1. Open Educational Practices
Definition, licences and issues
A presentation for the ACDE, March 2019
Kris Stutchbury, The Open University, UK
Thank you for the invitation to take part in the meeting. I believe that Open Educational resource and Open Educational practices represent a significant opportunity for providers of distance education in Africa and I welcome this opportunity to share with you some of the issues that are emerging in the field.

2. Open Educational Resources
For each of the statements, hold up the letter T (if you think the statement is true) and F (if you think the statement is false).
OER are free resources
Royalties are paid to the author of OERs
There are no restrictions on how you use OER
OER can take a variety of forms including resources on the internet, books, worksheets, videos and photos.
You can be sure that OER are good quality resources
OER that are published have all be quality assured
Start off with T/F quiz

3. Key Points
OER are free
They have a creative commons license (
They are free to use; the producer bears the cost of production
They take many different forms
The quality should be judged by the user
OER are free to use but not free to produce. They are produced by institutions and individuals using institutional funds or grant money. There are a number of different CC licenses. All require attribution. There are different conditions around selling, adapting and re-publishing. They take many different forms.
Misconceptions: OER are on the internet therefore must be good quality, OER are on the internet therefore aren’t very good, using OER is cheating, it is my job to produce curriculum support materials – people will think less of me if I use OER.
Quality should be judged by the user – who should judge? Who should check? Trust is required from the authorities. Eg Zambia.

4. Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER are 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.
OER first defined by UNESCO in Supported in the Paris Declaration, 2012 and the Ljubljana Action Plan, 2017.
Read slide –There are many mis-understandings around OER, so I thought it would be helpful for you all to pause for a minute and really get inside the issue.

5. OER Potential
OER are seen as a way to improve inclusivity in Education. Make resources available to more people, enable institutions to develop more courses quicker, massive opportunity. 46% of HEI lectures in SSA not aware of OER.
Largely untapped. Why? Access, more complicated than you might think – too much available, technical skills required.

6. Why do people/institutions publish OER?
As part of international development work
To enhance the reputation of the institution – draw people in
To be part of a community
To establish an individual reputation
To contribute to the common good
What is your institution’s policy on publishing and using OER?
Why do people publish OER – make their content available for free?
First key message of the talk. All institutions should have a policies in place about OER. These can be quite general. Eg OU 10% of course content is published as OER.
Policies on use – what is the balance: do you trust lecturers to find and select materials that will help them to a better job or to all the teaching materials have to be vetted? If so who does the vetting? Are they the best qualified people to do it? What alternatives are there?

7. OpenLearn has many free courses many of which are used by individuals and organisations for professional development – or people do them simply as a hobby. The idea is to draw people in.
The last VC extended the commitment to Open Educational Resources by investing in FutureLearn – a website which hosts MOOCs – Massive Open Online courses – all of which are free.
Some have quizzes and a digital badge – more of that later.

8. Why might you want to promote the use of OER in your institution?
Lack of up-to-date conventional resources
Access of new pedagogic approaches
The formation of collaborative networks
Opportunities to develop new skills and understandings
Makes economic sense at a time of expansion
Many good reasons for supporting the use of OER. If you want pedagogic practices to change then people need an alternative vision. They need to understand how you can do things differently – usually by experiencing something different.
The skills required in the selection of OER can be developed through collaboration. Many other advantages emerge

9. OER Use – the OER cycle
From: Enhancing teacher Education through OER (A MOOC written by The Open University UK and available on
Many institutions focus immediately on creation of OER. But if people are doing things differently, they need to experience the sort of resources available – I would urge you to concentrate on Use in the first instant, in order to develop the skills required to produce good quality resources.

10. The OER adoption pyramid (H. Trotter, G. Cox) http://conference
Volition
Availability
Capacity (technical skills to find, use, adapt and create)
Awareness (of OER, the concept)
Permission (to use (via Licence) or create (via institutional policy))
Access (to infrastructure)
Individuals
Institutions
This pyramid provides a way of thinking about how you might support the use of OER. The aim is to achieve ‘volition’ ie. indiviuals taking the initiative to use, adapt and ultimately create high quality resources. But to reach that stage, certain things have to be in place: access, permissions, awareness, capacity, availability of materials that might be useful

11. OER Adoption – Key questions
ADOPTION FACTORS
Questions for OER users
Questions for OER creators
Volition
Pedagogical values, institutional culture, social context
Do you want to use OER?
Do you want to get involved in OER creation?
Availability
Are the resources that we need available as OER?
Have you found OER to meet your learning needs?
Do you have teaching materials of sufficient quality? Copyright?
Capacity
Necessary skills, capabilities?
Do you know where to look for OER?
Do you have the skills to develop and upload OER?
Awareness
What is available?
Do you understand OER and what is available?
Do you understand the OER licenses?
Permission
Licensing and institutional factors
Do you have permission from the institution? License?
Who possesses the copyright over teaching materials you use?
Access
Electricity, devices?
How will you access OER?
This could form the basis of your own institutional policy making. This grid encapsulates various activities by institutional leaders: how to provide access (open up the library for more hours, change the rules around mobile phones, issue laptops, buy tablets, load repositories onto the institutional server…).
Permission: how do you make it clear to people that you support the use of OER? To what extent do you want your institution to be a creator of OER, what platform will you use?
Awareness: how will you help people to become aware of the OER repositories available – can you do research yourself, or who will you appoint to do this? What training could you provide? How could you make use of meetings time to promote OER? what mechanisms are there in your institution for sharing good practice?
Who could become OER champions and how could you support them?
The next three slides draw on the findings of the ROER4D project. A meta-analysis of 18 studies identified the cultural, structural and individual constraints around the use of OER.

12. Constraints which impact on OER use
Cultural
Searching for OER is not the norm
Need for quality guidelines
OER that are found may not align to the curriculum or be culturally relevant
Lack of autonomy
Changes to culture required
Less control from the top
More democratic
More autonomy for individuals
More trust, more collaboration
Different ways of working are required in order to derive the full benefits from OER, starting with institutional policies
What could you do to support
the use of OER in your Institution?

13. Constraints which impact on OER use
Structural
Volume of online resources available
Mostly text-based whereas video and audio are sought
Changes to structures required
More opportunities for collaboration
More access to ICT
More flexibility in the curriculum
What new structures are required in your institution to facilitate OER use?

14. Constraints which impact on OER use
Agential (individuals)
OER awareness and open licensing awareness
Time to find materials
Lack of skills to filter open licenses
Lack of ability to judge quality
Lack of autonomy
Changes required to support individuals
More opportunities for collaboration
More access to ICT
More flexibility in the curriculum
More training opportunities
More encouragement re-OER
What can you do to ensure that individuals are supported in the use of OER?

15. Aspects which enable the use of OER
The availability of OER relevant to the context
Copying is a common practice
Global repositories of OER
Institutional guidance and support
OER available in print
People with the skills to search online
Expertise in judging quality

16. Harnessing open content
Text-books
Teaching resources
Free online courses – MOOCs
Badged-open courses

17. Teaching resources Incorporating OER into course materials
Eg Open University of Sudan, Nigeria Teachers Institute, Open University of Tanzania, UNISA

18. MOOCs Massive Open Online Course Free content Social learning Quizzes
Time bound
Small fee for the certificate
Some course at the OU give credits for completing 3 or 4 linked MOOCs followed by an assessment based on drawing together learning across the three courses

19. Open courses Not time-bound May include a free ‘badge’
Groups of professionals in the same institution
Build your own assessments
A key challenge is to think of alternative forms of assessment, other than examinations.

20. Selection of OER – key questions
What are our needs? New pedagogy, integrating ICT, new content, new subjects………
Do the OER we have found meet our needs? What pedagogy to they embrace? Is the level and language appropriate for our learners?
Do we need to adapt them?
Who decides? Individual lecturers, Heads of Department, Deans, Heads of Institution? Government Ministers?

21. Summary Turn to your neighbour and tell them:
One thing you will take from this presentation
One question that you have about the use, adaptation or creation of OER.