Open educational content:
Proposed initiative
B88/08
Agenda item 10
18 September 2008
Issue
1.
Proposal for a pilot open educational content programme.
Recommendation
2.
Following its decision in January 2008 to agree a capital budget line for open
educational content, subject to approval of the specific programme, the Board is invited to
approve these initial project plans for a programme to develop open educational content at
a cost of £5.70 million in 2009/10 FY.
Timing for decisions
3.
An agreement by the HEFCE Board in September 2008 would allow the pilot phase
to commence in spring 2009 with the planning and commissioning process commencing
immediately. The pilots are to inform a more comprehensive engagement which would then
be costed in late 2009 based on experience.
Further information
4.
Further information is available from John Selby, Director (Education and
Participation), (0117 931 7416; [email protected]), Malcolm Read (JISC Executive
Secretary, 0117 931 7230; [email protected]) or David Sadler (HE Academy Director,
01904 717500, [email protected]).
Background
5.
In January, the Board agreed a budget of £25 million for the development of open
educational content. (£5 million in 2008-09, £10 million in 2009-10 and £10 million in
2010-11) (Paper B6/08 and minute M108e/20 refer), subject to subsequent approval of
specific programmes by the Board. This paper is bringing back to the board more detailed
proposals of the specific programme for its approval. This has taken some time because
the issues are complex and needed detailed discussion but the proposal now has the
support of the Teaching, Quality, and the Student Experience strategic advisory committee
(TQSE).
Discussion
6.
Open educational content can be defined as ‘teaching, learning and research
resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual
property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational
resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos,
tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to
knowledge’.1
7.
There are several main reasons for promoting open learning
a.
To encourage the sharing of content between institutions, between academics
and within communities of practice.
b.
To encourage development and uptake of new generation tools that will
enhance both productivity and relevance by being customisable and adaptable by
both academics and students.
c.
As a marketing tool where students can view content produced by an institution
prior to applying to study there.
d.
So that learning materials and resources can be shared universally - locally,
nationally and globally to support e-learning.
8.
At the June Quality Assessment, Learning, and Teaching (QALT) committee
meeting, members considered a discussion paper on open educational content. The paper
outlined the case for capital investment in the area of open content; detailed existing
centrally funded work and gave examples of other similar activity worldwide; suggested
issues that would need to be faced and offered possible courses of actions to address
these.
1
Definition used by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/
2
9.
There was support from QALT members for the way such an initiative would
empower learners and reduce duplication of effort. The need to build on relevant existing
work, including the Open University’s OpenLearn initiative2 was also stressed. Members
felt there was a need for decisive and agile action on behalf of HEFCE and invited JISC
and the HE Academy to prepare a second paper, with more detailed funding proposals. It
was specified that such a programme should commence with a pilot stage, including pilots
at institutional, subject and individual levels, and be managed using the Government
standard Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) methodology. The need to ensure
institutional strategic backing for such activity, and to avoid funding vanity publishing, was
emphasised and the need for ongoing evidence-based research into outcomes in this new
field of activity.
10. As a result of the comments from QALT, the proposals were modified after further
discussion. This revised plan was considered by the TQSE committee meeting on
3 September, at which a one year pilot programme was proposed. The TQSE committee
endorsed the proposals with some small suggestions for clarification of the proposals in a
number of details and endorsed their submission to the Board for approval.
11. The proposal has also been reviewed by HEFCE’s Head of Internal Audit in the
context of whether such a programme would be an appropriate use of capital funding as
outlined in the HM Treasury Capital Classification paper. The auditor has confirmed that
the proposals seem to make a good case for the projects to be funded from capital. The
proposal is not related to the e-university model in any way; from which the lessons have
been learnt.
12. The potential benefits of the open release of learning content by UK higher education
institutions are seen as follows:
a.
An increase in student satisfaction concerning the quality of learning materials.
b.
An increase in applications to UK HEI courses from international, and nontraditional, learners.
c.
An enhancement of the global academic reputation of the UK HE system.
d.
Improved value for money and added value through a shared service, adding
to the ethos of collegiality.
e.
UK higher education’s contribution to the public good and the developing world.
f.
A significant increase in the open availability and use of free high quality online
content.
g.
Advertising and marketing benefits to individual lecturers, HEIs and UK
education, opening up universities to potential students (e.g. widen access; promote
the uptake of science subjects).
h.
An opportunity to recognise and reward the contribution of teaching within HEIs
and recognise teaching professorships.
2
The Open Learning Initiative gives free access to course materials from The Open University
(http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/)
3
i.
Making use of the significant investment that has already been made in digital
content by providing ways to reuse and repurpose existing content and to
demonstrate how it can be used for teaching and learning.
13. The creation and use of open educational resources has attracted wide interest in
Government. John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, has
expressed a desire to see work carried out in this area. He has asked the JISC Chair,
Professor Sir Ron Cooke, to provide a paper on ICT and e-learning, to include open
educational content, as part of his review of higher education.
14. Open Educational content released already has proved popular, both in terms of
positive press coverage for the institutions involved and in terms of usage by learners and
educators. The MIT OpenCourseWare initiative materials have seen 1 million unique users
each month3, and the Open University’s OpenLearn materials have been accessed 1.7
million times in the last 18 months4. Both initiatives are experiencing interest worldwide
from both learners and educators, with an obvious reputational and visibility benefit to the
institutions involved.
15. A recent JISC project5 reported that nearly 70per cent of surveyed academics
regularly used digital learning materials from elsewhere as a basis for their own teaching
materials, and only a little over half of teaching materials are created from scratch. A
related project6 also surveyed a sample of academic practitioners regarding their attitudes
to sharing - only 19per cent reported that they “never” shared materials in either direction,
though the majority of reported sharing is currently within institutions, schools and
departments. JISC’s nationally funded repository of learning materials, JORUM, has
announced plans to embrace the growing interest in open educational content by
supporting the deposit of Creative Commons licensed materials via JorumOpen.7 The
Open Educational Resources programme will also benefit from the high quality content
already available as the result of central funding. This includes licensed content from JISC
Collections (http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/) and the JISC Digitisation Programme
(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation).
16. JISC is funding a programme to support HE being taught in FECs.8. The pilot Open
Educational Content programme has the potential to expand on this work and benefit the
further education and skills environment and sixth form colleges. It will also support
HEFCE’s ‘social dimension’ of the ‘enhancing the contribution of HE to the economy and
society’ and the idea of ‘public engagement’ by helping to increase the capacity and
effectiveness of knowledge exchange between HE and users of all kinds through the
availability of open learning content to the general public. It is proposed that one of the
pilots in each category specifically looks at designing Open Educational Content materials
(out of the knowledge stock of universities) specifically for third stream/knowledge
3
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/stats/
http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=11281
5 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories/project_cdlor.aspx
6 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_edistributed/wmshare.aspx
7 http://www.jorum.ac.uk/future_directions.htm
8 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_elearning_capital/el_heinfe.aspx
4
4
exchange/public engagement purposes (e.g. for the University of the Third Age client group
or for Small Medium Enterprises).
17. It is proposed to fund pilot projects at institutional (7 projects), subject (12 projects)
and individual level (10 projects) plus expert advice and guidance for contributors, users
and repository managers and some activity research. The outline programme plan for the
pilot initiative can be found at Annex A and includes:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
a vision statement.
projected benefits (at strategic and programme levels).
blueprint (describing outcomes).
programme plan.
risk register;
stakeholder analysis.
18. The projects funded under the pilot programme, under each of the three strands, will
work to openly (free for use and repurposing) release their existing learning content.
Content may include - but will not be limited to - course materials, reading lists, student
generated content, images and other multimedia, learning objects, electronic learning
activities, and recordings and supporting materials from lectures, workshops, and
presentations. Non-text materials will require technically innovative approaches to their
management but JISC has been funding work in this area for some time. Funds released to
the pilot projects will be used to identify and quality assure suitable materials, convert and
package materials into suitably reusable formats and tag appropriately, clear associated
background rights within materials and pay for staff resources to support the process.
19. Institutional pilots will work across all subject areas, implementing institution-wide
processes and systems to enable efficient release of materials to become part of
appropriate strategies and policies. Subject area pilots will develop appropriate consortia
involving departments within institutions, professional bodies and HE Academy subject
centres, identifying and releasing materials relating to a commonly used core curriculum.
Individual pilots will involve academic staff releasing interesting and useful material that
they have created.
20. It is proposed that the projects would start in spring 2009 but the planning and
commissioning process would need to start several months earlier. JISC and the Higher
Education Academy should be asked to manage such a programme on behalf of the
Council. A programme manager would be recruited in JISC as soon as possible once
funding is confirmed. The pilots are to inform a more comprehensive engagement which
would then be costed.
21. All projects would be expected to work to existing definitions concerning open
standards and compliance to information environment guidelines. They would work to
release, openly and without restriction, a substantial body of high-quality existing (or
repurposed) learning content which would have a wide potential user base and would be of
use as an exemplar of the quality of learning content in the UK HE system. Quality control
5
would be the responsibility of the institutions and informal benchmarking by peers
encouraged. The projects individually and collectively will need to tackle the long-term
sustainability of this activity and propose a way forward on this.
22. The pilots will be evaluated in terms of their achievement of the stated project and
programme aims (for instance the aspirations in the blueprint at Annex A), and will
compare their performance to other methods of content creation and procurement.
Examples of comparators could include student authored materials, centralised content
licensing and commercial content development on behalf of the sector.
23. This initiative will create a UK collection of repositories of open educational course
material. There are already plans to establish professional management procedures and
processes for all academic and scholarly repositories in the UK under the label of
Repositories UK; membership of Repositories UK will ensure repositories use common
technical and operational standards to ensure professional services and interoperability. It
is expected that through Repositories UK a coherent layer of scholarly and academic
content (research materials such as papers and data as well as educational content) will be
created and the skills base across the sector will be developed to promote a profession of
repository managers.
24. Quality assurance of the educational content is the responsibility of the participating
HEIs as will the long term sustainability of the repository. However, HEIs already have to
meet the cost of storing and disseminating educational content (often through the VLE or
informal postings on web sites). The additional maintenance costs of professionally
managed repositories will be offset by the efficiency gains of having such content properly
curated and readily available and re-usable.
25. There is a central cost to providing a search engine to collate and link educational
content from many different institutional repositories but this should be modest. The cost
will be met from programme funds during the life of the initiative but would then need to be
met either from JISC funds or subscription.
26. JISC and the HE Academy will prepare a paper for TQSE in Autumn 2009 to report
on progress, discuss which approaches work best, and make recommendations for a future
programme. Following the pilot phase, and the findings of the ongoing evaluation, it is
envisaged that appropriate areas of work would be scaled up to a budget of £10 million a
year for 4+ years, though this will depend on the availability of funds. This would include
further work involving the exploitation and promotion of this corpus of freely available
materials, the dissemination of good practice and defining and building a vehicle to manage
and co-ordinate the programme in the longer term.
Recommendation: The Board is invited to approve the initial project plans for the
development of open educational content at a cost of £5.70 million in 2009/10 FY.
6
Financial implications
27. HEFCE has funding of £25 million available for a large scale initiative up to
March 2011 although it is acknowledged that it will take at least five years to gain significant
impact in the sector. A one year pilot stage at a cost of £5.70 million has been designed to
run during the financial year 2009/10. This does involve a slippage in the original
programme timetable; this can be managed during the life of this spending review period. It
is not yet clear whether the whole of the balance will be used during the life of this spending
review but this will be clear after the pilot and it will be possible to divert the funding to other
programmes.
Risk implications
28. The decision to start the programme with a pilot was based on advice from QALT
and TQSE, in order that the risks involved with a large programme such of this would be
mitigated. Such a programme represents a serious challenge, it is not high risk technically
but it would be unique. The major challenges will be changing the culture of the teaching
profession, and building a sustainable business model.
29. In terms of management of risks, the HE Academy has experience of managing
programmes across the network of subject centres and JISC has robust programme
management arrangements, using the Office of Government Commerce (OGC’s) Managing
Successful Programmes (MSP)9 which focuses on the realisation of benefits from activities
funded. There is an initial risk register attached in Annex A.
Sector impact assessment
30. This is a pilot programme and will involve some burden but the potential benefits to
the sector and its sustainability are significant in that the potential for re-use and repurposing of educational content are significant for UK HEIs and have the potential for
significant international access with both recruitment and reputational benefit to UK HE.
There is no specific impact on diversity within the sector, though the initiative could have a
significant impact on opening up access to HE and hence in widening participation.
Public presentation
31. Presentation issues are covered in the outline stakeholder plan at Annex A. It is
noted that a cross agency plan would be necessary, and suggested that programme staff
begin working with communications and press departments within the HE Academy,
HEFCE and JISC as soon as the programme is confirmed by the HEFCE Board.
9
http://www.ogc.gov.uk/guidance_managing_successful_projects.asp
7
Annex A
Open Educational Content: Outline Programme Plan
Vision
A wide range of learning resources created by academics is freely available, easily
discovered and routinely re-used by both educators and learners.
Projected Benefit (strategic level)
All participants in the learning/teaching process will have easy access to appropriate, highquality learning materials and to flexible learning systems and tools, which they will be able
to customise to suit their own preferences and needs.
Projected Benefits (programme level)



A significant increase in the open availability of high quality digital learning content
online
An increase in student satisfaction concerning the quality of learning materials
An increase in applications to UK university courses from international, and nontraditional, learners.
Blueprint
By 2013, the sector will:






be sharing materials openly and freely, based around subject area consortia
be licensing a wide variety of materials on behalf of all institutions
saving time and effort by reusing materials
be seen as using high quality content for learning by prospective students
worldwide
be managing more effective transitions between informal and formal learning
be engaging with innovative learning materials and open-learning consortia in
worldwide higher education.
By 2013, institutions will:



see the value they add to the learning process in terms of the selection of materials
and the added context to these materials, rather than in the value of their own
proprietary content
have policies around ownership of and IPR within learning materials that support
sharing and reuse
be willing to support subject area level collaborations as a means of improving,
creating and releasing content
8


be able to develop a business model of higher education based on a new balance
between fee-paying and free services
be interacting with providers and users of open content in the professions and
employment sectors.
By 2013, academic staff will:



be confident in discovering and reusing learning materials online
be sharing their own materials widely and openly
have more time and resources available for learning design planning, research and
other activities.
By 2013, learners will:


be demanding a consistent high quality of learning materials throughout their
learning journey
expect to see examples of learning materials before applying to a course, institution
or qualification.
9
Outline Programme Plan
Work package
Institutional
Pilot
Subject Area
Pilots
Individual Pilots
Advice and
National
Exploitation
Central
Management
Projects
1. Small specialist institution
2. “Research intensive” institution
3. HE in FE
4. “Teaching intensive” institution
5. “Mixed economy” institution.
6. Third Stream institution
7. Open University
1. Vocational subject
2. Subject with professional body
3. Core academic literacies
4. Strategic/Vulnerable Subject
5. Multimedia subject
6. Third Stream focused
7. Other
Theme should centre on interesting
pedagogic methods, and materials
released should have wider subject
applicability.
Criteria/Purpose
Fully match-funded single institutions,
preferred with consortium partners, already
committed to this area. Institution wide
initiative required (eg. not limited to single
subject group). Ongoing linked evaluation of
work required.
Selection
Competitive
bidding process
using JISC/HE
Academy
procedures
Start Point
Spring 09.
Open
University
work could
start earlier.
Funding
£1.75m – 7
projects, £250k
per project,
matched funding
from institution
expected.
Consortium including HE Academy subject
centre, professional bodies and
faculties/schools in Universities. Ongoing
linked evaluation of work required.
Direct selection,
or competitive
bidding process
using JISC/HE
Academy
procedures
Spring 09
£3m - 12 projects,
£250k per project.
Open to HE Academy NTF/SF or ALT CMALT
(etc.) holders with relevant experience.
Ongoing linked evaluation work required.
Spring 09
£200k -10
projects, £20k per
person
Expert advice and guidance for
contributors, users and repository
managers.
Action Research.
Planning for national use of resources.
Metadata/linked search.
Repository of last resort.
IPR guidance.
Programme management of each phase
Ongoing evaluation
Marketing/events/communications
To build on and enhance existing experience.
Maximise use of resources to improve
efficiency of teaching and online learning.
Develop sustainable business model, create
a community of practice and a vehicle for
repository co-ordination and interoperability.
Conduct research to inform subsequent
programme and effective use by sector.
Based largely around existing JISC/HE
Academy and other linked services, projects
and processes.
Direct
commission or
competitive
bidding process
via HE Academy
Existing expertise
and structures –
especially JISC,
HE Academy,
nationally funded
services and the
Open University.
ASAP
£250k for first
year,
£200k for action
research
Direct
commission/
secretariat
ASAP
Up to 300k in first
year
Total
£5,700,000
Outline Programme Risk Register
Risk
Programme
fails due to poor
management
Likelihood/5
1
Severity/5
5
Mitigation
Programme managed
by appropriately
experienced and
qualified staff.
Pilot stage
inconclusive
3
4
Further pilots
commissioned, study
commissioned or
programme
abandoned.
Programme
poorly received
by sector and
other
stakeholders
1
4
Failure of pilot
to achieve
outcomes
3
3
Low use of
content in
community
3
5
Communications and
engagement strategy
developed alongside
programme and put
into practice by all
involved organisation.
Main programme will
only consist of
interventions where
the pilot has been
successful.
Communications and
engagement strategy
to be developed
alongside
programme.
Promotion of
materials by partner
organisations.
Provision of search
engine and guidance
to support use, reuse
and repurposing.
Trigger
Concerns raised
during project
monitoring by SRO
or sponsoring
body.
Evaluation of pilots
does not identify a
clear rationale for
proceeding with
full scale
programme.
Widespread
negative response
to programme from
community and
press.
Monitoring and
final report in
pilots.
Usage monitoring
suggests low
engagement.
Outline Stakeholder Analysis
Stakeholder
JISC
Interest
Programme
Partner
Importance
High
Engagement
Regular programme management
meeting
HE Academy
Programme
Partner
High
Regular programme management
meeting
HEFCE and
other FCs
Funder
High
Written updates, presentations at
meetings/events
UK HE Sector
Project host/end
user
High
Standard project communications.
Events/conferences
Specialist
press
Opinion former
Medium
Press releases, invites to events
Worldwide HE
sector
End user
Low
News releases, presentations at
international events.
Student Body
End user
Medium
Academic
Unions
Lecturer
representative
bodies
Institutional
management
representative
bodies
Funder of
HEFCE and
developing HE
25 Year Review
Opinion former
Medium
News stories in press, promotion via
institutions. Direct involvement via
pilot projects.
Updates and responses to queries.
Low
Updates and responses to queries.
Medium
Updates and responses to queries
Low
Press releases.
UUK/Guild HE
DIUS
Mainstream
Press/ media