Possible dissemination sessions

Recently I have been deliberating on titles of sessions for potential dissemination opportunities. It appears that they fit into two main categories.

Category one is for those people with no prior knowledge of OERs and are likely to involve internal events.

Possible session titles

  • An introduction to OERs
  • OSTRICH: OERs, why they matter!

The other category is focused on those with a prior understanding of OERs.

Possible session titles

  • How relevant are OERs in the current economic climate?
  • Reinventing the wheel. Why knowledge is not understanding.
  • Delivering OERs: Centralised vs Decentralised

A trip to the Zoo – 18th January

Members of the OSTRICH team from Bath and Derby visited the Beyond Distance team in Leicester on Tuesday to talk about where the OSTRICH project was at each institution, share thoughts and generally get to know each other a little better.

The agenda covered the following topics

  • Progress update
  • Group discussion on the evolution (and devolution) of CORRE process
  • Initial thoughts and feedback on how the cascade process is going
  • Internal evaluation plans
  • Repository discussion
  • Discussion of possible topics for conference papers

The entire day was extremely useful in framing the project deliverables and disseminating the progress made so far. It was also nice to see the environment in which the Beyond Distance team work and the media zoo in action.

Implementing the CORRE model at Derby

As we get further into the project there is a greater idea about how the CORRE model will be implemented at Derby.

Initially it was thought that Derby might adopt a slightly decentralised version of CORRE.  However as the project has progressed it has become increasingly apparent that the CORRE model fits Derby’s top sliced approach to the development of e-learning materials.

The major difference to the CORRE model is the addition of a substitution option when copyright clearing media.  This has the obvious benefit of allowing resources to maintain their media where previously they would have had to be removed.

Academics Visited

I have started a series of one to one meetings with tutors delivering courses for the Ostrich project.  Meeting up with the tutors to offer copyright guidance at this stage of the project is intended to pre-empt future time intensive or expensive permission seeking.  The difficulty in seeking permission to re-use material under a creative commons licence, rather than in the more restricted in-house educational use we normally seek, could result in not being able to include dependent third party material.

Working with tutors and encouraging the use of material developed in-house or sourcing creative commons material will possibly create more work for the tutors and the media team at the development stage, but will result in a resource which is more secure and less of a legal headache at a later stage.

Also by using images created by a team of professional photographers and designers offers not only a higher quality resource but a more consistent style.

The meeting on 14th December with Louise Buxton, Programme leader in hairdressing and spa was to discuss the dependent material she intends to include in her module.

The discussion centred around good practice in using third party resources, linking to web pages and using images.

In Louise’s module there will be links to web pages, images and some essential published articles.  The tutor is proactive in substituting in-house material and will be working with the photography team to minimise permission seeking.

Louise is keen to replicate in-house photos on the retail module which uses images to illustrate the impact of displaying products, the displays use branded products. It isn’t essential to have the brands showing so we will replicate the image in-house without brands or trade marks showing.

I had a meeting with Chris Barnes, Lecturer in Psychology on 15th December to go through 5 presentations for the Ostrich project. We discussed whether the removal of some of the third party material would weaken the presentation in any way.  Most can be replaced with either generic images taken from Flickr under the same category of the CC licence we are using for the Ostrich project or replicated in-house.

The presentations use 46 images – 3 need to be copyright cleared, 2 need the ownership verified or retrospective permission for change of use, the tutor owns the copyright of the image and has permission for use in house but not open source

Some taken in hospital by the tutor (with permission) we need to remove any personal data so neither the subject or hospital can be identified

Images illustrating psychological testing can be replicated in-house by the photography team or by the tutor.

A couple of cartoons which were included but are not necessary will be removed.

The meetings have been useful in anticipating the workflow for permission seeking and developing a dialogue with the academics so that they are aware of the support available to them.

Gathering and Screening…

Over the last week we have met with 4 academics who are participating in the OSTRICH project.  Obviously their contribution is vital to the CORRE process developed by Leicester and in producing meaningful and relevant OERs.

The approach that we are taking at Derby is to provide the academic (contributor) with the chance to improve, replace and augment the existing resources before they are Copyright cleared.  This has two distinct advantages;

  • Raises the level of content provided to our students at Derby and the future OERs.
  • By developing alternatives in-house, the clearing of resources should become more efficient.

By working alongside academics in this way we are effectively doing the screening stage of CORRE.

Thoughts on OERs

OERs could have a major impact on how the sector and the wider learning community operate. They could potentially enhance the quality of our resources, augment existing resources and free up academic workload to concentrate on teaching by acting as a time saver in content creation.

There is also the obvious marketing potential, which in light of “The Browne Review” is a very tantalising prospect. We have a great Media team within CeLT at Derby and there is a possibility to promote the institution by sharing the excellent work that they do to enhance online materials; e.g.


Also attached is a video below which demonstrates the potential global power of OERs. It is of the celebrated Physics Professor Walter Lewin from MIT (although I must admit I prefer Professor Shankar from Yale), who in this clip on YouTube has amassed over half a million views and has become a global Physics sensation.

What is open?

Thursday we finally had our initial project team workshop for the OSTRICH project. The team from Leicester spent a full day with us in Derby to kick off the project. Capturing all we discussed in a single post would be madness, so I decided to focus on something that captured my personal attention. Something which I don’t think has had much attention yet elsewhere.

What does it mean to be open? I’m not talking licences, or business models here. I’m talking very practically about the content itself.

Aside from teaching, I also have an extensive background in software development and so I am quite familiar with the Open Source ideology as it developed there, and naturally tend to draw comparisons between FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source Software) and OER (Open Educational Resources). One aspect that I would like to look at now concerns dependencies.

Software is generally not considered to be truly open if it depends on other software that is not. An Excel macro for instance can not be truly open, as I will need to buy and use Excel to use it. Similarly software that plays mp3 files cannot be truly open, as the mp3 format is actually licensed and therefore not free and open.

Extending this to educational resources raised 2 important questions:

  1. What formats do we use?
  2. What references and dependencies to other materials can we use?

The format issue might be relatively straightforward, as it is relatively easy to avoid closed formats if we are aware. Ensuring we release Open Document format or Portable Document Format (PDF) in stead of using Microsoft word is easy enough. Deciding whether it is acceptable to use Wimba Create for the generation of open course content might be a bit more ambiguous. But regardless of the outcome of that discusssion, provisions area easilly made to comply with that.

The issue of references is more complex however. Is it acceptable, for instance, to refer to a journal article that is only accessible via a commercial publisher? Sure, other universities will probably have access to said journal, but do schools in Africa? How open and free is our resource really if the only way to utilise it is to pay expensive access fees to a publisher? The problem of course, is that there are not always easy alternatives here. The most influential articles are often still published in closed journals, which means that replacing those with references to open scholarly resources might be settling for second best.

Personally I think we should work hard to remove these dependencies wherever we can. Because if we do not, we are perpetuating the problem. References and citations are a key currency in higher education, and the HE market will go where that currency goes.