 Good morning and welcome back to day two of OER Domains 21. I hope you're enjoying your morning so far I would like to welcome for this session Dr. Rob Farrow of the Institute for of Educational Technology at the Open University Rob is going to be talking about understanding OER and innovation Just before Rob speaks, I'd like to remind you to use the chat area for any comments you have or any questions And at the end of the session, we'll come back to those and we'll put those to Rob So without any further delay, I'd like to hand over to Rob Farrow. Thank you very much Hi, yeah, thanks very much so I'm going to be talking with you this morning about innovation and OER and And For those of you who don't know me, I'm a senior researcher at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK The OU has a history of innovation in distance education, which I'm sure you're aware of and Also in open education as well through OER and through sort of open practices and that kind of thing and so the Motivating question for this work, which relates to a project, which I'm going to be talking about at the end is Trying to understand what innovation looks like in an open educational context and my starting point for this is You might start off by thinking well, obviously OER are an innovation They let us do things like the five Rs and they give us new possibilities for action and Coordination and that kind of thing, but I think it's important to note that copyright, which OER is a sort of response to was also an innovation and It was designed to sort of solve the problem of how to regulate intellectual property Once the chemical reproduction became possible. So how do we incentivize creativity? How do we preserve works? How do we establish the rules for economic exploitation and so on? So So OER is a response to that, but it's not like Against the backdrop, but there's no innovation in anything else or something like that and I think It's not always easy to understand exactly what we mean by innovation per se, but it's especially complex in an open Context because a lot of the Challenges associated with openness make it hard to be very systematic and kind of categorical about innovation There's a recent paper, which is well worth reading which is a review of Innovation in open education, which you can find in the journal Sustainability And this highlights some things which I wanted to kind of pass on around this idea of openness one is that People still tend to think about formal models of innovation With respect to traditional education and traditional institutions of education and a lot of the time The sort of open response doesn't necessarily fit into the existing Way of doing things although it can do and I'm going to talk about that in a second The other is the kind of the sort of synthesis issue if you like We've got all these different kind of things going on that we call open How do we bring them all together into one area and how do we kind of understand them together as openness? And also that the kind of things that Support innovation the dynamism and the potential of open practices In a way, that's the sort of engine that drives the innovative aspects But it also makes it hard to be very general about what's going on And if you're familiar with Martin Weller's work, he's made us a sort of argument about openness and the difficulty of being categorically in general because How diverse context can be and how important context is for understanding openness and In addition to this you've got the idea of openness being something related to technology and technique But also that it's a sort of human element and it's about Outlook mindset Values and so on so all the things that are kind of coming together In innovation in open educational context so I wanted to so Just looking back now at some of the work that I've been involved with and trying to sort of distill out What is the innovation element of this which wasn't necessarily the focus at the time? And so you may be familiar with the open education research hub Which is the team I'm part of Now a few years ago when we first came together we did some The first sort of global research into The impact of OER and we work with a whole bunch of different collaborators. You can see them here And the way this research was organized was that we had a series of hypotheses that we were investigating And you can see these here each one had a sort of keyword summarized it But we were interested at the time in Examining what's the evidence base for the claims that people are making about OER? But people are saying it saves money for instance. Well, where's the evidence for that and so on so But in this case, I think this is this isn't a sort of a useful shorthand for This sort of innovations associated with OER at least in 2012 And you can read the reports yourselves if you want to find out what the outcome of that research was and So with OER research hub It was all about the key claims and so if you like those were the innovations that we were investigating There's also some innovation the way that we were investigating it by using open practices and open dissemination and so on But similarly looking at other projects, so UK open textbooks The innovation is to replace textbooks with open and licensed versions Supporting the kind of pedagogical change and making certain things more efficient and so on Creating the right kind of critical reflection that sort of thing And so in other projects like Bismuk, we had the idea of leveraging MOOCs for business training OER world map the idea of Using open data and open kind of protocols to share data and experiences amongst open education communities With the global OER graduate network goes again, we're quite interested there in the kind of The the open vector into research. So what's there's what's the impact of open on what people are doing? How do you how do you practice openly? How do you become an open researcher and so on? And so that just gives you a think of flavor of the different sort of manifestations of innovation And that's just a very very, you know Lightweight kind of look back at a few projects Looking at more theoretical accounts of innovation and trying to understand it more theoretically a Lot of people will start up with the idea of well Someone's the first person to think of something and do something differently. They're the innovator They're the ones that people follow And there's some truth to that but the idea of you know, I've used Archimedes here Discovering that you can measure irregular the volume of irregular bodies by displacement and water Shouting Eureka, and you know, it's the moment of innovation if you like If you actually look at sort of modern theories around innovation Not many of them would really agree with that as a kind of idea of how innovation Spreads if you look at the task artifact cycle, the idea here is that we we develop new tools to Meet the challenges new challenges come out. We need new tools and so on so it's always iterative And this iterative model is not like the Eureka model really and there might be a Eureka moment at some point But it's really about how these things spread That makes them, you know a kind of lasting innovation sustainable innovation Rogers did some work around how innovations spread And in a way the interesting thing here, I think is if an innovation doesn't spread it almost wasn't an innovation It's almost like The sort of the public decides what's innovative and what's not But here you see a sort of standard deviation curve which that's showing you how many people are adopting at a particular point and the Sort of yellow gold line is how many people have adopted as a whole So you always have the sort of the initial thing of the innovators and the early adopters And most people are on board at that point And if I think at this point, where is OER in this market share? graphic in fact OER has a 5% market share in K-12 in the USA, which is one of the more sort of advanced Spreads or proliferations of OER in a particular educational market 5% is not much. It puts you pretty low on this scale And in most places you wouldn't even be close to 5% right and One thing that's worth noting about this graph is that in the early adoption phase There's a kind of chasm of peril where things can kind of kind of fail at that point So they don't get enough and critical mass around adoption Kind of interesting. I'm not sure But with this one and the one before how much it helped us to understand openness specifically because they're really more about How things spread and how they iterate Which maybe describes quite well OER itself and how that changes and how that you know adapt in and so on But innovation as a whole is maybe more complicated Another framework that you might be already familiar with SEMR or Samir model for technology integration and this is a kind of progressive thing So the first use of a new tool or technology might be that you substitute it for the existing tool Then later on You improve that substituted tool make more improvements Make it better at something The next stage would be modifications So eventually you can get some sort of redesign of the task and finally you can rethink exactly the whole process because you read to Certain point where you transformed the task or the challenge Now if you map this on to for instance open textbooks, I think it's quite interesting and I think this this actually Maps quite well on to the sort of spectrum of what you might do with OER So first of all substitution quite simple you use the open textbook instead of the commercial textbook Augmentation you can then share that in ways you couldn't share it before maybe because of digital But maybe not maybe because of copyright You also make it cheaper for learners and so on Modification stages you might do remixing you might do re-editions you might collaborate across institutions to improve things And the rate redefinition stage you might rethink textbook completely. You know why we have a textbook at all So I see some potential here for sort of mapping this stuff and different different sort of Instances of OER open education If you were to develop it a bit further through this is this is from mobile learning but someone's categorized particular studies along this Samir kind of categories and I think this has potential as well for Understanding and explaining what's happening with open resources and open practices There aren't many studies which actually look at innovation as a specific thing in open education I was involved with one where we went back after a project ended and we tried to understand Okay, so what was the innovation really like then? You know what was happening that we didn't necessarily appreciate at the time or it comes out later through reflection and that kind of thing Now what I would say about this if it's a if it's a model. I'm not sure It's it's kind of messy right when you start looking at reality So reality is much messier than a nice neat set of categories But it does get you closer to understanding what really happened in that instance what happened in that exactly that particular example So I don't really have time to develop these arguments today But I have some thoughts around how we support innovation through we are and so This is if you like the more practical end of this stuff for me so raising awareness of open concentrating on empowering individuals encouraging experimentation develop critical and constructive learning cultures thinking and acting at the level of the ecosystem and Building and leveraging networks. This is a kind of provisional list. I suppose I don't really have time to go into it This is coming out some other work that I've done around for instance critical pedagogy Ethics and so on I put the references in here in case you want to look up more of that or you want to drop me a line about it So why am I doing all this stuff talking about? innovation anyway So I want to tell you briefly about a new project That's just started this year on core plus On core is the European Network for catalyzing open resources in education Renology Alliance project funded until 2023 So I won't go through the list of collaborators, but you can see them here on the slide So what's the point of the project? The idea is to create a coordinated area within Europe the innovation through open educational resources and The idea here is that we will build these communities facilitate their interactions But also come up with formal strategies around business models integration of our academia and how in the world of work we can have better use of open resources and open practices So you can see here the sort of high-level Concept behind the project so firstly, there's this idea of creating these the correct sort of communities and then we have the idea of how do we improve the quality? How do we build the right sort of technological infrastructure? How do we create the right policies and recommend? Them to the right people and so on And the one that I'm focusing on today. It's really this one about validated innovation of business models. Oh, we are on the business model side and I'm gonna be drawing on some work from a couple of years ago on the ufap project That's open online flexible and technology enhanced models So we did some work Couple of years ago where we did surveys around the world to try and kind of understand How provision differed in different countries and different institutions and on the business model side one common thing you can One and form of analysis is to sort of say who's got more of a defender like approach and who's more like a Prospector So defenders are interested in protecting what they've got and Prospectors are trying to create something new and they're more obviously associated with Innovation as a core concern. So we're going to be looking at different business models and how they map on to innovation But depending on so this is again from the ufap project depending on how you collect that data You can map lots of different Lots of different criteria So how open someone is what kind of business model they've got and this doesn't have to necessarily just apply to Education institutions you could do it with businesses as well and people who exist in that kind of middle space There is a theory of open innovation, which you may but not be familiar with It's the idea that contrary to traditional forms of Innovation within a corporation or business the idea is that you have a porous kind of Approach where academia is involved. There's alternative markets and it's a bit more, you know, what we would call an open practice So I think this is also an interesting thing to look at And I just want to finish off by telling you about the kind of work that we're going to be doing within on core That's relevant to innovation. So first of all Refining some of these thoughts into more of an innovation model and then building that at all for evaluation and recording examples of innovation I mean, we find these cases where people are doing something interesting. The idea is to amplify those across the network and Raise the profile but also extract the kind of key elements from it So there's desk research element and there's also sort of a series of events that we'll be doing And just looking to the sort of timeline for this so month six will be June this year That'll be the first of our briefings. There'll be Briefing documents that was six of those across the course of the project Which summarized some of the theoretical stuff some of the examples that we're finding and kind of give you a very sort of Quick overview of innovation in the last sort of six months We'll also be publishing a toolkit to help people understand innovation in their own context and then Throughout the life of the project we have these circles and so the first circle is in month 10 These are our community of practice meetings where we'll be bringing people together not just With an interest in innovation, but also later on in the project people interested in quality technology policy and so on Each have their own circle, which will come together Into one big community by the end of the project and so there'll be various sort of things online showcases and It's interesting content. I strongly recommend you to sign up to the mailing list that on core project. EU Where you've yet found more information about the project? But I hope you will join us as we are exploring innovation in this way. Thanks very much for your attention Thank thank you Rob for a fascinating presentation We don't have a lot of time for questions and maybe just pose this one from me Just if you could maybe quickly reflect on what you think of some of the criticisms that Nancy Edlinger makes of open innovation Which criticisms are they? Oh, I Have not read that book. I don't know. That's okay. Thanks very much We're nearly out of time anyway, but so I think Thank you for it for a very interesting talk and The comments bar has been very active. So we might want to look at those later But I'd just like to thank you once again for your presentation today and thank everyone for oh One more Rob. Could you give the link again to get in the encore mailing list? Maybe we could Yeah, it's just on core project. EU On core project. EU fabulous And I'm gonna take that reference that excellent your reference and I'm gonna have a look at it So thanks for that Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for coming and thank you Rob once again. Thank you I'm not