OER Programme Meeting - 20/10/2009
On Tuesday I attended the OER programme meeting in London as the IE team representative. As it was only my second day in post my responsibilities were limited to a brief spell on the registration desk and sitting at the back of the room trying to take in as much as possible.
The event consisted of three parallel sessions in the morning; an IPR overview given by Jason Campbell from JISC Legal, a session on accessibility issues led by Sal Cooke from JISC TechDis and the session I attended which was about Internationalization of OER led by David Kernohan from the JISC eLearning team and Patrick McAndrew from OLnet at the Open University.
David spoke about the work done by Michigan State University working in Africa with OERs based around Agricultural studies and how they were initially surprised at the lack of take-up of their resources but after additional research discovered the ‘cultural context’ of the content was an issue; without a shared cultural background the resources were difficult to really understand.
In an effort to improve this MSU applied to the Gates Foundation for funding to run a project in partnership with the actual end-users of these resources (looking beyond academics and students to the actual farmers etc) to find a way to present the content in a way that is most suitable for them. While they are already having some success with this approach they have already identified that it is not truly a sustainable or transferable approach.
Patricks’ presentation picked up on the theme of ‘cultural context’ and the idea of ‘cultural colonisation’. The OU has identified that even the words used to describe their use of OER can be seen to loaded with significance and can be percieved to be more about spreading the OU brand than any form of altruism.
There were a couple of particularly interesting almost throw away moments during this talk that were picked up again during the day. The first was the assertion by Patrick that use of Creative Commons had saved OpenLearn £100k (that was the sum budgeted for legal advice that wasn’t required once they committed to CC) and also a comment from the audience along the lines of “I wonder why we bother with licenses at all as we know users will take no notice and do what they want with the resources!”
Issues around Creative Commons came up again and again throughout the day with questions around what is the right kind of option to choose the dominant topic.
The afternoon consisted of an update on some Communication/Evaluation/Synthesis issues and an interesting discussion on how to start the process for release of OERs to be recognised and rewarded by Institutions in a manner similar to the publication of research.
One of the things I was most interested in was the preview of the new JorumOpen interface built on DSpace and due for release early in 2010. The presentation consisted of screenshots rather than a live demo or a screencast so it was difficult to get a real feel for the interaction and as usual comments were made comparing it unfavourably to Flickr. This is always going to be an issue for a service like Jorum and it will be interesting to see how the live site compares as a user experience to something like Flickr (though the lack of a bulk upload option on launch for JorumOpen is going to be an issue I think.)
There was also a quick introduction to SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education) from the OU by Rose Webb which is a HEFCE funded support service for OER activity. This project is lagging behind the rest of the OER activity in this programme but there were a couple of interesting elements to the presentation; new OU short term Fellowships in OER that I am sure will be of interest to alot of people and also the creation of a Community Support Officer (part-funded by JISC) who will act as a broker between the OER projects and the huge amount of experience the OU has in working in this area.
All-in-all I felt it was a very interesting event which all the attendees seemed to be enjoying and finding valuable, I certainly did. Thanks to David and Heather for making it such an interesting day.