This is the Panel Session for the Openness in Education session. In this session, we will discuss how our academic content can be shared with our colleagues, and the wider community. How and why should we be collaborative in an increasingly competitive environment? What are the benefits of an open attitude to our resources and approaches, how can we reach a wider and meaningful audience, and what licensing issues and opportunities exist? Are the potential threats of openness perceived, or real? This session will look at these issues and more.

1. Openness in education
Panel session

2. Historical experiences
• First involved in a HEA/JISC funded project to
share resources about 10 years ago.
• My role was simply to upload selected parts of
my teaching resources to their hosted site after
adding appropriate copyright statements.
• This was quite clumsy and I suspect of limited
efficacy to the community.
• Even I as a project participant found the site hard
work (and likely not well known/disseminated)!
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3. Reflections
• Engineers hardly ever buy textbooks and rely
entirely on the web.
• The textbooks there are tend to be too large/
broad/expensive to support individual modules.
• Textbooks can be hard to learn from as there is
no audio/video which humans respond well too!
• Increasingly publishers are looking at moving
textbooks to web based access with multi-
resources and possible chapter access. However:
– still expensive and may not fit neatly with curriculum.
– additional attributes do not fit neatly with MOLE.
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4. Reflections
• I felt I could offer something useful to students
and the community, but more on a chapter or
section scale than a whole text book.
• Writing a section on a single topic is achievable.
• The focus is on ‘teaching basic concepts’ not on
covering all bases.
Using the web was the obvious way forward as
sections can be added as and when time is
available.
Doing myself meant no tie-in to a publisher or
specific deliverables.
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5. Basic developments
• Created a cpanel
webpage to host
my resources.
• Supplement
with short
videos hosted on
Youtube (and
itunesU).
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http://controleducation.group.shef.ac.uk/indexwebbook.html

6. Youtube site
• Huge numbers of very positive comments from
around the globe.
• Good PR for Sheffield as all my slides have a clear
UoS stamp.
• Over 1.5 million views over last 4-5 years.
• The majority of viewers not UK based but still
many UK viewers.
Graham can tell you about the success of the
iTunesU twin which I believe is also very good.
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7. QUESTIONS
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8. Why should we make our content open?
Partly we should view Universities as state
funded institutions for the benefit of all society.
• Making resources open allows the whole
community to access these.
• Colleagues from other institutions appreciate
the opportunity to use our resources to
improve their teaching delivery. This benefits
their students, thus implicitly the community.
• Good publicity is likely to send some students
our way so aids recruitment and reputation.
Proper evidence of benefits is needed.

9. What do you think the University should be
doing to facilitate good practice in making
content Open Educational Resources?
• We do not have a standard website or other
mechanism for sharing resources beyond the
itunesU website which is probably not widely
known (and quite limited in structure).
• Consequently, staff will do their own thing, which
means the University benefits much less as
external awareness will be random.
• There is not a culture of sharing with many staff
being ‘possessive’ of their resources.
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10. What are the main barriers and problems
with making content Open Educational
Resources?
• Lack of an understanding of copyright and
whether our resources meet the legal
requirements.
• Lack of a suitable framework to host resources.
• Lack of support to put resources on any
framework.
• Fears that ‘giving away our resources’ will
damage our income streams.
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11. The issue of ownership? What do we
need to do to ensure our OERs remain
ours and are properly used?
• Add correct copyright statements into the
resources. [Does not stop plagiarism]
• More centralised support for the mechanisms
used to share materials (wherein more expertise
will be present).
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12. Do we run the risk of selling ourselves
cheap, making fools of ourselves by
making content open?
• Academics should be confident in the value of
their resources, after all they ‘sell these to
attending students’.
• No-one should be forced to share, rather the
culture should be one whereby it is normal.
• University hosted sharing should be subject to
some degree of quality checking.
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