SCORE Project update; OER and Quantitative Social Science

1. How OERs can help a Strategically
Important and Vulnerable Subject
Area - Quantitative Social Science
Dr Jackie Carter, University of
Manchester and SCORE, The Open
University, UK

2. 200 years 200 countries 4 minutes
“I came to understand the world http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
by visiting it. I use statistics to
check my understanding and to http://howtomakeadifference.net/2012/03/28/hans-
tell others.”
CC BY-NC 2.0
rosling/

3. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 NPR http://richannel.org/visualising-how-a-population-reaches-7-billion

5. http://www.esds.ac.uk

6. Prof John MacInnes - ESRC Strategic Advisor for Quantitative Methods at Undergraduate
Level
Source: www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Undergraduate_quantitative_research_methods_tcm8-
2722.pdf

7. Policy Drivers for Quantitative Skills
• Quantitative Methods (QM) or
Quantitative Skills (QS) or
Statistical Literacy
• Increasingly, Hefce will invest on
behalf of students to meet the
costs incurred by universities that
cannot be covered by fees alone:
support for widening
participation, high-cost subjects,
specialist institutions, and
strategically important and
vulnerable subjects.
www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectionc www.britac.ac.uk/policy/Languages_and_
ode=26&storycode=419552&c=1 Quantitative_Skills.cfm

8. Celebrating the value and relevance of the social
sciences
(above)
http://blogs.bis.gov.uk/blog/2011/11/08/celebrating-the-value-
and-relevance-of-the-social-sciences/
QUANTITATIVE SKILLS: LEARNING LESSONS FROM
OVERSEAS (right)
http://www.britac.ac.uk/

9. www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform33/OpenWorking.html
http://www.oer-quality.org/tag/qa/

10. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2462/3613705218_aae4ca0477.jpg

11. The SCORE Project
The aims of this project are to share teaching
resources and expertise in those institutions already
working to upskill students in QM; and to focus on
resources that address global issues by using real
world data
The resulting open educational resources (OER) will
be accompanied by ‘stories’ or narratives of exemplar
usage, engaging social science learners with QM. The
focus will be away from economics and psychology

12. Methodology
• Identify willing
respondents from:
– quantitative-methods-
teachers mailing list
– Media contacts
– Policy practitioners
• This presentation is a
snapshot of results 2/3
way through the project
(see paper)
myitzonecasestudies.files.wordpress.com/2008
/10/case-studies.jpg

13. giving students an opportunity to
express their fears and frustrations
about the use of abuse of statistics
from the outset, ….supporting them
throughout - and especially in the
early stages - in terms of their use of
data and statistics
Fear of Tests
Studying for my biostatistics exam was scary
enough, without the spiders.
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Michael http://www.flickr.com/photos/pictoral/268139464/sizes/o/in/photostream/

14. ‘you don’t learn much about research
methodology by just reading books and writing
essays, you do have to go out and collect some
data, and you don’t really appreciate the craft of
quantitative methods until you do a bit of
recoding and see what difference it makes’
CC BY 2.0 Stuart Bannocks
www.flickr.com/photos/42665617@N07/6021961819/sizes/z/in/photostream/

15. ‘so students get a real view of where Britain sits
in a global context….it captures their imagination’
Mark Easton – Home Editor http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15164970

16. Data, data, data. I cannot make bricks
without clay (Sherlock Holmes)
let them ‘get their hands dirty with data’ in
order to appreciate that it generates an
improvement in practical not just theoretical
skills.
[Using data provides] a risk-free way to gain
statistical, computer and information skills ..
directly applicable to the workplace
[it’s about] transferable skills
There is a balance between helping students
to collect data themselves and giving access
to authoritative data sources
…focussing on research design and how to
become a social scientist.

17. Data Journalism
• BBC College of
Journalism
• Focus on open data –
e.g. Political party
donations
• Tools for data
exploration (pivot
tables)
• Motivation – in search
of a story

18. Policy Related Research
UK Poverty Advisor for Save
the Children
Statistics in Real Life – 1st Year
course at University of
Manchester – Guest speaker
www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/23/child-poverty-britain-map#

19. My first reaction to sharing
resources was one of horror! I
remembered days spent writing ..
my teaching materials and felt very
protective of them – why would I
then share them with someone
else? …in academia we are
socialized into being protective
about our materials
Context is everything in QM teaching and I started to feel that I
was almost certainly going through the same laborious process
that hundreds of lecturers before me had gone through
themselves. Why we’re we replicating this process in isolation?
Think how much time we could save if we pooled resources! …I
decided that I didn’t want to continue the ‘cycle of abuse’ along
the lines of “well I had to do it on my own so why should I share
my hard-earned experience and resources with someone else?”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5537336223/sizes/z/in/photostream/

20. and I realized how great these Once I understood the terms of the
things were precisely because Creative Commons licenses and the
people had collaborated and protection they gave my resources I
shared. … actually I was quite proud was sold.
of my resources and that as well as
criticism there was also the If you do it [tagging] right then your
possibility that I would receive work will turn up high on Google
positive feedback… there is a searches (I’ve already had people tell
parallel with publishing – if you do me that they found my resources via
good work then it gets read and you Google
start to build your reputation. In an
era in which the student experience
.. stipulated through the licensing
and teaching quality is becoming
agreement that any derived works
increasingly important to HEIs, why
must be deposited in JORUM also –
wouldn’t you want to show-off your
thus we are starting to build a critical
resources?
mass of open access materials that
will only snowball as more and more
people get involved
http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5537336223/sizes/z/in/photostream/

21. is open a step too far too soon for some?
QM teaching group (QANTAC) – sharing in a closed way first….
….but with leadership could open up
Need to understand the benefits of sharing
.. Real world examples – real
opportunity to develop OER worth
sharing
Links to employability very important
http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5537336223/sizes/z/in/photostream/

22. Learning from similar initiatives

23. “OER is a very young concept. People who live it every day
are sort of like 'why aren't more people doing it?’ It's still
very young and it will come of age. We will look back ten
years from now we will see the OER movement as the single
biggest change for creating access to high quality higher
education for people on the planet - most people just don't
realise it yet.
And where we've got to do some work is search and retrieval
and application - that's still the great frontier. We're not
doing a good enough job in equipping our educators to
participate; we're not doing a good enough job in enabling
our students to find it and do something meaningful with it”.
Professor Martin Bean; VC Open University, UK
Questions & discussion: Bridging the divide: visions of education futures through technology. Going Global Conference 2012

24. Jean Spector http://fr.fotopedia.com/items/jeans-AJA3RruQUkA
Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works