1. “Opening Up:
Staff attitudes to open learning”
OCWC Global
7th May 2010
Andy Beggan
Learning Team Leader
The University of Nottingham

2. Outline of presentation
 About Nottingham
 Why open learning?
 Strategic drivers
 Background
 Staff attitudes
 Focus group feedback
 Staff survey results
 Challenges
 Activities
 Impact on Nottingham
 Next steps

3. About Nottingham
• Research led institution
• Student numbers
• 30,000 students (postgrad and undergrad)
• 6,000 international (130 countries)
• Six campuses (inc. China and Malaysia)
• E-Learning Support (Learning Team)
• Multimedia production unit
• VLEs
• E-assessment
• Video production
• Podcasting
• E-learning development (Xerte)

4. Why is Nottingham involved?
1.Social responsibility
2.Promotional opportunities
3.Cost efficiencies

5. What is Nottingham doing?
 U-Now – OCW/OER
 Launched 2007
 Member of OCWC 200
 Visitors Up 67% over
Q1 2009
 UK HEA/JISC funded
through BERLiN project
2009/10

6. The BERLiN project
 Re-invigorate the U-Now (2009/10)
 Capturing examples from across all campuses
 Issues assigning credits? Led to „module frameworks‟
 Introduction to microeconomics
 Rich learning objects add further depth
 No limitations of what can be made available
 Podcasts and videos, interactive learning content, PDFs, etc
 Copyright „hurdles‟ main barrier

7. Opening up: Staff attitudes
 Open learning focus groups (Summer 2009)
 20 academic staff across 5 focus groups
 All faculties at all levels of academic staff
 Feedback grouped under themes
 Areas
 +ve, -ve, neutral
 Themes
 Online staff survey (Mar 2010)
 6% of academic staff

8. Focus group feedback
19
138
Social responsibility
154 Promotion
Cost efficiencies
Focus groups

9. Distribution across themes
Loss of control
Barriers for reuse
QA
Book sales
Learning strategies
Target audience
Development costs
Changing current practice
Academic promotion
Academic concerns
University showcase
IPR
Commercial
Impact
Social responsibility Promotion Cost efficiencies
Focus groups

10. 1. Social responsibility
“I have got this feeling that there‟s people out
there who don‟t have access to education and
that they‟ve got access to the internet. Maybe
they could use these courses or sessions or the
odd video or whatever to just top up what they
cannot manage to get from their own
education system.”
Focus groups

11. 1. Social responsibility
Loss of control
Barriers for reuse
QA
Book sales
Learning strategies
Target audience
Development costs
Changing current practice
Academic promotion
Academic concerns
University showcase
IPR
Commercial
Impact
Positive Negative Neutral
Focus groups

12. Contribution
•Individual
•School
•Consortium
Connections Clearance
•Internal •Permissions
•External •IPR
•Partnerships •Copyright
Connections
•Internal
•External
Circulation •Partnerships Construction
•OER aggregating sites •Assembly
•RSS feeds •Packaging
•Web2.0 •URLs
Cataloguing
•Metadata
•Keywords/tags
•Upload

13. Open Educational Resources (OER) Students benefit from the range of
can help build fruitful partnerships approaches available through the use
with colleagues and institutions of Open Educational Resources(OER)
worldwide in my teaching
Strongly
Disagree Strongly
Strongly
1% Strongly Disagree
Disagree Agree
Agree 2%
Disagree 5% 7%
7% 11%
Neutral
25% Neutral
38% Agree
48%
Agree
56%
Staff survey

14. International partnerships
 OER Africa feedback on U-Now
 Address multiple audiences at the same time
 Display
 Intended level of use and target audience
 Brief description
 Licence
 File size
 Technical information and publisher
 Downloading instructions
 Different approaches to navigation (browse, filter, search)
 Encourage editing and repurpose
 UKOER~OER Africa / UNESCO partnerships
 OER „Shopping list‟ to support African HEIs

15. 2. Promotion
“I don‟t think it would make any difference to our
reputation as teachers. The whole culture is
research. All the promotions and everything are
through research.”
“I fought quite hard for the materials to be made
more widely available than just within the
University for a number of reasons. It adds to
the reputation of the Centre, it attracts good
tutors; it‟s got lots of knock on effects that are
very positive.” Focus groups

16. 2. Promotion
Loss of control
Barriers for reuse
QA
Book sales
Learning strategies
Target audience
Development costs
Changing current practice
Academic promotion
Academic concerns
University showcase
IPR
Commercial
Impact
Positive Negative Neutral
Focus groups

17. What benefits do you see in publishing
and using OER materials?
Publishing Using
73% 72%
66%
60% 58%
56%
51%
47% 47%
44%
42%
34% 33%
30%
22% 22% 21%
15%
9%
7%
Staff survey

18. Open Courseware Consortium
 Joined OCWC in 2007/8
 One of 4 UK members
 Mathematical institute, Oxford
 Peoples-uni.org
 The Open University
 The University of Nottingham
 Doubled visitors to U-Now
 Around 30% referrals to U-Now
Q1 2010 comes via OCWC
 Submission via RSS

19. Promotion of staff

20. 3. Cost efficiencies
“ I‟ve used other people‟s materials and some stuff
you see is terrible and other things you think oh
that‟s a good idea I‟ll do it like that. You pick and
choose, mix it up with your own stuff and I find
that an incredibly positive process.”
“There would be issues over copyright, principally
images, graphs, figures, data from papers and
textbooks used willy-nilly in lectures because you
don‟t have that fear… you are breaching copyright.”
Focus groups

21. 3. Cost efficiencies
Loss of control
Barriers for reuse
QA
Book sales
Learning strategies
Target audience
Development costs
Changing current practice
Academic promotion
Academic concerns
University showcase
IPR
Commercial
Impact
Positive Negative Neutral
Focus groups

22. Reusing OER is a useful way of I would only use OER in my teaching if I
developing new courses am able to edit and personalise the
materials for use with my students
Strongly Strongly
Strongly
Disagree Disagree
Disagree Agree
2% 2%
6% 1%
Disagree Strongly
10% Agree
19%
Neutral
20%
Agree
Neutral 49%
42%
Agree
49%
Staff survey

23. Re-purposing OER

24. What types of open resources would you be most
willing to publish or use?
Publish Use
66%
59%
53%
49 %
46% 46%
43% 42%
38%39% 37%38% 38%
35% 35%
33% 33%32%
30% 30% 29%
27% 28%
23%
15%
9%
Staff survey

25. XPERT
 Producer-centric models
 Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory
 UK JISC funded under rapid innovation programme
 To progress the vision of a distributed architecture
of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use
 Based on Xerte Online Toolkits
 www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte
 www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/

26. XPERT

27. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/

28. What barriers do you face in publishing and using
OER materials?
65%
Publishing Using
58%
55%
43%
40%
37%
32%
25% 26%
24% 23%
21%
16% 16%
13%
11%
8% 8% 9% 8% 8% 8%
5% 8% 5%
3% 3%
1%
Staff survey

29. Impact on Nottingham
Staff survey: I will submit teaching and
Staff survey: I have submitted teaching and
learning resources for publication as OER in the
learning resources for publication as OER
future
Unsure
3%
Yes
Yes
29% Unsure 39%
44%
No No
68% 17%
Staff survey: I have used OER from other Staff survey: I will use OER from other academics
academics in my teaching in my teaching in the future
Unsure
3%
Yes
27% Yes
Unsure 42%
44%
No
No
70%
14%
Staff survey

30. Next steps
 Social responsibility
 UKOER~OER Africa framework
 Promotion
 U-Now website review
 School based and subject based RSS feeds
 Support growth of local communities
 Link to prospectuses / school webpages
 Cost efficiencies
 „Digital literacy course‟
 Appropriate reuse and repurpose of OER
 Workshops, seminars, PGCHE
 New tools and technologies

31. Any Questions?
http://unow.nottingham.ac.uk/