Scotland has a distinctive and highly regarded tradition of education that is recognised internationally. However, while the Scottish Government has been active in formulating Digital Future strategies and open data policies, it has yet to articulate policies to support open education and open educational resources. Elsewhere in the UK, the Higher Education Funding Council for England funded a £15M (€17,5M) OER programme, which ran from 2009 to 2012. The UKOER Programme, managed by JISC and the Higher Education Academy and supported by Cetis, funded a large number of projects that released OERs, developed and embedded open practices and built capacity within institutions and across subject domains. Although restricted to the English HE sector, the UKOER Programmes demonstrated that open educational resources and practices have the potential to address current issues in Scottish education. Although no comparable funding programme exists in Scotland, a number of ‘grassroots’ initiatives are emerging from the further and higher education sector that are opening up Scottish education. In order to explore how Scotland can leverage the power of open to develop the nation’s unique education offering, support social inclusion and inter-institutional collaboration and sharing, and engage with EU open education directives, Cetis are facilitating an Open Scotland Summit, which will explore the development of open education policies and practices for Scotland. This paper will provide a critical overview of open education initiatives in Scotland in the wider context of UK, European and global developments, and present the outcomes and findings of the Open Scotland Summit.

1. Open Scotland:
Policies and strategies for
opening up education in
Scotland
Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker, Joe Wilson,
Sheila MacNeill

2. Overview
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Introduction to Cetis
UK OER Programme
Open education initiatives in Scotland
Open Scotland aims and objectives

3. What is Cetis?
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Centre for Education Technology, Interoperability and
Standards http://www.cetis.ac.uk/
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A national UK technology advisory centre providing
strategic, technical and pedagogical advice on
educational technology and standards to funding bodies,
standards agencies, government, institutions and
commercial partners.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

4. About Cetis
Partnership between:
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University of Bolton,
England.
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Heriot Watt
University, Scotland.
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Three staff located in
Scotland.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

5. Cetis and Jisc
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Cetis have a long association with Jisc, http:/jisc.ac.uk
Formerly an F/HE quango, now a charity.
Funded Cetis as a project 2001 – 2005 & an Innovation
Support Centre 2006 – 2013.
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Provided Jisc with strategic technical input and guidance.
Represented the Jisc community on international standards
bodies.
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Supported the Jisc development programmes.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

6. UKOER Programme
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Funded by HEFCE between 2009 – 2012.
Managed by Jisc and HEA and supported by Cetis.
Invested over £15 million.
Funded over 80 individual projects.
Aimed at releasing OERs and embedding sustainable open practice
in institutions.
All resource tagged #ukoer and
deposited in Jorum national
repository http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

7. Scottish Open Education Developments
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3E Framework
GCU Library OER Guidelines
MOOCs
Re:Source OER Repository
Curriculum for Excellence
Open Badges
Learner Journey Project
Smarter Scotland Strategic Objective
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

8. Napier 3E Framework
3E levels of examples
To make active use of technology to meaningfully enhance the learning,
teaching and assessment experience across all modules.
Enhance
Extend
Empower
Adopting technology in simple Further use of technology that Developed use of technology
and effective ways to actively
facilitates key aspects of
that requires higher order
support students and increase
individual and collaborative
their activity and selfcollaborative learning and
learning that reflects how
responsibility
assessment through increasing knowledge is created and used
their choice and control
in the professional environment
eg. Seminar participation
Provide a discussion board for
students to post follow-up
comments (queries, issues that
Encourage more equal
Have students work in pairs or
engagement in seminars by small groups to design and lead
having students take turns (in
online seminars for particular
pairs or small groups) to
units, with guidance from tutor
seminar to be picked up during
produce a summary of that
on their proposed topic and
approach
lecture
online, perhaps with a follow-up
question to be tackled
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

9. Glasgow Caledonian University Library
OER Guidelines
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

10. MOOCs
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University of Edinburgh have successfully run 6 courses
on Coursera attracting over 300,000 students.
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Three Scottish HE institutions involved in FutureLearn.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

11. Re:Source
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A Resource sharing platform for the college sector in
Scotland.
Powered by Jorum.
Aims to provide
“…access to a rich
collection of OER
content from Scotland’s
Colleges & related
collections of interest to
the FE Sector.”
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

12. Curriculum for Excellence
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New curriculum introduced in 2010 which aims to
“ensure that all children and young people in Scotland develop the
attributes, knowledge and skills they will need to flourish in life,
learning and work.”
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Curriculum for Excellence based on developing 4 capacities, helping
children to become:
• Successful learners
• Confident individuals
• Responsible citizens
• Effective contributors
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

13. Mozilla Open Badges
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Open Badges in Scottish Education Group supported by Jisc RSC
Scotland. http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?page_id=3068
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SQA formally announced it’s intention to work with Mozilla
Foundation and OBSEG to:
“investigate the opportunities presented by an innovative approach
to displaying individuals’ learning accomplishments online.”
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

14. Learner Journey Project
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Scottish Government led project aiming to:
“empower learners to make better decisions by making it easier for
them to see what they have achieved so far, what learning
opportunities are available to them and how they can get to where
they want to be in the future.”
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Commissioned Learning Journey Data Jam.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.
© Crown Copyright. OGL.

15. A Smarter Scotland
“A smarter Scotland is critical to delivering the Government’s
Purpose of achieving sustainable economic growth. By
making Scotland smarter, we will lay the foundations for the
future wellbeing and achievement of our children and young
people, increase skill levels across the population and better
channel the outputs of our universities and colleges into
sustainable wealth creation, especially participation,
productivity and economic growth.”
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

16. Open Scotland Summit
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Brought together senior
managers, policy makers and
key thinkers to explore the
development of open
education policy and practice
in Scotland.
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National Museum of Scotland,
Edinburgh, June 2013.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

17. Open Scotland Summit
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Organised by Cetis, in collaboration with SQA, Jisc RSC
Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

18. Open Scotland Participants
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Scottish Government
Scottish Qualifications
Authority
Education Scotland
Scottish Funding
Council
Quality Assurance
Agency
College Development
Network
National Library of
Scotland
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.
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Universities of
Edinburgh, Dundee,
Heriot Watt, UHI,
Glasgow Caledonian.
Jisc
Jorum
Jisc RSC Scotland
Jisc RSC Cymru
OSS Watch
Nordic Open Education
Alliance
Creative Commons
POERUP Project

19. Lightning Talks and Case Studies
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Lightning talks on
• Open data
• Open Source in education
• MOOCs
• UKOER
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Case studies from
• Scandinavia
• Wales
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

20. Open Scotland Keynote
“Open Education: The Business
and Policy Case for OER”
by Dr Cable Green,
Creative Commons, Director of
Global Learning.
© Martin Hawksey
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

21. Open Scotland Keynote
“At the heart of the movement towards Open Educational
Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s
knowledge is a public good and that technology in general
and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an opportunity
for everyone to share, use, and reuse it.”
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Cathy Casserly & Mike Smith, Creative Commons &
Hewlett Foundation
“the opposite of open is not closed, the opposite of open is
broken.”
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

22. How can openness help to address
strategic priorities and challenges?
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Publishing - current models for publishing research and
educational content are outdated. New open models are
needed. This requires changes in attitude and practice.
Licence Restrictions – tendency to release OER under
restrictive licences limiting ability to re-use & remix.
Develop open policy & practice to support openness &
overcome “closed minds”. But need investment to make
resources open.
Joining Up Open Practice – pockets of good practice
across Scotland that need joining up, e.g. public
libraries.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

23. How can openness help to address
strategic priorities and challenges?
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Quality Assurance – lack of quality assurance still a
concern. Need to move from “not invented here” to
“proudly borrowed from there”.
Learners as Co-creators – how can we engage
learners?
“The Big Ticket” – how
can opennes address
government strategic
agendas: post-16
education, knowledge
transfer, curriculum change,
school – college –
university articulation.
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EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

24. How can openness help to address
strategic priorities and challenges?
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Change Management – sector is undergoing period of
massive change, unsettling for staff, but change also
presents opportunity for radical new developments.
Curriculum for Excellence– changing the way children
think and learn. Can open resources help prepare
colleges and universities for this change?
FE Funding Cuts– massive cuts in FE sector. More
students and fewer staff. How can colleges make better
use of?
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

25. An Open Declaration for Scotland?
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Took Paris OER Declaration as a
starting point.
Declaration a “good thing” but too
limited in scope.
Scottish declaration should focus on
open education more widely.
Contextualisation required. Need to
provide evidence of declaration’s
statements in action.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.
© UNESCO

26. Open Scotland Actions
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Action 1 – Establish working group, similar to the Nordic
countries, to stimulate open education research and
inform future Government white papers.
Action 2 – Learn from nations that are further ahead of
Scotland in promoting the open agenda. Work with the
other devolved nations in the UK.
Action 3 – Use the working group to focus on key
Government priorities and agendas, e.g. learner
journeys, articulation, work based learning, knowledge
transfer.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

27. Open Scotland Deliverables
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Key Deliverable 1 - Position paper providing evidence
of the benefits of openness with examples of how these
can impact on Government priorities.
Key Deliverable 2 - A Scottish Open Learning
Declaration.
Key Deliverable 3 - Government policy on open
education. This will require stakeholder groups to state
how they will engage with and contribute to the
implementation of the policy.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

28. Progress
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Less progress since June than hoped.
No funded remit to devote resource to Open Scotland.
Key staff unavailable.
Loss of momentum.
But…
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Open Scotland blog launched http://openscot.wordpress.com
Encouraging developments e.g. SQA Open badges
announcement.
Continued interest in open education.
Willingness to engage.
EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

29. Licence
Open Scotland: Policies and strategies for opening up education in Scotland
by Lorna M Campbell, lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com
of Cetis http://www.cetis.ac.uk is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/