This document summarizes feedback from focus groups and surveys of academic staff at the University of Nottingham regarding open learning and open educational resources. It discusses the strategic drivers for open learning including social responsibility, promotion of the university, and cost efficiencies. It outlines initiatives at Nottingham such as the U-Now open courseware site and the XPERT open resource repository. It also discusses challenges such as copyright and staff attitudes, which were mixed but generally positive. Next steps include expanding open resources and partnerships while addressing issues of appropriate reuse.

1. “Opening Up: Staff attitudes to open learning”OCWC Global7th 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

4. Student numbers

5. 39,300 students (postgrad and undergrad)

6. 9,700 international (130 countries)

7. Six campuses (inc. China and Malaysia)

8. E-Learning Support (Learning Team)

9. Multimedia production unit

10. VLEs

11. E-assessment

12. Video production/podcasting

13. Computer aided learning

15. Social responsibility Promotional opportunities Cost efficiencies

16. What is Nottingham doing? U-Now – OCW/OER Launched 2007 Member of OCWC 2008 11,280 visitors Q1 2010 Up 67% over Q1 2009 Over 2000 downloads for ‘Anatomists cookbook UK HEA/JISC funded through BERLiN project 2009/10

17. 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

18. 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 (98)

19. Focus group feedback Focus groups

20. Distribution across themes Focus groups

21. 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

22. 1. Social responsibility Focus groups

24. External

26. External

28. 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 International partnerships

29. 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

30. 2. Promotion Focus groups

31. Staff survey

32. 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

33. Promotion of staff

35. 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

36. 3. Cost efficiencies Focus groups

37. Staff survey

38. Re-purposing OER

39. Staff survey

40. 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/

41. Xerte Online Toolkits

42. XPERT

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

44. Staff survey

45. Staff survey Impact on Nottingham

46. 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

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