Strategy implementation seminar for Open Universities belonging to the MORIL consortium MORIL under the OLCOS perspective Julià Minguillón Universitat Oberta de Catalunya 28/05/2008

Table of contents ● OLCOS basics ● OER lifecycle ● Key issues ● Research challenges ● OER in a European perspective ● Enablers and barriers ● Recommendations ● Conclusions

OLCOS project ● Open eLearning Content Observatory Services ● Transversal action funded by the EC under the eLearning programme, ● Partners: – European Center for Media Competence, Germany – European Distance Elearning Network, Hungary – FernUniversitaet in Hagen, Germany – Mediamaisteri Group, Finland – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain – Salzburg Research, Austria (project coordinator)

OLCOS main goals ● To foster the creation, sharing and reuse of open educational resources, including: – Content for teaching and learning – Software based tools and services – Licenses ● Three main results: – OLCOS roadmap 2012 – Tutorials – Community creation and engagement

OLCOS methodology ● Qualitative research: – Data gathering – Focus groups and communities of practice – Experts were interviewed ● Dissemination: – OLCOS roadmap 2012 (book and PDF) – Tutorials (wiki) – Promotional videos – OLCOS web site:

Project focus ● OLCOS focuses on the educational practice, not on the result ● OER lifecycle: – Create – Re-use / modify – License – Share – Search – Use – Manage

Project outcomes ● The OLCOS Roadmap 2012 aims to provide educational decision makers with orientation and recommendations about OER: – Current situation – Strategical advice ● Tutorials are practical recommendations for creating, sharing, licensing and using OER, mainly for teachers and students ● List of selected OER related projects and resources

Key issues ● Technology – Powerpoint is not open ● Methodology – Learning is more than just contents ● Sustainability – CAREO has been recently closed ● Licensing – Lack of copyright does not mean open access

Research challenges ● Methodological: – Critical mass, granularity and integration – Quality assesment ● Technological: – Efficient search (semantic) – Supporting OER lifecycle ● CC Licensing covers authors, not editors ● Socio-cultural issues ● Organizational and infrastructure changes

OER in a European perspective ● Slow growth in a situation of fragmentation ● International collaborative efforts need to be strengthened ● Valorisation of public sector information hampered by lack of open access ● Little impact of project based digital repositories ● The European digital library as a flagship ● Communities of interest and practice and knowledge technologies as critical success

Areas and topics covered ● Three main groups: – Policies, institution frameworks and business models – Open access and open content repositories – Laboratories of open educational practices and resources (research) ● For each area: – Drivers and enablers – Barriers

Policies, institutional frameworks and business models ● Enablers: – Policies emphasise educational innovation and organisational change – ICT based lifelong learning needs to be promoted – International interest in (and funding of) OER opportunities – CC licensing is firmly established and increasingly used – Healthy competition among leading institutions – Open and distance education more attractive – The Bologna process is a driver for collaboration

Policies, institutional frameworks and business models ● Barriers: – Business models in OER are tricky – Lack of institutional policies and incentives for educators to excel in OER cause hesitation – Considerable effort on teacher training and support – Difficulty of finding a balanced marketing for open and commercial educational offerings – Little innovation by most academic and educational publishers, lack of culture changing – Possible implementation of rigid DRM systems

Open access and open content repositories ● Enablers: – Strong breakthrough and adoption of the Open Access principle in academic publishing – Funding bodies require that project results be made available as open access – Widespread tried and tested know-how in distributed open access repositories (OAI) – Open content repositories increasingly surface from the deep web

Open access and open content repositories ● Barriers: – Fears of low recognition and reputation among researchers and academics – Need to reinforce institutional open access policies and measures – Barriers to making research data openly available – Creation of rich educational metadata is costly – Ontology based educational semantic webs still a promise, not a reality

Laboratories of open educational practices and resources ● Enablers: – Free and open source software is widely used in higher education and further education institutions – The “industrialist” Learning Object approach has run out of steam, needs new impulse from OER – New systems for creating Learning Designs – Social software tools and services empower learners to create, share and license content – RSS feeds enrich and keep up-to-date educational portals and learners' sites – Emergence of personal learning environments and semantic applications for accesing knowledge

Laboratories of open educational practices and resources ● Barriers: – More cooperation between tool developers and educators is needed – Lack of know-how for enabling and promoting innovative education – Educational repositories need to think how to become communities of practice, and to implement advanced tools and services – Library services may be slow to find their place in open environments

Recommendations ● Devised for: – Educational policy makers and funding bodies – Boards, directors and supervisors of educational institutions – Teachers – Students – Educational repositories – E-learning tools and enviroments developers

Recommendations for boards, directors and supervisors ● Scrutinise whether educational institutions are employing innovative approaches beyond teacher centered knowledge transfer ● Promote sharing and re-use of OER and experiences from open educational practices ● Establish reward mechanisms and supportive measures for developing and sharing OER ● Clarify copyrights and define licensing schemes for making OER available

Conclusions ● Main MORIL concerns are aligned with OLCOS: – Business model and sustainability issues – Learning model and innovative pedagogies – Marketing and reaching new audiences ● Any proposal should address: – Organisational changes – Methodological changes – Technological changes – Sustainability issues – Licensing