 Hello everybody and thank you for coming to this session and welcome. My name is Gabby Wittes, I'll be chairing the session and I can tell you you'll be in for a treat this morning. We have Catherine Cronin from the National University of Ireland. We have Matt Kornak from the National STEM Teaching Centre and we have Charlie Farley from the University of Edinburgh. And I've been asked to give you one piece of information before we start and that is lunch will be at 12.30 for one hour and we need to head over to the other side of the building for lunch. So without further ado I'll hand over to Catherine. Thank you so much. One of the awful things about this wonderful conference is making choices about where to go. I usually want to be in about three places at once so thank you all for being here. I still feel quite moved by Lorna's keynote this morning. I just thought it was a wonderful encapsulation of a lot of the key issues that really drive us Lorna. You embody and also you express the values that certainly move me around open education. In preparation for today I went back and read a few blog posts from the last couple of OER conferences I've been coming since 2015 and last year there was a particular conversation at the end of the conference with four previous chairs and everyone agreed that each OER conference kind of moves beyond you know significantly moves beyond the one before but was only able to do that because of what happened you know previously. And I think the conference is quite unique in my experience because it's a place for real critical conversations and it has been for some time. So I'm just so delighted to be here and to be a part of it. When I read back those blog posts I wanted to link back just to a couple of ideas that I've been meaningful for me about previous conferences so I guess taking your lead Lorna. Two years ago in my presentation about open education I really made links between openness and participatory culture and I used the example of the marriage equality referendum in Ireland which I mean even though we're two years on the world has changed so much since then it's quite amazing really. But it was I thought it was a beautiful example of the way people used participatory culture built on open practices to kind of have their voice to create civic change which is what happened. And I drew on Henry Jenkins and others work in participatory culture asking you know to what extent are we enabling students to develop the practices the skills the identities that they need to really engage in participatory culture to develop their voice and their agency so that they too can create, co-create knowledge and culture. And that's I think a key question underlying openness as far as I'm concerned. Also shared in 2016 and shared by many people since then is this one particular work among a huge body of work now in critical approaches to openness and that's Richard Edwards. And you know even the examples Lorna shared this morning I think really call this to mind is an important question becomes not simply whether education is more or less open but what forms of openness are worthwhile and for whom. So that continual negotiation as open educators and practitioners around when and how openness is appropriate in different contexts that really underlies these critical approaches. So with that in mind and that is kind of the soup that I was swimming in and thinking in I engaged in my PhD research which I just completed and submitted last week. So this is why you'll hear a few people. It would have been nice to have more than two days after submitting and having to travel here but hey newly minted I suppose I am. One other aspect I'd say of these critical approaches is last year OER 17 the politics of open was quite transformative I think for a lot of people because not only were critical approaches woven in a lot of the work people were talking about but they were foregrounded people were talking about gender race geography and just inclusivity at a very deep level. So it was the object of our conversations not just the subtext. So you know all in all these were some of my this was a slide of mine from 2016 just what do what do we mean when we're talking about open what we mean we mean many things it's not universally experienced and I think that's very clear it's complex it's contextual it requires digital capability and agency. It's both descriptive and aspirational I think this is why people sometimes struggle with defining open because it's a goal it's it's an aspiration that we that we move towards but it also describes what we do in some ways like when we talk about OER and critical discourse is essential and you know I often quote Trezy McMillan caught him when I talk about critical approaches that we really need to move from access to equity and justice so and I think many of us in this room are engaged in that work. So when I started my own PhD research I began with that question which was really about individual practice around OEP. So in academic settings like my own in which the use of OEP is not required requested expected or specifically supported why do some educators and not others choose to use open educational practices and the question was actually even broader than that because there have been some wonderful studies of open educators characterizing open educators but I chose to do an interpretive study of educators across the whole spectrum so the educators who were boldly open and being you know an inspiration for others to those who wanted nothing to do it and said no thanks don't talk to me about social media or any of those things you know I think the only way we should interact with students is via email and the VLE and then people in the middle maybe people who had stepped up to more open practices and stepped back or people who were just slowly emerging in their open practice I really wanted to understand what was happening in the movement along that that continuum if you like so so so that what what I studied was meaning making and decision-making around openness so not how did people understand you know my definition or our definition of open but how do individual practitioners what does open mean to them how do they define it themselves and how do they use that then to make their decisions about openness and then those that do use open as educational practices to try to understand their practices in a little more depth so needless to say there was a there was a very complex continuum of practices of course but you know encapsulating just some of the the studies in this very complex mix of digital practices looking from less open to more open these are not meant as poles by any means or a binary because surely we are beyond thinking about openness and in terms of binaries but if you think of those two things as poles of continuum four things really emerge and they were practices around digital identity digital networking digital tools for teaching that people chose and use of where we are and it was very very interesting as I said some people were clearly at one end or the other some were moving some you know of course it depended on context for individuals but one of the most important things was that many people perceived potential benefits of openness but they were outweighed by their perception of the risks of openness so we do not have a policy at our institution like many institutions do not and Burr is an exception and there are others so that lack of policy spoke very loudly so there were people who were trying things and thought you know if something goes wrong I'm not really sure if the university will have my back and maybe they won't but who cares and other people said the same thing and said I don't know if the university will have my back I have no idea what the policy is and so I'm not going to do that I just don't think it's safe so my work now is really going to be moving more into into policy but everything on the on the right column really characterized the people who were what we would call open educators so they were they had resident identities using the visitor resident continuum they use social media both personally and professionally use the VLE and email of course but also used all kinds of open tools and social media there was actually in fact very little intentional use of OER because we have no policy around OER at our university and again hopefully that will change but those people who were in that right hand column these were the dimensions that they shared so if we if we want to say what makes an open educator in the context that I studied one Irish University looking at academic staff broadly defined full-time and part-time permanent and not permanent these were the dimensions that those people shared and the pink semicircle is the one that roared out more than all others so this whole notion of balancing privacy and openness if people felt that they couldn't safely do that they would not choose to be open but those who did had found ways and of course you can see the link between the pink and the orange they're very connected so the people who did manage to to that balancing act or people who had the digital literacies or capabilities to know that I can use this tool for that and that tool for that and a different identity here and so on and thereby kind of manage that tension between privacy and openness the outer circle were things really more relation to how people teach and how they think of themselves as teachers so most of my 19 participants valued social learning I'm not saying that the open educators were the only ones that valued social learning but the ones who were open also embodied some notion of challenging traditional teaching well expectations in some way so some people talked in the mode of having humility as a learner wanting students to see them as a learner as well as a teacher and there were other ways that people did that and I can talk more about that later one complexity around this I don't want to go into too much depth okay five minutes is the inner circle operates at two dimensions so if you if you like we often help staff develop their digital capabilities as individuals but what stops people sometimes from engaging in say using social media with students is well how do I do that as a teacher you know how do I manage my personal self and my teaching self and so on so I think we need to think about those two levels of helping staff do that and the same with balancing privacy and openness because again that seems to be a barrier for many staff one of the things that I thought to include in my study was I really wanted to speak to students as well because I felt like this pedagogical interaction that's going on when we engage in open practices is is between you know educators and students and others so I wanted there to be a student voice and unfortunately it wasn't as as deep as I would have liked it to be but I did follow-up interviews with two of the 19 participants educators and then surveyed their students and what what arose were many many more tensions so there were some assumptions both overt and latent made by educators around how open they think students are or how willing they might be to engage in social media or what tools they use and those were often unmatched by what the students came back and said so the students in open responses I asked them to describe their digital identity the majority of them used words like quiet reserved hidden private so they totally understand the perils of loss of privacy and we're managing that in their own way so when their lecturer came in and said like let's use Twitter without maybe asking them about it most of them didn't engage with it because there was no kind of pre-work around that so you know I really think this it kind of reinforces what I what I would say my my findings are kind of in one slide really is that I found that practicing openness is complex of course it's always personal because once we step outside the bounded space of the VLE and we were identified with our role our digital identity is personal so our personal values around privacy around who we are as a teacher our philosophy of teaching and so on come into play in how we enact openness it's contextual so it was very different we might decide to interact with our students in very different ways if we're in engineering or if we're in social work or if we're you know adjunct member of faculty or someone who has tenure all these kinds of things come into play and finally it's continually negotiated so really even the people who have been open for some time probably all the people in this room we all know that really every every tweet you know one of my participants said it's a lot of work for one tweet or she's tweeting every time we engage in openness we're thinking you know will I share this will I use that hashtag you know is all of those questions this notion of continual negotiation is work that that people are doing and it's not recognized and and supported to to just a very small extent I would say particularly at my institution so you know I think my work and the work of a lot of you who are who you know there's so many people in this room whose work really inspires me and I've learned from feeds into you know this that Audrey Waters expressed so well is that we really need to rebuild institutions if we are working within institutions that value humans minds and lives and integrity and safety so hold on and holding on to those values of what openness can enable and but also in keeping in mind the importance of helping people to care for their private selves protect their privacy to the extent that they define it and they wish to and so on and that's difficult work but I suppose it's it's occasions like this where we where we share our work with each other that can embolden us to go out and do that work in our institutions and Henry Jenkins said this back in 2013 if we truly value participatory culture we must recognize the right of individuals to choose not to participate you know and I think we could we could replace participatory culture with the word openness there also it's you know they're very similar so we always students staff everyone must always have the option you know not to participate not to be open and that needs to be okay and finally in the face of all that all those tensions and risks and awful things that are there since November 2016 I think I've used this slide in every single one of my presentations because yeah we we we face enormous constraints in the work we do in the culture that we live but I think you know open education is a place for so much hope and and again it's occasions like this where we can kind of draw strength from each other so you know I just I always would like to end on a hopeful note and look forward to hearing what you'll have to say so thank you I'll stand next to the mic and reading all questions at the end questions now okay is that all right yeah fresh in your mind and I've been asked to give people time to wait for the microphone because this is being streamed and if the microphone doesn't get to you then I will repeat the question okay so any questions for Catherine thank you that was that was wonderful Catherine thank you I really like what you were saying about the humility of the learner and how teachers felt it was important to communicate that so I wonder if you just a little bit more about that yeah one person voiced it in that way and then you know several people talked about that and I was able to code it in that way and it was people who felt it was very important for them as a teacher to show themselves as a learner always and they weren't really connected to this role of being the expert in the room so those are the people who opened up their classrooms and said well we're going to invite Henry Jenkins or Lorna Campbell you know in to talk to us today and they wanted to ask questions of those people as well and wouldn't be afraid to make mistakes whether they were technical or around content or anything with students and also engage with students around things like you know what social media tools are you using how are you using them what are they good for what tools could be used for this class now what would you be willing to use you know that and I think that it came out quite strongly in the open educators and I don't know if that if any of you kind of reflected on that do you feel that in yourselves that I'm not sure I'd love to know how the what I presented from my educators resonates with other people's experience Hi it's your own thank you for your talk I wonder did you find and talk to educators that turned away from openness Yes very interesting yes I did there were there were I'm thinking of one person in particular now because I can tell the story probably better than saying there were a few it was someone who had engaged with you who had used Twitter to it was in a kind of an English literature class and students were being different characters and tweeting and a there were some context collapse among students and other people entering the conversation with a bit of teasing and things that he wasn't prepared for but which he felt he dealt with but be he said it just became such a tension on him that he wasn't sure if he was using it right and if you wasn't sure if he's engaging enough just this real weight of you know I'm not really sure if I'm doing it right and I don't have the time to kind of spend to make sure I'm doing it right so I think I'm just not going to do that anymore so kind of two things really Hi do you think that today's social media platforms are working as they should in in terms of open education and no and I think I wish Alan Levine was in the room we a few of us spent the last day at Coventry and Alan Levine was sharing some open-source alternative he has to many of the tools that we know use Slack and PowerPoint and all these things no obviously there's a big crisis from the heady days where we all thought social media connects the world to realizing that you know our data is being used is sold you know in ways that we can't even can't even see can't even know so it's another thing that I think many open educators who did use open tools before now feel that that's not a legitimate ethical choice with students so yeah and these are the kinds of conversations that I have with other open educators all the time so at the moment if people do elect to use it it has it must be in conversation with students and also the work that's done on the front end is around how to protect your privacy the importance of digital identity and so on so it's the work that I would do as a practitioner with students but I am ambivalent about it for sure okay it's gone up sorry okay Tony it's coming back coming back thanks Catherine at the weekend as Luna's already said Chris Bourke did a pretty amazing speech that's the creative commons summit and she talked about openness as a privilege I wonder whether that surface to new research that sense of you know privacy and being able to balance those things that you described is a privilege that some people haven't some people just don't have yes indeed yeah great question I watched Chris's talk as well it was quite amazing and Sava Singh as well talks about this privilege in a number of ways you know at a very elemental level there are people who chose to be open in the early days of open and and I count myself in that group who have this network of educators that you know we can now all go into slack and all these other spaces because we have our networks and if we then encourage our students to go into the same tools in a very different environment there's privilege there and there's privileges in being the you know in that white you know patriarchal heteronormative culture you know if you're any of those things you are less likely to experience risk or abuse online you know on any of the open tools so again I think the most important point is just to be open to clarity about that with students because the alternative the alternative is to not being open though is recognizing all those risks and then fleeing from participatory culture and the open web and then we have no voice there so you know it's navigating that negotiating that help modeling how we negotiate that and it's live you know as these things arise and helping students do that because you know our students will leave institutions as whatever you know nurses and social workers of whatever as citizens in increasingly open network to participatory culture so unless we're helping them within our disciplines and our institutions to engage in those practices and protect their privacy and understand the risks then we're failing I think Catherine I'm gonna have to stop you there but I think that was a really important point we ended on thank you very much big hand for Catherine and now we have Matt Kornack who's going to talk to us about OERs in STEM teacher training so I work for the National STEM Learning Center I'm their online CPD coordinators the center actually provides training what's not training it's it's professional development for teachers ongoing professional development for teachers in a whole range of different ways and our center in York but also nationally across many of our partners and I've come from the University of York with a fair bit of experience in doing e-learning and a bit of distance learning and I started doing MOOCs for teachers professional development and I had to throw everything I knew out the window it was a bit of an enlightening moment for me so I've had to reconsider everything I thought I knew about how distance learning works so I apologize if what I show you now is unsurprising to you as experienced open educators but I thought I'd share my experiences for you in this presentation I'll be drawing upon engagement data and this is quantitative data from five different types of courses that we offer to explore the design issues that we might need to consider when developing MOOCs but more crucially of course is how to best equip our online learners to utilize our courses and our content so when we put a course or any open resource together normally as educators we want our learners to progress through it we may say that we're happy for them to dip out here and there but the reality is we want them to complete it all don't we and we've put a lot of thought into that learning design the idea of the narrative flow through the course the idea that we're trying to help them develop a particular skill and that's not just something you can get from just visiting one page there's a sequence of activities involved here so how do we judge whether a course is working or not well we normally draw on a pretty graph like this and in this case it's a retention curve or attrition curve for a course and and it gives an idea of how learners are progressing through it and retention is is one of those metrics that's very easy to measure and gives us a sense that how learners are progressing through a course but those statistics aren't as helpful as we might originally think now to burn colleagues challenge the use of these sorts of metrics the metrics that we apply to our normal sorts of courses called normal but online distance formal education and caution about the application to MOOCs they talk of an informed commitment to complete and that's about considering whether the people who join these courses are actually intending to complete it so there appears to be first a useful concept that simply the inflated enrollment figures that we hear about MOOCs actually describe a commitment to start and not very useful but the retention curve starts to introduce a few other ideas so to propose that we're looking at ways to measure informed committed complete perhaps watching the first video is shows that maybe completing the first week or completing an activity you could decide at any point where that commitment to complete is going to come in so for the purposes of this presentation I've just said well if you access any page on the course you've made a commitment in some way and that's why these graphs are represented here as a percentage of all the learners and why importantly even the first step doesn't have all the learners there some learners will just dive in later and I thought well maybe that's something that's typical of MOOCs and down to the individual motivations of learners and again to burn colleagues make the astute point that because of the open nature of MOOCs learners have the opportunity to address their own educational needs again no surprise there for example Watted and Barrack in a study of one MOOC made the observation that participants from industry or professions are likely to enroll on courses for professional gain by addressing a particular skills gap or knowledge gap rather than to get a piece of paper and that's really important to me if I'm developing resources for teachers in their CPD and not necessarily creating courses for them to come away with a piece of paper so we have learners with learning goals that might not align with other students and it might not even align with the educator perhaps and Dabur and colleagues describe this as the window shopping of open online courses a characteristic which again comes through on the retention graphs however I'm not convinced that that window shopping activities actually taking place across the whole course so if you filter just those learners who view less than a quarter of the course which is blue line here you see that most of their interest still is only at the very start not much is happening along the rest of the course the start of the course is still the focal point for these types of learner learners who access more than 75% of the course have a more even distribution which is what you'd expect so there's something going on at the very start of the course is informing learners decisions to either engage or not and I think that's something that we need to pay attention to as MOOC designers now it wasn't till a change in the way that courses were advertised on future learn many of you might be aware of that I decided to start considering the significance of course start dates and I got quite upset someone who's come from online distance education about the idea that the course start date is no longer really advertised the idea of the course as an event is being challenged and those that see a course on future learn might not know when the course actually started when they join so there's a there's a bit of attention there when you look at the typical model of a student thinking they're going to do a course but might be arriving late now focusing on the cloud's use of investigation of engagement over time on a number of MOOCs provides part of the rationale for this patterns of behaviour were categorised with one category samplers being particularly comments amongst late starters the concern for late starters is the course structure with its weekly pattern might actually discourage participation by late arrivals leading them to become samplers rather than completers so the new future approach is actually quite clever if you think about the weeks are now adjusted to when the learner starts so if the course is four weeks in a new learner joins to them it's still week one and they get all the week one emails and things like that so they think it's still the beginning of the course but I still wanted to explore whether there is a difference in learning experience for those who signed up in advance compared to those who join when the course is already running or even supported periods and what has been known unsupported periods and what has been known as extended availability without facilitate involvement so this graph starts to show how two groups those enrolled before course and after course visited the course pages this is the retention graph but split out into those two groups and this was a course with an advertised start date immediately you see a difference that those enrolled after the start date the blue line sorry the orange line drop off at a much higher attrition rate than those who joined and rolled the course before the start of the course itself so if you go back to the idea of window shopping this seems to suggest to me that learners who have an immediate access to the course are not browsing the whole course of relevant bits but using the first few pages to work out whether it meets their learning rather than perhaps looking at the course content in more detail and just dipping in those who make a conscious decision before the course start date have read the course blurb they're more committed they have a better understand where the course fits their need pattern is exactly the same when you look at the new model of course promotion for me future loan without the start date being advertised number of enrollments before the course is lower but the shape of the curve is exactly the same so I've also adjusted it so I've changed the curve so they're now reflecting the proportion of those different enrollment period groups and this was a pattern that I found quite surprisingly in all of our courses whether it was a six week subject specialist course or a two week course for volunteers who go out to work in schools and talk about stem so why are we allowing instant access if the learners don't see the course out unsurprisingly the conversion to learner the enrollment access is high even though the proportion remained retained for the full duration of the course is lower is this down to the course design the focus is more on a collaborating cohort or is this down to the nature of the individual learner who is more targeted at which point the courses going to look at once they've committed before on that first week so the course is free and in order to get informed commitment to complete why not jump in straight away my guess would be that the course title alone does prompt this engagement so we need to do some work here on how we keep those learners engaged we have here that conversion to learn a graph and you can see that the before start date is significantly lower than those who jump in when the course is available you've got that instant gratification when the course is available so therefore you to engage straight away again not surprising but aside from whether late learners join before working out with the course is right for them or not there are other issues at play and Swinerton and colleagues reported that commenters those learners who make posts who contribute are more likely to have online courses before more likely to have taken online courses before in a sense that they brought some experience to that that engagement so when we look at the way that different groups of learners have started to comment it's quite interesting to see those who joined before the course is started those who perhaps might have done online course before and aware of how the online courses work they've engaged with that type of learning some assumptions in there definitely more likely to be actively contributing and again we have that problem of whether you've got a load of people joining together there's a bit of a buzz going coming in late you're going to get perhaps a lesson experience but is that actually the case you can still learn vocariously from the experience shared by learners who may have posted several weeks going on now long gone so whether these late starters have prior experience or not we're asking to engage the course in a very different way and the same is true of whether they're social learners whether they reply to other learners so I design challenges therefore how can we make the course flexible open to those with different learning needs at different times whilst also aiming to provide support and deliver the benefits and richness of social learning particularly as we're having more and more people join the course late now we've tried a few approaches in our courses the way that these later learners are learning is different but not necessarily less valuable we still receive positive feedback about the impact of the course on their practice we incorporate a mixture of design elements to help respond to a growing number of learners without trying to take the course without our educated support and that educated support is actually something we value quite a lot having our academic expertise and our professional development expertise to help our participants so we've tried a few things out I'm still not sure which of these is the most valuable for those late starters and be very keen to hear your thoughts and if you've explored this issue yourself how we make sure that late starters get the most out of the course but one way I wanted to consider what is happening in online course is to use the student teacher content interaction model and certainly this is for my thinking my zone Addison applied that student content teacher interaction models three classic moot categories of X CNS with content being more significant X and interaction with other learners and educated to be more applicable in the connectivist constructivist or social formats Bain and Ross in the 2014 review of MOOCs in the UK came to the conclusion there are many different types of MOOCs out there and that definition of X and C just is completely irrelevant and I want to argue a similar but slightly different point because from what I've shown I've come to the conclusion that MOOCs are metamorphic and that might be a bit of a contrived alliteration there but MOOCs don't just have one format or one mode of learning or teaching as the design designer intended what is happening with insert an online course and certainly these courses which have extended enrollment extended availability periods without support is the very nature of the MOOC itself changes the levels of potential interaction are different learners and possibly thinking is the course facilitating teams still available have I missed the date for any time-based activities other learners making comments is anyone actually going to read my contributions now I'm not sure whether all these questions actually go through the heads of MOOC learners but if our courses are designed to encourage interaction in some way then our courses not only have to be flexible for different forms of participation for different learning aims flexible enough that they work in both transmissive and collaborative pedagogies dare I say it then is MOOC pedagogy itself open open to interpretation thank you thank you Matt and a very provocative thought provoking ending let's take a question from the back first hi I'm Doug Bell sure that was really interesting so I'm interested in and this might sound like a facetious question but why do we even do courses like why don't we start from where people are with granular content and then give them a bunch of pathways and then it doesn't matter where they start and stuff I'm just interested in why we persist in courses where we don't necessarily do that offline sometimes I think that's a very valid point and I think that's why I was sort of suggesting that maybe course structure is something that we as educators put in because that helps us order our thinking and we have that picture in our head of where a learner needs to go through certain key points in order to build their development we have in our courses a self audit task where learners identify the points that against 10 statements of the things they want to address in the course and they have to identify what their professional development objective is at the start of the course and I think that's actually an incredibly valuable experience for them to do because whether you're joining the course with all the other learners at the beginning or if you're joining it late you can still do that activity to help you direct what you want to get out of the course so I think there's a scaffolding structure there that we put in as educators but how people engage with MOOCs is certainly up to them and I think that's one of the tensions I'm still trying to grapple with okay another question from the front here have you considered giving participants alternatives like downloading the entire course and doing it offline at their own pace or including themes of gamifications like achievements and accomplishments yeah it's an interesting point and that's not something that we've looked at so far um I'd be interested to hear a little bit more about gamification in the professional educational sphere that that was that could actually be quite interesting to look at for I don't know how much is out there on that in terms of downloading content well all the videos are downloadable but future as you know has got a cut off now unless you pay to upgrade and I think that is an issue but we include with our courses certain takeaways there are handouts and things that they will take on and we have a lot of online resources that we link to on our own website which are freely available and are open so yes I think that's a very valid point to consider is the portability of the course content and how the participants can return to it because within professional development actually that's incredibly important is being able to go back and change in review or thinking over a longer period of time which is actually probably why we see quite a number of participants take our courses multiple times they don't they might get a little bit out of the first round a little bit out of the second run but they do come back which is very interesting to think about thank you question from the middle here hi thanks that was great and I love your alliteration I've already gone off and stolen oh you are creative commons whatever and to so hi I'm Andrew Smith from the Open University with MOOCs do you think there's a mythology there do you think actually students know that they're doing a MOOC no we don't use the word MOOC anywhere yeah I think yeah I often care that they're doing an online course they're engaging online but as soon as you start telling them it's a MOOC or anything like that you may as well start beating your chest and speaking cling on at them because it's it's it's pointless it's a strange language it's yeah whatever but it's interesting your data for your MOOC because I've been engaging because I'm quite different in a completely different community and there's a few percent out but we're more it's behaving more or less the same and I'm teaching teachers network engineering so whatever you're teaching is behaving the same way and in my community where I'm using a completely different platform the data is very similar so is this another thing about human nature I couldn't possibly answer that very high level question but I think that there is certainly we've looked at retention data across a number of different partners and it comes out very similar and ours seem to be noticeably higher because we must be doing something right and I think it's that that extra design elements that we put in which keep that retention going better but the consistency of the shape of the curves in the difference between those two groups between all of the different courses that we ran was the thing that surprised me the most because yes you can look at retention across every learner but those learners are divided in so many different groupings and future learners just done some work on archetypes where they're looking at learners who are doing it for professional reasons versus those who are just doing it for the weekend as a hobby and the different behaviors that are exhibited by those two different types of learners so we can start to break that down in many different ways but I think that overall picture is the long tail it's a long tail that we've been talking about for years now in terms of the way the internet is using the resources that are out there everyone's looking for a niche and that that might be something you know a couple of steps might might be addressing their niche Thank you Matt I'm going to have to stop you there but thank you very much cheers always just gets interesting at the point where the time comes to an end now we're handing over to Charlie who's going to talk to us about OER code creation with students and the community Okay great so hello and welcome to everybody today including everybody who's following along online so yes my name is Stephanie Charlie Farley please call me Charlie and I go by she, her, hers pronouns so I am from the OER service at the University of Edinburgh where I work with Lana Campbell and quite a number of colleagues across our information services group we have so our approach to open education resource and practice is actually focused on awareness digital literacies and confidence and we are quite fortunate as has been mentioned in that we do have a learning and teaching policy about OER which sets out guidance and the ways in which the university is able to support the use creation and sharing of learning and teaching materials both within the university and as part of our civic mission which has also been mentioned sharing that out to Scotland, UK and the wider international comments so our OER learning and teaching policy was implemented in January 2016 and this same year we were approached by the teaching staff on the Geoscience Outreach Course so the Geoscience Outreach Course has been running for a number of years now and their focus is cross-disciplinary they seek to improve science communication to provide their students with hands-on experience reach a diverse audience widen participation in research and education and to do this through active engagement so during the course over the year students choose their own projects based on their own interests and passions they are then paired up with local schools care homes, conservation, community, garden and other public groups across the UK these students they work together for that year with the groups and they will create a piece of science communication or an educational resource that will be available for the group that they're working for they have created videos lesson plans board games websites smartphone apps community dinners workshops groups and more the output that they have created has been fabulous and diverse and the clients and the groups that they are working with have continued to use those resources as the years have gone on so it felt to the teaching team on the course that incorporating open education practice skills and the digital literacies and confidences involved in that in their course would benefit not only their students but also the groups that they are working with so to do this they brought us in to work with them and we've spent a couple of years building this up students are provided with seminars throughout the year to give them the tools and the skills that they need to work on creating their projects we now include within that an interactive seminar on OER open licenses and copyright which has been really well received the open content licenses and attribution are also built into the final project assessment and students are made aware of this right throughout their course so they know that they need to carefully check and attribute everything that they're using and that they will be assessed on that at the end as well in addition to this we have some fabulous summer interns that we've been hiring who come in at the end of the project and there are a few projects that the teaching team will generally select our intern will then work with the students and the teaching team over the summer to check attributions make changes where it's necessary and then they will package and promote these projects as OER and disseminate that across multiple areas so we have been incredibly fortunate in the interns that we've had coming and working with us these last few summers Lorna has already been quoting one of them our fabulous Martin Tasker so Martin was with us in 2016 he had a great time so Martin actually credits his entry into physics in higher education with the open resources that were provided by MIT when he was a high school student and he feels and he has stated this in a few of his blogs and also in the quote that Lorna was talking about earlier today that this is what enabled him to follow his passion and his interest to take that into higher education Martin was great he worked with us over the summer he then also returned the following year and helped to run the open licensing workshop for the next intake of outreach students this last summer we had Thomas Sanders who came in and again worked and created some fabulous resources with our students he then came back and as you see in the picture up here he actually presented at the local open educational practice Scotland conference he did a fabulous job there he has also gone on to run a wikipedia editor-thon for his school of history groups and he is creating his own open educational resources related to the debating team activities that he's involved in so I'm just going to talk about a few of the projects that our outreach students have been creating and what's really lovely and wonderful to see is that the skills that they are gaining through this process are continuing on in their personal professional and education and research lives as they continue on out this course so Roseanne Smith used a timeline to explore the concept of sea level rise with high school students in her project the sea level story this experience actually inspired Roseanne to help establish Scotland's own children's university and she's still involved in this on a day-to-day basis providing additional outside of school hours opportunities for primary and early education students to gain additional learning Ila Simmons is currently a fifth year geology master students and for her fourth year outreach project she shared her passion for vulcanology by creating and delivering a series of lessons to primary five students at a local school she was incredibly chuffed when one of those students came back after the summer holidays with a volcano cake that she had baked Ila is now a tutor on the outreach course and she continues to teach about volcanoes in primary school and science fairs another one that I'm really quite pleased with Rebecca Shannon created fund statistical methods workshops for final year secondary school students these were positively received by teachers in Edinburgh and through the power of Twitter in Norfolk and she then went on to create a set of Pokemon themed posters with our intern over the summer focused for primary learners which have also proved quite popular so I'm going to let the students tell you what they think of the course as well and what they've learning been learning so Jojana Dasglova has said that the course provided her with the unique opportunity to combine her scientific knowledge with her horticulture family history she created the Trinity Gardening Club and taught secondary school pupils about agroecology and wildlife friendly farming the teaching experience she got reaffirmed her decision to pursue teaching as a career and inspired her to strive for innovation and community engagement and Hannah Stevens has said that geoscience outreach proved to her that somewhere in her she had the confidence and skill to not only create lessons that fit within the Scottish school curriculum but deliver them as well the support provided by her lectures and supervisors helped her succeed by encouraging the ideas that would work and letting her bounce ideas around with them so students really have been enjoying and taking away a lot from this course and the skills that we've been providing through the addition of the open educational focus as well the gaining experience of science outreach and public engagement they are getting first hand experience of teaching and learning and the practices of knowledge transfer they are developing communication skills a wealth of transferable skills project and time management is incredibly important to their project throughout the year and they are really building on their digital literacy benefits for staff and tutors are also great so it allows them to communicate work to a wider audience it adds value and to teaching to their own research and they are able to enhance knowledge exchange it also provides support for dissemination of the scientific knowledge coming out of the schools the clients and the community groups involved are also getting a lot out of this course they are gaining reusable resources that they can take on and change and adapt and use in the years to come they are forging new partnerships with the students with the university and with the other groups who are involved in the projects they are getting the value of the educational resources that have been created and they are also benefiting from the dissemination of the scientific knowledge coming from their own groups and research Brian Cameron on the Outreach Teaching Team has really summed it up in that the university and the students are creating a legacy of knowledge transfer and cooperation that benefits all and it really is and it's wonderful to see the course is not only limited to the geoscience school students so it's been getting a lot of attention within the university and out with in the 2016-17 academic year they were joined by students from the psychology department who went on to create some absolutely fabulous resources including attention and advertising tactics prejudice reduction strategies and a fabulous resource on an introduction to the brain and you can have a look at all of these on our open ed website in the 17-18 year this is broadened so we now have students on the course from ecology geology geography psychology archaeology and landscape architecture and I'm really excited to see what projects they're going to be creating and what we're going to be working with and putting out there this summer with our next intern is this also changed the way the staff involved in the course have been looking at their own work so they have actually gone on to create open educational resources based out of the latest research to come from their school so Kay Douglas from the teaching team has created a wealth of resources and these have been specifically tailored to the Scottish school curriculum as well again these are all available on the open ed website and I really would recommend going and having a look because they're fabulous so I'm a bit pressed for time but I just wanted to shout out to the course organisers and everybody involved in the outreach course because the passion and the dedication that they have shown to their students to increasing their knowledge and ensuring that the projects and the resources to come out of this course are going to be useful and valuable not just to the students and the groups that they're involved with but also to a broad audience has been absolutely magnificent so the course organiser Isla Maya Smith has been fabulous and I've really enjoyed running the workshops with her it's been wonderful working with the teaching team so we've got Brian Cameron Colin Graham Andrew Cross and K Douglas they're absolutely amazing we've had external contributors and the tutors on the course have been absolutely amazing unfortunately that's all the time that I've got today but you can find more information about the course and about the work that we're doing on our open ed website and there's further articles about the geoscience outreach course that are available as well thank you great thank you Charlie another inspiring presentation any questions yes one at the back there thanks very much for that presentation absolutely inspiring work so I'm very glad I got a chance to see that my question is that with all of the experience from students that's being gathered as a part of this project are there any plans to use that kind of experience and those perceptions to inform university teaching practice and also teaching policy around openness I have to say this is actually an aim of the teaching staff involved in this course so they are really committed to really getting as many other faculties and schools involved in this process as possible that's why you now see so many students from other schools and faculties are now coming in onto the course and what they're really pushing for and would love to see is this approach to be taken on by other courses within their own structures so yes absolutely all questions there's one over there hey I'm just interested in sort of how it works logistically as it broadens to other subject areas so did you do geosciences still own it and are there structures at Edinburgh University that kind of make that work so the courses run within the School of Geosciences and it's still run and owned by that school and what's happening is now they're inviting students from other schools to come in on and take the course within the Geosciences School they would absolutely love to see other schools taking this on and embedding it within their own courses and programmes though so we'd love to see that happening yeah other questions towards the back there hi I think it was really interesting my question I'm not sure if this is relevant to your particular case but we are looking at creating an OER repository and one of the things we're facing questions on is how we make sure that the resources are kind of effectively managed and so reviewing them every 18 months or two years and just wonder what process you're using to to do that are you shelving resources or so we actually looked into having a repository as part of our OER service and we've decided against it and our approach is actually around the the skills and the literacies and the approach and the practice of our students and our staff so on the open ed we actually encourage that they share their resources on whichever online platform is most suited to the media and the type of information that they're sharing so we have a number of resources on TES Connect we have accounts on Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo all over the place and our approach is really these are openly licensed resources they're adaptable please do share them wherever they're going to have the furthest reach and so the best benefit and they're adaptable so the version that's out there now is not necessarily going to be relevant five years from now but it's adaptable so anybody can take that and improve it and update it so the idea of going back and reviewing something that was created three years ago isn't necessarily priority for us because we feel the people who are going to be using that resource will be making those adaptations and have the ability to do so because it's been openly licensed thank you one more final question yes here in the front can I just ask a follow-up question to that do you have any evidence? just for the streaming thank you sorry just a follow-up question to that do you have any evidence of people actually going back in and remixing or adapting improving those resources? so the ones that we have on TES Connect we can see the usage on that so we can see where they are being downloaded how many times they're being viewed and we do get feedback every now and then so people can choose to leave a review on there and say how they've enjoyed it and we do have some excellent reviews and comments on there but this is the thing with any open resource it's really difficult to track back and see who is reusing and remixing so that's really all that we have at this point right well I think we've ended exactly on time so thank you thank you very much Charlie and another thank you to Catherine and Matt and Charlie again for a really inspiring presentation all together thanks