1. Higher Education as a public good: Pushing forward, pushing boundaries Dr Karin Crawford - Principal Teaching Fellow Ian Mathews – Senior Lecturer Diane Simpson – Senior Lecturer

2. The Context Image courtesy of University of Lincoln - www.lincoln.ac.ukwww.lincoln.ac.uk The University: Post 1992 university Currently has five campus sites The School of Health and Social Care: Programmes in: Nursing (mental health and adult nursing) Social Work Health and Social Care Programmes within the school are provided at the main Brayford campus and inHull

3. The Project – Open Educational Resources (OER) in professional education One of six institutional projects – funded and supported through the HEA Change Academy programme http://oer.lincoln.ac.uk/projects/http://oer.lincoln.ac.uk/projects/ Focus on practice learning for nursing and social work programmes to underpin the transition to e-portfolios and to facilitate and support students and work based mentors/educators during practice learning placements

4. The Project – what we did Scoping of existing OER for practice learning – searching existing OER resources (e.g. JORUM, SwapBOX; Internet searches); Decision to create our own short vodcasts - ‘One Minute Wonders’; To date, we have a range of vodcasts featuring staff, students and service users.

5. The wider context of OER The production of OER can be seen as part of a wider social movement that seeks to move away from traditional understandings of knowledge production and dissemination (Winn 2012) The OER movement raises profound questions such as ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘whom is able to generate knowledge?’

6. Drawing on ‘others’ to generate knowledge Health and social care professionals have a commitment to engaging with patients/service users, recognising and using their knowledge to inform and improve our work ‘Student as producer’ and student engagement agendas (Burawoy 2005; Neary and Winn 2009)

7. The democratisation of knowledge? Exports the advantages and knowledge of Higher Education into the public domain; Imports, recognises and values the knowledge, skills and understandings of ‘others’ into the framework of Higher Education

8. Connections Resonates with a range of important agendas such as; Social inclusion; Social capital or social wealth; Notions of the ‘Big Society’; Access to Higher Education.

9. ChallengesBenefits Locating existing OERStudent engagement Finding time as a whole teamProfessional development across the team – networking and learning within and beyond the institution Formatting and editing issues – ensuring good quality videos (in terms of sound and picture quality) Interprofessional work across the disciplines – furthering work on involvement of practitioners and service-users Engagement of some colleagues in some aspects of OER production Furthering our knowledge and skills with new technologies – digital scholarship Establishing sustainable processes for on-going growth and maintenance of the project and its materials Sharing good practice and good ideas – reducing duplication of materials

10. Conclusion This presentation relates to one project in one institution but reflects a wider international movement towards a ‘radical form’ of HE (Winn 2012: 133); This work arguably pushes the boundaries of accepted, tightly-guarded acceptable locations of knowledge production in the professions; Highly rewarding and widely beneficial work, but not without challenges!

11. Links and references Burawoy, M. (2005) ‘For public sociology’ American Sociological Review 70 (1), pp. 4-28 Neary, M. and Winn, J. (2009) ‘The Student as Producer: Reinventing the Student Experience in Higher Education’ in L. Bell, H. Stevenson and M. Neary (2009) The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience London: Continuum pp 126-138 Winn, J. (2012) ‘Open Education: From the Freedom of Things to the Freedom of People’ in M. Neary, H. Stevenson and L. Bell (2012) Towards Teaching in Public: Reshaping the Modern University London: Continuum pp. 133-147 For information about the OER projects at Lincoln http://oer.lincoln.ac.uk/projects/ For further information about this project please contact kcrawford@lincoln.ac.uk kcrawford@lincoln.ac.uk