Personal Blogs

Publish a blog post that describes your experience with open education. Is it just with the OU, or have you studied a MOOC, used open resources, or engaged with open access publications?

As explained in my previous blog post about OpenLearn and innovation H817 Week 2 Activity 5 Are OER both open and innovative? I’ve been involved in open education for a long time at the OU in various ways, encompassing different forms of ‘open’. The OU’s mission has always been ‘to be open to people, places, methods and ideas’ and this still holds true in its 52^nd year.

My OU undergraduate degree was open in the sense that there was and is no requirement from the OU for previous school level qualifications (GCSEs or A levels) to study an undergraduate degree at the OU and at the time no limit on the length of time it took to complete the degree (I did 7 modules over 11 years, with breaks when my children were born). From the start, the OU charged fees for its formal learning but has always, as enshrined in its charter, shared some of its content for free with the wider population: via radio and TV broadcasts, free posters associated with those broadcasts and since 2006 free short courses via OpenLearn even before ‘MOOCs’ were a named thing.

OU staff members were encouraged to study with the OU, to help them understand what it meant to be a distance learner. The insights I gained about distance education from my time as an OU undergraduate has helped me numerous times in my various OU roles. Many staff members of all grades have studied with the OU over the years, with some like me starting in secretarial & clerical grades and moving on to academic-related or academic roles as a result.

In 2013 while in IET, I was project manager for the OLDS MOOC (Open Learning Design) before FutureLearn existed. The MOOC was run by IET using an open platform it had developed called Cloudworks plus Google hangouts and Twitter, so was a very different beast from any FutureLearn MOOC. It was open to anyone, though in practice, mostly educators at universities around the world were interested in it.

In 2014 I moved from IET to the home of Open Learn: Open Media and Informal Learning (then called Open Media Unit) to work on the 3 year Open Educational Practices in Scotland project (OEPS) which was co-ordinated by the OU in Scotland. Although my role as Senior Producer (Open Education Project) was to coordinate the online platform development work to support open educational practices, I was also involved in co-authoring badged open courses, guiding third party organisations through the creation of their first elearning courses (Parkinson’s UK, Dyslexia Scotland and Education Scotland being 3 of the organisations OEPS worked with to create open courses, which are still used today), research into OER and what it means to do OEP, writing articles, setting up and helping run the OEPS Twitter account sharing OEPS activities openly and presenting at OER conferences.

In OMIL I went from a Moodle (open source VLE software) novice who had a smattering of experience of working with IT developers when in IET, to a platform manager who confidently writes IT development requirements (acceptance criteria) for the OER platform OpenLearn Create (OLC). Some Moodle code developed for OLC and language pack translations OMIL commissions is shared back with the Moodle community.

I learned so much from OEPS and what it means to be an open education practitioner (I’m still learning). Ultimately OEPS became one impetus for embarking upon the MA ODE: presenting at OE Global in March 2017 in Cape Town finally helped me start to acknowledge that I’m an educator. The other impetus was a resolution I made on a flight back from Cape Town in November 2018 after sadly saying goodbye to my brother who was dying of cancer, he was the only one of my siblings to have a Masters degree (Geology), his long illness and positivity in his final weeks inspired me to go for mine at last.

I often use ORO (OU Open Research Online) to find open versions of OU staff research publications. It isn’t behind a paywall and many of the papers are available as a PDF download.

I’ve been a Flickr user for some time, sometimes sharing photos I’ve taken but more frequently and recently when searching for openly licenced images to use in a series of piano solo videos 'A Little Night Music' playlist I’m compiling for sharing openly on YouTube by Music for All @ SMSG (a local music event organisation team I’ve been involved in for years).

When reusing OER resources found online in this way in a new OER, I’m very conscious of the need for attribution (TASL): title, author, source and licence (something I learned from OEPS). However, I know that this is something many people struggle to practice because they don’t understand how the open licence system works, the TASL information isn’t easy to find or they don’t know they ought to reference what they are reusing.

This is a challenge for open education practitioners: to share such practice in accessible, meaningful ways so more people grasp the principles of open and begin to adopt open education practices appropriate for their context too.