Refer to WP6 workflow Collect basic metadata about resource
- 9. www.medev.ac.uk cc by-nc-sa http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertfrancis/100775342/ www.medev.ac.uk/oer/value.html
- 14. ‘ Resources’ identified for inclusion www.medev.ac.uk Resources identified for inclusion per site Case studies WP4 database Newcastle University 8 (3) 949 University of Oxford 3 (1) 14 University of Aberdeen 4 (2) 35 The Royal Veterinary College 5 (1) 64 University of Nottingham 6 (3) 19 University of Southampton 5 (1) TBC University of Bristol 4 (1) 133 Queen’s University Belfast 4 (2) 7 Imperial College 2 (1) 28 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 1 (1) 2 St Georges, University of London 4 (2) 63 Cardiff University 2 TBC Bedfordshire University 2 TBC University of Edinburgh 2 5 University of Warwick 2 TBC Keele University 2 (1) TBC Non partner (e.g. other HEIs) 5 800 Total 60 (19) ~2000
- 17. Setting the scene Academic Institution LCMS autonomous specialized educational modules has/creates cc: by-nc-sa Graphics courtesy of Chara Balasubramiam St George’s, University of London uses uses
- 19. Product vs process Module specification documents Assessment Feedback Student handbooks Lectures Work based learning Handouts CAL Seminars PBL/groupwork Library Discussions Student generated content Hidden curriculum Labwork Tutorials Videos Podcasts Animations Reading lists Social networking Blogs Wikis Bookmarks cc: by-nc-sa
- 20. Product vs process www.flickr.com/photos/swoo/3213525752/ cc: by-nc-sa
- 21. Resource collections cc: by-nc-sa
- 22. National repository VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE VLE Active staff involvement Photo: Miroslav Vajdia http://11031.openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike cc: by-nc-sa
- 24. PIMPS* example *Put in many places & syndicate www.medev.ac.uk/oer cc: by-nc-sa
- 25. Diametric opposition? Trackability Openness More context More granularity Context? Confidence? Time? Formal peer review Star ratings/user comments cc: by-nc-sa
- 28. Acknowledgements: project partners www.medev.ac.uk
- 31. Call: 0191 222 5888 Email: [email_address] [email_address] Toolkits: www.medev.ac.uk/oer/ cc some rights reserved Stefan Baudy www.flickr.com/photos/-bast-/349497988/
Editor's Notes
- Thanks Chris for the invitation to present as part of this sustainability workshop. Suzanne and I will cover some of the sustainability questions, such as adopting highly defensible OER policies to safeguard the release of resources, that we attempted to address in our OER project, and crystal-ball gaze into a sustainable future. We are not experts in open release or sustainability and we appreciate that in a one year project we are pressed to keep our understanding of developments ‘out there’ up to date with our own findings. We wish to thank Lindsay Wood who is the project officer on the project described later in this presentation. MEDEV was fortunate to be awarded a project in Phase 1 of the OER programme:
- Which had sustainability at its heart from the outset – sustainability in terms of collecting, storing and releasing materials, and using current practice to inform and develop policy. We have 17 HEI partners, and about 10 national and international advisors including professional bodies, etc. In fact Suzanne is presenting to the Inter-regulatory Group of the professional bodies in health and social care on Monday. We focused on releasing a substantial amount of resources in medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine, postgraduate and staff development through testing their OER readiness against a series of good practice toolkits. Challenges to Subject Strand projects are working across many institutions – Guidance needs to be generic/tailorable to multiple institutional contexts (e.g. institutional policies; internal structure of the organisation may vary; etc.) There may be subject specific elements (fieldwork; how teachers approach finding resources to use in teaching; etc.) Teachers may be employed by non-HEI employer (e.g. work based learning; health care settings; working with professional and regulatory bodies; clinical honorary contracts) Potential for multiple resources on the same topic (e.g. handwashing video) Many different opinions about how we could succeed with the project Subject centre staff are not employed by the contributors – have to be careful within the project Some people thought that we were starting OOER from a blank playing field/scratch, others that everything that we needed was already available.
- We have found that there are many conflicting tensions evoked by the thought of going OER. It may be fashionable today but it may go out of fashion if the cons outweigh the pros. On one hand (left hand column) institutions welcome the idea of showcasing their learning materials, but they are very aware (right hand column) of the possibility that some materials might be poor graphical quality, or worse, inaccurate. While they are happy to contribute materials they are unsure if they will use materials produced by others. However we can bust the Not Invented Here myth – academic teaching materials are FULL of other peoples stuff! They are concerned that if someone does abuse the content, they will not be able to afford to force them to cease their activity. There is a general preference for keeping learning materials on a private Virtual Learning Environment / not to be aware. What we need to do is raise confidence in using and reusing educational resources.
- We developed a process centred around an iterative improvement cycle where the use of good-practice risk-assessment toolkits would highlight issues in ‘going OER’; and case studies would document each experience, and, in the early stages, issues with the toolkits. Because the toolkits have to be generic to many institutions they are being tested with all partners to understand their fitness for purpose. As the institutional policies become more robust and processes more embedded, the need for case studies and toolkits might lessen, or even disappear completely. We were also aware that not all resources, even with the best toolkit in the world, would reach ‘open’ status.
- We went through a process of collecting information (mapping and categorisation) about teaching resources which could possibly be made available. All potential resources would be somewhere on this scale, and we deliberately wanted to find examples of resources at all the coloured levels in order to test our toolkits. Resources in the red area either haven’t been tested in the toolkits, or have been tested and will never be made open. Examples of this might include material where patient identity or respect for patients’ rights cannot be assured. In the orange region resources need a lot of work in order to get them ready to be made open: they have problems with IPR, or patient consent, or quality/branding. Materials in the yellow section were potentially easy to release, and typically these are the sort of materials that are already on websites, along with resources in the green area. An example of a green resource might be a course guide document already available on the web. It may be that the resource has gone out of date in which case they slip from green back into yellow. Once we had identified what kind of resource we had (green, amber or red) we would know how much effort we needed to invest in making it open. Once it is made open we wanted to ‘hallmark’ resources clearly with a Creative Commons licence. So what are the toolkits actually doing here?
- However, across the UK staff and students are already uploading teaching and other materials to the Internet/web, especially to social networking sites. People are already doing it. Failure to follow good practice doesn’t mean that you can’t do it, it just means that you need more insurance. If you are big enough and have no conscience you can just put materials up and wait for the lawyers to get in touch. The rest of us have to be more careful. Our best practice compliance table has been developed to assist institutions to understand how their policies measure up, in order to safeguard themselves from litigation brought against them, and also to establish their own rights in relation to their own copy and moral rights. It is intended as a guide only and legal advice should be sought by those wishing to adopt good practice risk-management policies. So what do the toolkits look like?
- Each toolkit is made up of essentially a question and answer decision tree. We have ended up with one big toolkit but to date we have thought of them primarily in terms of institutional policies led by colleagues at Keele University; IPR led by Chara; patient consent and quality led by Jane Williams at Bristol University. Each toolkit asks questions such as “:does your institution have a policy for…" “if so does it cover…” and depending on what you answer it takes you though a different path. At key points we have sample policy documents which are generally a hybrid of best practice with some lawyer input which the toolkits link to. These were implemented in Vue and OpenLabyrinth in which we commissioned some changes .
- It takes up to 2 hours to take an identified resource through the toolkit/sand develop a case study, but once you have done the first one the later ones are much quicker. You already know about IPR but it is worth rehearsing very briefly. Here is an image from a typical lecture in undergraduate medicine (from the Head and Neck series of lectures at Newcastle University):
- This lecture has been recorded as the lecturer is speaking. This powerpoint slide builds, to match the voiceover. Could you identify what are the issues here?
- [ask for suggestions]
- [Read slide] This is a very simple example as it doesn’t have any people-issues. One of the things that we promised to do was to look at patient and non-patient consents:
- Other OER projects have probably found from their work that we need to get more rigorous about consenting. OOER has examples of people who willing participate in videos for teaching but who don’t want them appearing on the Internet. Role players/simulated patients who take money for ‘appearances’ whose income could be affected by putting recordings on the web. We have students appearing in the background (asking questions at the end of a taped lecture) and branded products appearing in the background of videos (endorsement/moral right abuse). Patients have kindly agreed to release of clinical recordings which are not appropriate for a reputable organisation to release (which was the basic tenant behind medic restrict). We have teachers who appear in videos who pass away – is it fair to families to use that material without their consent? In health it is mandatory to consider these alongside IPR and so we propose the roll out of a Consent Commons which accepts a basic human right to refuse consent or at some point in the future to withdraw consent, so that the rights of those appearing in these materials are perfectly clear to users. This is about having good quality policies and following them in order to respect human dignity. Consent commons would have, like CC, at least three but possibly more levels, and the JISC has agreed 50K as part of the Strategic Content Alliance work to take this forward. Despite these limitations we have identified quite a few possible resources for comparison with the toolkits, specifically:
- Each partner has told us about a lot of potential content which is in the right hand column. Each case study that we have identified is selected to illustrate a different test. Of the 60 case studies we have identified those in brackets (with a total of 19) have already been documented, and used to inform version 2 of the toolkits. Mostly we have hit problems with Consent and third party upstream rights (the same as other projects we are sure) The resources listed in the right hand column are stored in a database ready to upload into JorumOpen:
- Which we will be doing using RSS. I will now hand over to Suzanne to get into some more challenging territory.
- These are only a few of the many recommendations, but they are the ones which we want to highlight to you today. We really need institutions to start using CC licences on their works, to clarify exactly who owns what and how it may be used. Institutions frightened of giving away the crown jewels may be perfectly happy with releasing up to 75% of a module or programme but not the whole thing. To protect ourselves and our colleagues into the future we need sophisticated searching (reputation based materials) and take down policies. We would like to know that staff can be rewarded for getting involved in this, as contributors and users of other people’s resources. We also had many recommendations for the national repository who we are working with to implement as many as we can.
- In this section I will talk about some reflections on future OER takeup based on some of the questions that have come up during the course of our project. They are very much drawn from discussion with project partners And I will also put Jorum into the context of being an intermediary in the OER release process Here we have a diagram of a typical HEI, which has a Learning Content Management System, into which tutors our their teaching materials There are probably some web2.0 tools there too, which tutors may also be creating or uploading teaching materials There may very well also be an institutional repository which they may be required to deposit teaching materials And there are autonomous specialised learning modules being created which may be somewhere else again – like the departmental intranet or external website…..
- This is multiplied across a number of institutions – 17 HEIs in the case of this project. Of course all of our partners wanted to share materials, but as illustrated here by Chara, inter-institution communication cannot always be effective. This is where we have been lucky to have tools like Jorum to house not only the materials themselves, but also the metadata about materials held on HEI servers. The different places to put stuff may be valid for any number of reasons. I am going to talk about how OOER has been trying to encourage its member HEIs to separate the process of teaching out from the products of teaching…..
- What I have tried to do here is take a sample of different kinds of teaching and learning tools and colour code them according to whether they are a product (green and easy to think about releasing as OER) or related to a process (orange and red) where it may be more challenging to release as OER (orange) or where you may be releasing ‘the crown jewels’ or thie things that give institutions their unique selling points: Assessment Accreditation and most importantly in the case of this project, the teachers themselves, and how they teach their subjects. It’s about recognising where the value lies in the educational process – the learning design. Very few people make money from teaching resources. OER has been really helpful in this respect in encouraging people to think about OER vs learning design, or product vs process I’ll come back to this later
- This is a rather nice analogy The cake is the thing which seems to have the value That represents OER Actually what has the value is the wrapper That’s the teaching process, the tutor, the assessment and the accreditation/award Making sure we know how to make the purple shiny paper the thing that people want and institutions value is the chalenge – turning the throwaway wrapper into a Willy Wonka golden ticket, which far exceeds the perceived value of the sweet in the middle.
- In this slide we are looking at a simple representation of the complexity and diversity of types of resources we have been dealing with in round one of the OER projects. The three boxes with the black line round them are the range of resources we have been dealing with in round one. Round two asks participants to deal with all four. We are asking Jorum Open to do all of this functionality But are we at this stage asking too much? Is Jorum Open the right place to be provide all of these services? e.g. The cat resources – easy to deal with. In our case they may be x-ray images, or scans, or they may be those resources left by an altruistic retiring professor. They don’t need anything doing to them, and so the HEI is happy. Legacy resources are those which may have been around a while and you know that they are going out of date. Like module handouts which may need revising from time to time. We can plan to review and update these materials, and whilst they require some work, they are predictable. Resources which go out of date unpredictably and at speed, requiring attention right there and right then – which may include taking them down or adding a disclaimer. They become decrepit as a result of an external dependency which may increase risk to the HEI if they aren’t dealt with in a timely fashion. This is unpredictable and takes staff away from their other work in order to deal with them. Examples would include guidance on avian and swine flu, or hygiene training when there was a big MRSA outbreak. Guidance on swine flu was changing every two weeks….. Would the institutional repository be the right place? If materials were in more than one place, would tutors or learning technologists remember to take down and re-upload all instances? The up to date materials would typically be everything in the LCMS. What is the currency of stuff in a VLE/LCMS? Is it more important to the tutor/student to keep it current locally than it is nationally? Or is it equal?....
- Here we can see the previous slide illustrated slightly differently. Lecturers upload their teaching materials to the VLE or LCMS – possibly also to an institutional repository, where they also have to deposit their research materials, which are all locked down and closed to Google – where we KNOW the same tutors and their students go to look for stuff to help them with their courses. They then print out their teaching materials for lectures. This in itself presents a challenging enough picture without then asking for their active involvement in depositing to a national or other repository. What would be a much more pragmatic solution for new materials is to make the link between the VLEs and Google and the repository much more explicit.
- The only practical way to keep new material up to date and to avoid risk associated with dependent decrepitude is to take it and/or its metadata directly from the VLE into the repository or a referatory or archive, which means giving both the repositories and referatories and search engines access to the VLE/LCMS/institutional repository. This should make all materials much more findable, but most of us don’t have this yet so in the meantime….
- … we had outlined an API toolkit in our original plan and as APIs to many web 2.0 services are so readily available nowadays, and because we had recently recruited a great developer, we decided to have a go at a mashup of a number of APIs. The idea was to be able to make the process of putting your stuff out there, and enabling people to find it, as easy as possible, using only one form and one one interface….. James has a proof of concept using scribd, Picasa, YouTube, Delicious and Twitter working so far. Some other services are proving a bit more tricky because of the time it take to process the files when uploading them – e.g. Slideshare but we are still working on it. We think its going to be useful for the Subject Centre anyway, and know that the CORE materials project in Liverpool has been doing something similar…. However, by PIMPIng something, it makes it much harder to track usage….. Or control the material…..
- The trouble is, we want everything! There are tensions as ilustrated by these blue arrows And the term ‘open’ melans different things to different people “ openness’ can be contextual too… e.g. wikivet, UK Council for Communication Skills Teaching in Undergraduate Medical Education And may change as user confidence grows, as more people get involved and as time advances. We also need to recognise that the point of desire where we may want to be on any of these blue scales might never or could never change because of specific contexts e.g. genito-urinary medicine, obs and gynae materials. and the concept of ‘open within a tribe’ recognised as valid where tutors may feel safer in the short to medium term sharing their materials.
- What would be nice would be to find a way to support those tribes – which is a nice feature HumBox is starting to develop. It plays on subject allegiences and and inter-institutional communication, encourages peer review prior to release ad encourages confidence building in ‘safe’ groups. Our consortium is a tribe and despite the funding ending we would like to find a way to keep working with them, as well as with new partners.
- A new funding call has been issued in the UK. While the pilots are ‘finished’ there are many areas requiring further work.
- In a project this size there are a lot of people to thank, specifically our project partners,
- And members of the subject centre team and our host institution.
- This is a short list of references there will be more on the website soon, as soon as we finish the final report.
- Do feedback to us on the usefulness of the tooklkits, which are being added to the website day by day. We will email the OER superlist when they are available.