policy | Open World

policy | Open World
Open World
Lorna M Campbell
(This post previously appeared on the
Open Scotland
blog and on
Open.Ed
.)
The
3rd UNESCO
World
OER Congress
took place in Dubai last week.  The previous two congresses, held in Paris in 2012, and Ljubljana in 2017, resulted in the
Paris OER Declaration
and the
Ljubljana OER Action Plan
, which was the forerunner of the 2019
UNESCO Recommendation on OER
.  The output of the 3rd OER Congress is the
Draft Dubai Declaration on OER
The theme of the Dubai congress was “Digital Public Goods: Open Solutions and AI for Inclusive Access to Knowledge”.  Digital public goods (DPG) are defined by the UN’s
Roadmap for Digital Cooperation
, as
“open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the sustainable digital goals (SDGs)”.
In this context open education resources are regarded as digital public goods that “support the enrichment of the global knowledge commons”.
In addition to the
Sustainable Development Goals
, the
UNESCO Recommendation on OER
, and the
Road Map for Digital Cooperation,
the Dubai Declaration also references Commitment 7 of
Our Common Agenda
: to “Improve digital cooperation”.
Key themes of the Declaration are harnessing the opportunities afforded by emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain to create new OER, curate and index existing OER, translate OER, and “ensure the provenance, integrity, and lawful use of OER”.
The Declaration outlines Recommendations in five areas (paraphrased from the draft):
Capacity Building
Support professional development for educators, content creators and those working on Gen AI projects, on copyright (inc. exceptions and limitations) and open licensing, to understand challenges posed by emerging technologies and ensure sharing and collaboration that respect copyright laws.
Promote digital literacy for users and developers to engage in the responsible creation and use of emerging technologies for OER.
Develop technologies such as cryptographic signing, semantic interoperability, and machine learning to improve attribution and discoverability of OER. E.g. Embedding metadata into OER, identifier generation standards, author-identity credentials, time-stamping mechanisms and signing OER packages.
Prioritise digitally signed works for OER repositories, and their use in the training open AI models.
Implement strategies grounded in human rights that are open, accessible, multistakeholder and gender inclusive to ensure respect for user generated data, metadata, privacy and attend to ethical practices and respect copyright rules.
Policy
Policy environments should focus on the protection and verifiability of authorship of OER and other Digital Public Goods.
Open licensing should be incorporated into the Terms of Use of AI applications specifying that it is only to be used by humans to generate openly licensed content.
Support embedding licensing information of training content in the output generated by AI tools. When open licensed materials are used to train AI models, the resulting generated content should be made available under compatible open licenses, and attribution to the copyright owner(s) of the training materials should be reflected in the generated content.
Encourage and support research into next generation attribution systems to enable tracing the use and re-use of OER.
Ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER
Support the development of AI-enabled OER that is accessible in low-bandwidth scenarios and designed to enhance the accessibility of vulnerable groups.
Include cryptographic signing into quality criteria for the production of OER. Emphasise the connection of signatures to real-world identity of authors – to create incentives for publication and counter misinformation.
Support the translation and contextualisation of OER with the participation of different user communities.
Encourage the engagement of diverse participants in communities of open practice.
Sustainability Models for OER
Support approaches IPR protection & OER development driven by the
ROAM-X
principles of human rights, openness, accessibility, and multi-stakeholder participation.
Promote sustainable environmental approaches for digital public goods to minimise energy consumption and reduce the carbon footprint, recognising when the use of AI-tools is not necessary or appropriate.
Practice participatory governance, active transparency, public reporting and regular audits for the complete OER ecosystem (including technological, legal, and pedagogical aspects) to build trust among stakeholders.
Prioritise public infrastructure and public-private partnerships, while also supporting private initiatives for OER using emerging technologies, that adhere to the principles of digital public goods and openness.
International cooperation
Promote human centered use of emerging technologies, including AI, for the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER
Engage with the open community and legal experts on open licensing and IP law to ensure that emerging technologies adhere to legal terms and address the demands of diverse stakeholders.
Develop ethical frameworks and new technologies to promote OER, including more effective identification of provenance and tracking using AI-based techniques.
Encourage OER repositories and content source to implement policies that prioritize digitally signed works, and define how they may be processed and used, including criteria for the training of AI models.
Develop AI platforms to create and OER adhering to the UNESCO Recommendation on OER.
A few thoughts
As with previous congresses, there were no representatives present from UK government ministries, education authorities, or institutions. While this is disappointing, we do hope that the new Declaration will prompt the education sector in Scotland to reconsider the benefits and affordances of open educational resources. It was the Paris OER Declaration that originally inspired the development of the Scottish Open Education Declaration, and Joe Wilson and I were fortunate to attend the 2nd World Congress in Ljubljana to represent Open Scotland. Though we had limited success persuading the Scottish Government of the benefits of supporting OER, the Scottish Open Education Declaration did prove to have some influence further from home, particularly in Morocco, where it informed the development of a similar initiative.  I was pleased to see that Morocco were active participants in the Dubai Congress where they highlighted their “national OER and Open Science strategy that aims to modernise education and expand research accessibility, driven by strong engagement from educators.” (
Latifa bint Mohammed inaugurates 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress in Dubai.
I’m very encouraged that the Declaration highlights the importance of developing digital skills and copyright literacy to ensure everyone is able to understand the impact of AI and emerging technologies.  Supporting digital skills development has always been one of the cornerstones of the University of Edinburgh’s OER Policy and OER Service.  Our approach is to empower staff and students to develop the skills and confidence to make informed decisions about creating and using open educational resources and open licensed content.
I’m also pleased that the Declaration recognises the importance of supporting diverse communities of open practice, though I do feel that supporting open practice should underpin
all
the recommendations of the Declaration.
I’m a bit surprised by the prioritisaton of digital signatures and cryptographic technologies and I’m alarmed by the recommendation that signatures should connect to authors’ real-world identities.  While this approach does have the potential to address issues relating to attribution and verification, and to combat misinformation, it’s also potentially ripe for abuse.
It’s interesting that embedding metadata in open content and tracking OER have reappeared.  Both are great ideas, but neither are straightforward to implement.  I know, I worked with educational metadata standards for many years, and also managed a programme of small OER tracking projects way back on 2010. Part of the problem is that open educational resources are such a diverse class of things and, by their very nature, they are scattered all over the internet.  I can’t help feeling that many of these recommendations pre-suppose that OERs exist in curated repositories. While some do, the vast majority don’t, and never will. Semantic search services have long been seen as the key to enable cross searching and discovery of heterogenous resources distributed across the web, but I’m not sure how much progress has been made towards making this a reality.
While I’m not surprised that the Declaration focuses on the affordances and challenges of generative AI and emerging technologies, I am concerned that it rather glosses over the many problematic ethical issues, including algorithmic bias, exploitative and extractive labour practices, and environmental impact. The Declaration does reference the
ROAM-X
principles, sustainable environmental approaches and highlights the importance of recognising when the use of AI-tools is not necessary or appropriate, but I feel it could have gone a lot further.  I would like to have seen some acknowledgement of the risks of rapidly embracing these new technologies, risks that is not evenly distributed across the globe, and to focus instead on human centred approaches to achieve the aims of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Resources
3rd UNESCO World OER Congress
3rd UNESCO World OER Congress livestream recordings
Draft Dubai Declaration on OER: Digital Public Goods and Emerging Technologies for Equitable and Inclusive Access to Knowledge
Latifa bint Mohammed inaugurates 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress in Dubai
To mark 10 years of the
Open Scotland
initiative, Joe Wilson and I ran two events as part of the
OER23 Conference
at UHI in Inverness, which provided an opportunity for members of the education community to reflect on how the open education landscape in Scotland has evolved over the last decade, and to discuss potential ways to advance open education across all sectors of Scottish education.
Open Scotland Pre-Conference Workshop
Joe has already written up our pre-conference Open Scotland workshop, which brought together around 40 colleagues, in person and online, to discuss key challenges and priorities. You can read Joe’s summary of the workshop here:
Open Scotland Reflections on Pre-Conference Workshop
OpenScotland @10 Plenary Panel
The closing plenary panel of OER23 brought together open education practitioners from within Scotland and beyond.  Panel participants were Lorna M. Campbell, Open Scotland and University of Edinburgh; Scott Connor, UHI;  Maren Deepwell, ALT; Stuart Nicol, University of Edinburgh; Robert Schuwer, consultant and former UNESCO Chair on Open Educational Resources; Joe Wilson, Open Scotland and City of Glasgow College.  Each member of the panel was invited to briefly share their thoughts on future directions for Open Education, before we opened the discussion to the floor.
Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.
Stuart Nicol
, Head of Educational Design and Engagement at the University of Edinburgh, acknowledged that while it’s disappointing that there hasn’t been more support from Scottish Government, there has been a support for open education at a number of institutions, including the University of Edinburgh.  Stuart highlighted the important role of committed people who have pushed the open agenda within institutions.  Short of having government level commitment and policy, Stuart suggested we need to provide opportunities for people to come together to share practice and to encourage institutions to work together.
Scott Connor
, Digital and Open Education Lead at UHI’s Learning and Teaching Academy, outlined UHI’s strategic commitment to open education which is underpinned by an OER Policy and a
framework for the development of open educational practices
. Scott highlighted lack government mandates and funding as a barriers to engagement with open education and suggested that real impact would come through the government adopting the Scottish Open Education Declaration and using it to mandate that resources created with public funding should be shared openly to benefit everyone.
Both Scott and Stuart highlighted the OER policies adapted and adopted by the
University of Edinburgh
and
UHI
as a prime example of open education collaboration.
Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.
Robert Schuwer
, independent consultant and former UNESCO Chair of OER, provided an overview of open education in The Netherlands where the government has supported a range of OER initiatives and stimulation grants since 2006. In 2014 the Education Ministry issued a  strategic agenda stating that by 2025 all teachers should share their learning materials. Although some institutions such as TU Delft are front-runners, other smaller institutions are just getting started.
Robert suggested that the biggest challenge is to cross the chasm from early adopters and innovators to the majority of teachers to encourage them to adopt principles of openness in education.  He suggested connecting to teachers passion, which is teaching, not sharing materials, and highlighting how open education can help them to become better teachers.
Maren Deepwell
, CEO of the Association for Learning Technology, reminded us that we’re not just talking about openness in Higher Education we’re looking at all sectors including schools, training, vocational education, FE, HE, and research. UK Government looks at Open Access research and thinks the open box is ticked. ALT has tried to reach out to both Scottish Government and the Department of Education, but often there is no one with responsibility for open education policy beyond Open Access and Open Research funding.
Maren noted that we tend to see open education as another challenge alongside Brexit, the cost of living crisis, climate change, sustainability, etc., and ultimately it is never at the top of the agenda.  She suggested that our opportunity is to present openness as a way to solve these challenges.  It’s ingrained in us that openness is the extra step that teachers need more time, more funding, more skills, to take.  Instead we need to highlight how openness could solve resource scarcity and training issues, and help small independent providers collaborate across sectors.  We need to show openness as a way to solve these challenges, rather than as a stand alone challenge in its own right.
Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.
Opening the discussion to the floor, members of the community put forward a range of comments and suggestions including:
Taking a whole population approach to education rather than a sectoral approach. Open education is a way to educate for all our futures, not just those who can afford a good education. Open educators should collaborate with demographic data experts to see how open education could address key challenges of our ageing population, including health and social care.
Start with early interventions at primary school level. How do children learn, what do they learn, what role models  do they see? Start to train a new generation of people to think in different ways. Currently there is no mention of openness in the General Teaching Council programme, but a logical place to start would be with teaching staff who are teaching children how to learn.  However because of concerns about GDPR, teachers work in closed environments, there are challenges around safeguarding and managing digital identities.
Scotland’s baby box has been an import mechanism for learning for both parents and children, why not add a leaflet about open education?
Scotland has always had a very egalitarian tradition of education, the principles of openness fit well with this tradition, from school all the way up, so it’s frustrating that we haven’t been able to introduce open education at school level.
Maybe we’re trying too hard to change policy, perhaps it would be better to focus on doing fun stuff and sharing open practice. Do what you can at the small level; small OER, rather than big OER. This can be really powerful. Sharing in small ways can make a difference.
People hear about Open Scotland and are interested in open education, but they’re constrained by their local authorities or their college marketing teams.
The strength of open education is in the grass roots, as soon as it get sucked into politics, it gets watered down. There is a risk that comes with government policy and funding. You cede some control when policy is dictated at that level.  At grass roots level we can control it, shape it and manage it.  It’s hard work pushing upwards but there is a danger when it comes from the other direction that we lose something and open education gets co-opted by people we may not wish to work with.
Robert Schuwer countered this point by noting that this has not happened in The Netherlands.  Government support is provided at all levels of education but there is a lot of autonomy within institutions. The only mandates were the 2014 strategic agenda and a 2020 Open Access research mandate, both of which have been beneficial.  Robert also noted that students lobbied the Education Minister and had directly input to the 2014 sharing agenda.  This was also the case at the University of Edinburgh, where EUSA encouraged the University to support open education and OER.
We have a political problem in that our education ministers don’t know much about education, so openness is never a priority.  We need to trust ourselves and continue with the grass roots work.  We need to feed messages up to government ministers that open education can be a solution to sustainability and other strategic agendas.  We need to take our advocacy up a notch, perhaps take out an advert in the press.
Next steps
The next step will be to continue synthesising the outputs of the workshop and plenary panel, captured in this Padlet, with a view to drafting a new Open Scotland manifesto to share with the community and move the open education agenda forward.
This blog post was originally posted on the
Open Scotland
blog.
To mark 10 years of the Open Scotland initiative we will be holding two events as part of the
OER23 Conference
to bring together members of the education community in Scotland to reflect on how the open education landscape in Scotland has evolved over the last decade against the backdrop of global crisis and uncertainty (Campbell and Wilson 2021). Hosted by ALT and the University of the Highlands and Islands, the OER Conference is taking place in Scotland for the first time since 2016. One of the main themes of the conference is “Open Education in Scotland – celebrating 10 years of the Scottish Open Education Declaration.”
Thigibh a-steach!
Come and join us at the OER23 Conference in Inverness to contribute to shaping the future of open education in Scotland.
Open Scotland Pre-Conference Workshop
When: Tuesday 4th April, 15.30 – 17.00
Where: UHI Inverness and online
Who: Open to all.
This pre-conference workshop, facilitated by Joe Wilson and Lorna M. Campbell, will reflect on the Open Scotland initiative and discuss ways forward for the open education community. We’ll briefly address the history and impact of Open Scotland and explore the role of Open Scotland and the Scottish Open Education Declaration going forward.
We’ll ask whether the aims of Open Scotland are still relevant, whether the Scottish Open Education Declaration has a role to play in the future, and how it can be reframed to reflect current challenges and priorities.
How can we encourage more teachers, learners and education institutions across the sector to engage with open education?
How do we ensure that the Scottish education community tunes in to global open practice and makes most of the possibilities of open educational resources , open research , open textbooks and other opportunities?
Can we effectively lobby the Scottish Government to adopt policies that support open education and OER at the national level?
How can we in Scotland, the UK, and internationally, align with the principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER (UNESCO 2019)?
We invite key leaders, influencers, educators, open practitioners and advocates across the Scottish education community to join us. This workshop is free and open to all. Remote participation will be available for those who are unable to join us in Inverness.
Registration
If you are not an OER23 delegate, please register here in order to participate:
Open Scotland Pre Conference Session for External Delegates
OER23 Conference Closing Plenary: OpenScotland @10
When: Thursday 6th April, 16.20 – 17.00
Where: UHI Inverness and online
Who: OER23 Conference delegates
The closing plenary panel of the OER23 Conference will bring together open education advocates from Scotland and The Netherlands to reflect on the open education landscape in Scotland and internationally. We’ll discuss engagement with open education across Scotland, focusing on the benefits and affordances of open education and OER and how it can help to address local and global education challenges and priorities, while reflecting on the relevance of the original aim of Open Scotland: To raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education.
Panel participants: Lorna M. Campbell, Open Scotland and University of Edinburgh; Scott Connor, UHI;  Maren Deepwell, ALT; Stuart Nicol, University of Edinburgh; Robert Schuwer, consultant and former UNESCO Chair on Open Educational Resources; Joe Wilson, Open Scotland and City of Glasgow College.
Background
Open Scotland
is a voluntary cross-sector initiative, established in 2013, to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. In the decade since its launch, Open Scotland has been supported by Cetis, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, the Association for Learning Technology, Reclaim Hosting, the University of Edinburgh and Creative Commons. Openness remains a key strategic principle for many of these organisations.
In order to achieve its aims, Open Scotland hosted the Open Scotland Summit (2013) and Open Education, Open Scotland (2014) at the University of Edinburgh, which brought together senior managers, policy makers and key thinkers to explore the development of open education policy and practice in Scotland. Members of Open Scotland contributed regularly to national conferences, and participated in international events including Open Education Global in Ljubljana, OERde14 in Berlin, Morocco Open Education Day, the Open Education Policy Network, UNESCO European Regional Consultation in Malta, and the 2017 UNESCO OER World Congress.
In 2014, inspired by the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration (UNESCO 2012), Open Scotland launched the
Scottish Open Education Declaration
(Open Scotland 2014), an open draft document that all members of the community were invited to contribute to. The Declaration called on the Scottish Government, the Scottish Funding Council and all sectors of Scottish education to endorse the principles of the UNESCO OER Declaration and ensure that educational materials produced with public funding are freely and openly available to all. With support from ALT Scotland and Creative Commons, the Declaration was brought to the attention of three consecutive Cabinet Secretaries of Education, however the Scottish Government declined to engage with these principles. Despite this lack of response, the Scottish Open Education Declaration has been influential elsewhere. It inspired the OER Morocco Declaration (Berrada and Almakari 2017), informed the OpenMed Project, and has raised awareness of open education within institutions, triggering discussions about open education at policy level.
Visit the
Open Scotland blog
to find out more about the initiative.
References
Berrada, K. and Almakari, A. (2017) Déclaration du Maroc sur les Ressources Educatives Libres / OER Morocco Declaration. Available at: https://openmedproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/OER-Morocco-Declaration.pdf (Accessed: 9 January 2023).
Campbell, L.M. and Wilson, J. (2021) Open Educational Resources: An equitable future for education in Scotland. Available at: https://openscot.net/further-education/open-educational-resources-an-equitable-future-for-education-in-scotland/ (Accessed: 9 January 2023).
Open Scotland. (2014) Scottish Open Education Declaration. Available at: https://declaration.openscot.net/ (Accessed: 9 January 2023).
UNESCO. (2012) The Paris OER Declaration. Available at: https://en.unesco.org/oer/paris-declaration (Accessed: 9 January 2023).
UNESCO. (2019) Recommendation on Open Educational Resources. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-open-educational-resources-oer (Accessed: 9 January 2023).
I’m very excited that the OER Service has a new brochure to celebrate 5 years of support for open education at the University of Edinburgh. Writing the text and gathering the images for this brochure has taken up a lot of my time over the last couple of months and I’m really pleased with the way at turned out, thanks to the fabulous design skills of Nicky Greenhorn from Information Services Group’s
Graphic Design Service.
Open for Good: OER at the University of Edinburgh
tells the story of five years of support for OER and open knowledge at the University of Edinburgh.  The brochure includes information about our award-winning open policies, our outreach activities, and our commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  It also features case studies of student engagement and OER in the curriculum from across the University, along with a timeline of significant open education developments and events.
We worked alongside our Online Course Production Service, who also produced their own brochure:
Short Online Courses
unpacks our open course development process from a learning design perspective, covering our commitment to accessibility, continuing professional development, and learner-centred approaches to online learning. The brochure highlights our partnerships with Coursera, EdX and Futurelearn, and provides access to a wealth of online courses, and free resources, including open course production templates and Creative Commons licensed media.
Both brochures showcase open licensed images from the University’s unique archives and collections, and feature forewords by Dr Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal and Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services, along with testimonials from our staff and students.
We’re planning to make online versions of both brochures available to browse and download shortly.  If you would like printed copies in the meantime, please e-mail
open.ed@ed.ac.uk
or
course-production-team@ed.ac.uk
Principles of Open Education and OER
This blog post was originally posted on the University of Edinburgh’s
Curriculum Transformation Hub
The principles of open education were initially outlined in the 2008
Cape Town Declaration
[1], which advocates that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, and redistribute educational resources without constraint, to nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.
Broadly speaking, open education encompasses teaching techniques and academic practices that draw on open technologies, pedagogical approaches and open educational resources (OER) to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. This may involve both teachers and learners engaging in the co-creation of learning experiences, participating in online peer communities, using, creating and sharing open educational resources (OER) and open knowledge, sharing experiences and professional practice, and engaging with interdisciplinarity and open scholarship.
Although open education can encompass many different approaches, open educational resources, or OER, are central to this domain. The
UNESCO Recommendation on OER
[2] defines open educational resources as
“teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that
reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that
permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or
limited restrictions.”
Open Education and OER at the University of Edinburgh
At the University of Edinburgh, we believe that open education and OER, are fully in keeping with our institutional vision, purpose and values, to discover knowledge and make the world a better place, while ensuring that our teaching and research is diverse, inclusive, accessible to all and relevant to society.   In line with the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, we also believe that OER and open knowledge are critical to achieving the aims of the
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
[3].
To support open education and the creation and use of OER, the University has an
Open Educational Resources Policy
[4], approved by our Learning and Teaching Committee, which encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience, expand provision of learning opportunities, and enrich our shared knowledge commons.  We also have a central
OER Service
[5], based in Information Services Group, that provides staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER, engaging with open education and developing digital and copyright literacy skills.  Understanding authorship, copyright, and licensing is increasingly important at a time when both staff and students are actively engaged in co-creating digital resources and open knowledge.
Benefits and Risks of Openness
Open education approaches, such as collaborative flexible learning and co-creation of learning experiences, can be beneficial in many different contexts, but they are particularly well suited to hybrid teaching and learning, where no separation is made between digital and on campus student cohorts, and students are brought together by the way teaching is designed, enabling them to move between digital and classroom-based learning activities.
Engaging with open education, OER and open knowledge through curriculum assignments can help to develop a wide range of core disciplinary competencies and transferable attributes including:
Digital, data and copyright literacy skills,
Understanding how knowledge and information is created
shared and contested online
Collaborative working and collective knowledge creation,
Information synthesis,
Critical thinking and source evaluation,
Writing as public outreach.
However, it’s also important to consider the risks of openness, as any understanding of openness is highly personal, contextualised and continually negotiated. We all experience openness from different perspectives, depending on different intersecting factors of power, privilege, inclusion and exclusion.
In his
5Rs for Open Pedagogy
[6] Rajiv Jhangiani identifies Risk as being one of his values for Open Pedagogy.
“Open pedagogy involves vulnerabilities and risks that are not distributed evenly and that should not be ignored or glossed over. These risks are substantially higher for women, students and scholars of colour, precarious faculty, and many other groups and voices that are marginalized by the academy.”
Many systemic barriers and structural inequalities exist in open spaces and communities; open does not necessarily mean accessible to all.  When engaging with open education, we need to be aware of our own privilege and be sensitive to those who may experience openness differently, and we need to address the systemic barriers and structural inequalities that may prevent others from engaging with open education and to enable everyone to participate equitably, and on their own terms.
The University has an invaluable
Digital Safety and Citizenship Web Hub
[7], that offers comprehensive information and resources on a range of digital safety and citizenship-related issues, including
training
and
events
, and advice on being an informed digital citizen.
If we’re sensitive to these risks and inequities and work to mitigate them, integrating open education and OER into the curriculum can bring significant benefits, including building networks, relationships and communities, fostering agency and empowerment, developing strong societal values and an appreciation of equity, intersectionality and social justice.
Open Education in the Curriculum
Wikimedia in the Curriculum
One way to engage with open education and the creation of open knowledge is by contributing to Wikipedia, the world’s biggest open educational resource and the gateway through which millions of people seek access to knowledge.  Working together with the University’s Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, colleagues from a number of schools and colleges have integrated Wikipedia and Wikidata editing assignments into their courses.  Editing Wikipedia provides valuable opportunities for students to develop their digital research and communication skills, and enables them to contribute to the creation and dissemination of open knowledge. Writing articles that will be publicly accessible and live on after the end of their assignment has proved to be highly motivating for students, and provides an incentive for them to think more deeply about their research. It encourages them to ensure they are synthesising all the reliable information available, and to think about how they can communicate their scholarship to a general audience. Students can see that their contribution will benefit the huge audience that consults Wikipedia, plugging gaps in coverage, and bringing to light hidden histories, significant figures, and important concepts and ideas. This makes for a valuable and inspiring teaching and learning experience, that enhances the digital literacy, research and communication skills of both staff and students.
Talking about a Wikipedia assignment that focused on improving articles on Islamic art, science and the occult, Dr Glaire Andersen, from Edinburgh College of Art commented
“In a year that brought pervasive systemic injustices into stark relief, our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered. As one student commented, “Really love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.”
Other examples include Global Health Challenges postgraduates collaborating to improve Wikipedia articles on natural or manmade disasters. History students re-examining the legacy of Scotland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and presenting a more positive view of black British history. Digital Education Masters students collaborating to publish a new entry on Information Literacies. And Reproductive Biology Honours students work in groups to publish new articles on reproductive biomedical terms.
Wikimedia in the Classroom assignment, Aine Kavanagh, Reproductive Biology, by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh,
CC BY SA.
Our Wikimedian in Residence provides a free central service to all staff and students across the University, further information including testimonies from staff and students who have taken part in Wikimedia in the Curriculum assignments is available here:
Wikimedian in Residence
Open Education and Co-creation – GeoScience Outreach
Another important benefit of open education is that it helps to facilitate the co-creation of knowledge and understanding.  Co-creation can be described as student led collaborative initiatives, often developed in partnership with teachers or other bodies outwith the institution, that lead to the development of shared outputs.  A key feature of co-creation is that is must be based on equal partnerships between teachers and students and “relationships that foster respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility”[8].
One successful example of open education and co-creation in the curriculum is the Geosciences Outreach Course, which provides students with an opportunity to work with a wide range of clients including schools, museums, outdoor centres, and community groups, to design and deliver resources for STEM engagement. Students may work on project ideas suggested by the client, but they are also encouraged to develop their own ideas.  This provides students with the opportunity to work in new and challenging environments, acquiring a range of transferable skills that enhance their employability. They gain experience of science outreach, public engagement, teaching and learning, and knowledge transfer while at the same time developing communication, project and time management skills.
A key element of the course is to develop resources with a legacy that can be reused by other communities and organisations. Open Content Curation student Interns employed by the University’s OER Service repurpose these materials to create open educational resources aligned to the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, which are shared online through Open.Ed and
TES Resources
[9] where they can be found and reused by school teachers and learners.  These OERs, co-created by our students, have been downloaded over 58,000 times and the collection was recently awarded
Open Education Global’s Open Curation Award
[10].
Open Education Awards for Excellence: Open Curation / Repository – University of Edinburgh by Stephanie (Charlie) Farley,
CC BY SA.
OER Assignments – Digital Futures for Learning
OER creation assignments are also incorporated into the Digital Futures for Learning module, part of the MSc in Digital Education, where students create open resource that critically evaluate the implications of educational trends, such as the future of writing, complexity in education, and radical digital literacy.  Creating genuinely open resources that are usable and reusable requires careful attention to issues such as accessibility, structure, audience, and licensing. The students need to critically consider and apply their learning, and in doing so are able to create practical re-usable resources, while demonstrating a range of transferable skills and competencies.
Commenting on this OER creation assignment, course leader Dr Jen Ross said
“Experiencing first-hand what it means to engage in open educational practice gives student an appetite to learn and think more.  The creation of OERs provides a platform for students to share their learning. In this way, these assignments can have ongoing, tangible value for students and for the people who encounter their work.” [11]
Reusing and Repurposing OER
Reusing and customising existing open educational resources can help to diversify and expand the pool of teaching and learning resources available to staff and students.
LGBT+ Resources for Medical Education
In 2016 undergraduate medical students developed a suite of resources covering lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual health. Although knowledge of LGBT+ health and of the sensitivities needed to treat LGBT patients are valuable skills for qualifying doctors, these issues are not well-covered in the medical curricula. This project remixed and repurposed resources originally created by Case Western Reserve University, and then contributed them back to the commons as OER. New open resources including digital stories recorded from patient interviews and resources for Secondary School children, were also created and released as OER. In a recent blog post on
Teaching Matters
[12], Dr. Jeni Harden, Senior Lecturer in Social Science and Health, reflected on how these resources have contributed to the medicine curriculum over the past five years.
Fundamentals of Music Theory
Fundamentals of Music Theory
[13] is an open textbook co-created by staff and students from the Reid School of Music with support from the University’s OER Service.  This Student Experience Grant funded
collaborative project
[14] repurposed existing open licensed MOOC content and blended-learning course materials to co-create a proof-of-concept open textbook. The project enabled our student partners to develop digital and copyright literacy skills, an understanding of OER and open textbooks, familiarity with ebook applications, and experience of working with educational media and content. Their input enhanced the original teaching materials and brought about further teaching and learning enhancement. Open textbooks have the potential to benefit universities in the post-pandemic world by reducing textbook costs, benefit staff by providing access to easily customisable open textbooks, and benefit students by providing free, high quality digital learning materials. Furthermore, open textbooks and OER have the potential to facilitate the democratic reshaping of teaching materials through student engagement and co-creation.
Further Information
These are just some examples of ways that open education and OER have already been integrated into the curriculum here at the University of Edinburgh.  They demonstrate how valuable co-creating open knowledge and open educational resources through curriculum assignments can be to help students develop essential digital skills, core competencies and transferable attributes, and enable our learners to become fully engaged digital citizens.
For further information about open education and OER please visit the University’s OER Service at
Open.Ed
or e-mail us at
open.ed@ed.ac.uk
References
Capetown Open Education Declaration
UNESCO, (2019), Recommendation on Open Educational Resources,
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
University of Edinburgh Open Educational Resources Policy,
OER Service,
Jhangiani, R, (2019), 5Rs for Open Pedagogy, Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D. Blog,
Digital Safety and Citizenship Web Hub,
Lubicz-Nawrocka, T., (2019), An introduction to student and staff co-creation of the curriculum, Teaching Matters Blog,
University of Edinburgh Open.Ed Hub, TES Resources,
OE Awards for Excellence
Ross, J., (2019), Digital Futures for Learning: An OER assignment, Open.Ed Blog,
Farley, S. and Harden, J., (2021), Five years on: The LGBT+ Healthcare 101 OER, Teaching Matters Blog,
Edwards, M., Kitchen, J., Moran, N., Moir, Z., and Worth, R., (2021),
Fundamentals of Music Theory
, Edinburgh Diamond,
DOI
Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education Project,
At the end of each year, I used to write a round up of significant work and life events over the previous 12 months.  That didn’t happen last year.  Just getting to the end of the year felt like an achievement.  That was enough.  I’ve kept this blog ticking over for the last year, though I’ve written fewer posts here than in previous years.  It’s partly that I’ve been blogging elsewhere, on the
OpenEd
Teaching Matters
, and
Open Textbooks
blogs. But it’s also a question of bandwidth; surviving in the midst of a global pandemic, and taking care of those around you, be they family, friends, or work colleagues, takes up a lot of emotional energy, so there often wasn’t much energy left over to reflect on what I was actually doing.  I’m still committed to using this blog to share my practice though, so I want to end the year on a hopeful note with a blog post about all the things I’ve done that I didn’t manage to write about at the time, or that I only touched on in passing.
Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education
At the start of the year I was awarded a University of Edinburgh
Student Experience Grant
, and together with Dr Nikki Moran and three brilliant student interns from the Reid School of Music, we undertook an experimental project to repurpose open resources from an existing MOOC and on-campus course to create a prototype open textbook,
Fundamentals of Music Theory
.  Working with Nikki and the students was a delight and we learned a lot about different publishing platforms and the process of editing and creating ebooks in different formats. My InDesign skills are basic at best, but my old HTML skills came in very handy!  We gave a talk about the project at the OERxDomains Conference,
The Scale of Open: Repurposing Open Resources for Music Education
, and it was great to receive such positive feedback on the importance of working together with students on projects like this. In his
final reflection
on the project our intern Ifeanyichukwu Ezinmadu wrote;
“This project has got me inspired towards creating an independent OER project in music theory based on the ABRSM theory syllabus. To achieve this new goal of mine, I look forward to deploying skills developed on this project such as collaboration, research, design thinking, and other technical skills. I will dearly miss the entire team that has made this Project a possibility – Lorna, Charlie, Nikki, Kari, and Ana – and I look forward to engaging with other opportunities within and beyond the University of Edinburgh to learn and contribute meaningfully towards music education projects.”
You can read more about the project on our blog here:
Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education
, and download our open textbook here:
Fundamentals of Music Theory.
Learn Ultra Base Navigation Upgrade
Another project I was involved in earlier this year was the Learn Ultra Base Navigation Upgrade project, which investigated the implications and feasibility of upgrading to UBN in advance of a full upgrade to Learn Ultra.  I’m not usually directly involved in supporting and delivering our Learn VLE service, but we were short handed so I was drafted in to do some of the project management. Although it was a bit of a steep learning curve for me, it was a really good opportunity to connect with colleagues who maintain and support the Learn Service and the Learn Foundations project, and it was interesting to have a preview of UBN and the functionality it provides.
OER Policy update
On more familiar territory, I enjoyed working with our Education Technology Policy officer Neil McCormick to review and revise the University of Edinburgh’s OER Policy.  The University’s original policy was approved in 2015 and five years later, in September this year, our new policy was approved by Education Committee.  This new policy, which has adopted UNESCO’s definition of OER, strengthens the University’s commitment to open knowledge and achieving the aims of the Agenda for Sustainable Development.  You can read about the new OER Policy on Teaching Matters here:
A new OER Policy for the University
, and access the policy itself here:
University of Edinburgh OER Policy
Open Education Global Awards
The OER Policy is just one of a sweet of open policies for teaching and learning that the University shares under Creative Commons licence, and we were delighted when these policies were awarded Open Education Global’s
Open Policy Award
as part of their 2021 Awards for Excellence.  Edinburgh rather swept the boards at the awards, also winning the
Open Curation Award
for our collection of OERs on
TES Resources
, co-created by GeoScience Outreach undergraduates and our fabulous Open Content Curation interns.  Melissa Highton won the
Open Leadership Award
, and Wikimedia intern Hannah Rothman won the
Open Student Award
.  We didn’t win the Open Resilience Award, but Charlie and I made a very cool video for our entry so I’m sharing it here anyway 🙂
ALT, Wikimedia UK, Creative Commons
I’ve continued serving as a trustee for
ALT
and
Wikimedia UK
and it’s always an honour to give something back to both these organisations, given their ongoing commitment to  openness, equity, community engagement and knowledge activism. This year I was privileged to sit on the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Awards panel, which is always an inspiring experience, and the recruitment panel for the new ALT CIO. I also stepped briefly into the role of interim Chair of Board for Wikimedia UK, when Nick Poole’s term came to an end and before our new chair Monisha Shah took up the role.  With my Wikimedia UK hat on, I contributed to the Creative Commons working group on the ethics of open sharing, chaired by Josie Fraser.  You can read the outputs and recommendations of this working group here:
Beyond Copyright: the Ethics of Open Sharing
Knowledge Activism
I made my own small contribution to knowledge activism at the beginning of the year, when the University’s Disabled Staff Network and Staff Pride Network decided to run an editathon for LGBT History Month, I suggested HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland as a topic. As a result of the HIV Scotland Editathon, six new articles were created and several others improved, making a significant contribution to representing the history of
HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland
on Wikipedia.  I created a new article about
Scottish AIDS Monitor
and I also wrote and article about
Jill Nalder
, the Welsh actress who inspired the character of Jill in Russel T. Davis’ drama
Its a Sin
. Later in the year,
Gary Needham
invited me to present a webinar on
Knowledge Activism: Representing the History of HIV and AIDS activism on Wikipedia
for the University of Liverpool’s School of the Arts.  Gary and I have a formative shared queer history that goes back many years, so it really meant a lot to me to be able to speak to him and his colleagues about the challenges of representing queer lives and experiences in this way.
A different kind of knowledge activism was provoked by the BBC drama series
Vigil
which opened with distressing scenes of a fishing trawler being sunk by a nuclear submarine off the West Coast of Scotland.  I certainly wasn’t the only one who noted similarities to the sinking of the fishing vessel
Antares
by hunter killer submarine HMS
Trenchant
off Arran in 1990, despite the BBC denying that the incident was based on any specific real life event.  At the time, there was no Wikipedia entry about the sinking of the
Antares
and
HMS
Trenchant
‘s entry made only a veiled reference to the incident, so I fixed that.  It’s important that we remember tragedies like this and equally important that we remember who was responsible.
And while we’re on the subject of activism and loss of life at sea, please consider supporting the
Royal National Lifeboat Institution
if you can.  Their volunteers risk their own lives to save those who find themselves in peril at sea, and they are facing increasing hostility and abuse for their selfless courage and humanity.
COP26
Activism of a different kind was going on all over Glasgow in November to coincide with COP26.  I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic about the outcomes of the conference or the will of global leaders and developed nations to enact meaningful change to halt the climate crisis, however it was hugely inspiring to hear the voices of so many young indigenous community activists.  These are the radical voices we need to listen to and make space for.  Also kudos to my daughter for snapping what surely has to be the most accurate photograph of the conference and the crisis we face, when we joined the climate march through Glasgow on 7 November.
COP26 Climate Crisis March, Glasgow, CC BY NC SA, Rhuna McCartney
Open Scotland
Another area where we’ve made less progress than I would have hoped is with
Open Scotland
.  As a purely voluntary initiative Open Scotland hasn’t been particularly active for a number of years now, but many of those involved are still supporting open education, open practice and OER through other initiatives and activities. We remain committed to the aims of the
Scottish Open Education Declaration
and we haven’t given up hope that one day, the Scottish Government will wake up to the benefits and affordances of sharing publicly funded educational resources under open licence.  In March this year, with support from Creative Commons, we made another attempt at engaging the Cabinet Secretary for Education with the the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and the Scottish Open Education Declaration, but again we were disappointed to receive a generic response from a civil servant.  At a time when inclusive and equitable access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities has never been more important, Scottish Government’s continued failure to engage with open education and OER is disappointing to say the least.
Hello Helo
On a more positive note, we got a new kitten this year.  This is Helo and he behaves more like a puppy than a cat.  He’s very cute, but he’s also an absolute menace.  My two long suffering adult cats are getting no peace.
Helo, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
I got home to the Hebrides in the summer for the first time in two years.  It was a joy to see family again and when I finally got to the beach (yes,
that
beach) I felt like I could breath again for the first time in months.
Traigh na Berie, Isle of Lewis, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
Hope
In what has been a difficult and challenging year on many levels, I’ve been privileged to continue working with so many kind, compassionate, fierce and committed open education practitioners and open knowledge advocates.  You give me hope.
It seems fitting to end with a quote from the late, great bell hooks, whose courage and clarity touched so many and whose words provide hope for us all.
“My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.”
~ bell hooks (1952 – 2021)
Many thanks to P-8 Digital Skills Project “Strengthening Digital Skills in Teaching”, ETH Zürich and ZHAW for inviting me to speak at their
OER Conference 21
. Slides and transcript of my talk, which highlights the work of Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, GeoScience Outreach students and Open Content Curation Interns, are available here.
Before we get started I just want to quickly recap what we mean when we talk about open education and OER.
The principles of open education were outlined in the 2008 Cape Town Declaration, one of the first initiatives to lay the foundations of the “emerging open education movement”. The Declaration advocates that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, and redistribute educational resources without constraint, in order to nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.  The Cape Town Declaration is still an influential document that was updated on its 10th anniversary as Capetown +10, and I can highly recommend having a look at this if you want a broad overview of the principles of open education.
There are numerous definitions and interpretations of Open Education, some of which you can explore here.
One description of the open education movement that I particularly like is from the not for profit organization  OER Commons…
“The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation.”
Continue reading
This post originally featured on the University of Edinburgh’s
Teaching Matters
blog.
In September 2021, the University of Edinburgh’s Education Committee approved a new
Open Education Resources (OER) Policy
, which revises and updates our previous 2016 policy. Supported by the central OER Service, the policy encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience, expand provision of learning opportunities, and enrich our shared knowledge commons. Investing in OER and open licensing helps to improve the sustainability and longevity of our educational resources, while encouraging colleagues to reuse and repurpose existing open materials expands the pool of teaching and learning resources and helps to diversity the curriculum. As one of the few universities in the UK to have an OER policy, the new policy strengthens the University of Edinburgh’s position as a world leader in open education and reiterates our strategic commitment to openness and achieving the
2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
Five years of OER at the University of Edinburgh
“Staff and students at The University of Edinburgh produce huge amounts of teaching and learning materials every year. The OER policy helps us to help you make them available for sharing with teachers and students all around the world.”
Dr Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal and Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW)
In the five years since the first OER Policy was approved, the quantity and quality of open educational resources produced by staff and students across the University has increased enormously. We now have a collection of thousands of media assets, hundreds of OERs, and dozens of massive open online courses that can be used, re-used, adapted and re-shared in sustainable ways. This includes almost 5000 open licensed videos on
Media Hopper Create
, 243 open resources and collections shared through the Open.Ed
OER Showcase
, 84 free short online courses, and 67 student-created OERs for school teachers on
TES Resources
, which have been downloaded over 60,000 times.  The OER Service has run over 230
digital skills workshops
, employed ten student interns, won three awards, and our
How To
Guides have been accessed 109,502 times.
Policy Review
The OER Policy review and revision was undertaken by Neil McCormick, Education Technology Policy Officer, and Lorna M. Campbell, OER Service Manager, both based in Learning Teaching and Web Services in ISG. In reviewing this policy, we considered developments at several other UK and European universities with existing OER practice.
Some institutions mandate the use of a single central OER repository to curate, quality control and monitor the impact of the resources their faculty create. Here at the University we trust colleagues to quality control their own teaching and learning resources, and we do not have a central OER repository because they are often unsustainable, and it can be difficult to encourage engagement. Instead, the Policy continues to encourage colleagues to share their open licensed teaching and learning materials in an appropriate repository or public-access website so that they can be discovered and re-used by others. The OER Service provides access to many channels for this purpose, including the
OER Showcase
, the
Open Media Bank
on Media Hopper Create, the
Open.Ed Shop
on TES Resources, and various channels on Flickr,
, and
Sketchfab
.  We also have an @OpenEdEdinburgh twitter account that we use to share news, highlight OERs created by staff and students across the University, and connect with the global open education community.
Some universities mandate that any resource considered for internal teaching awards must be open licensed. While we encourage all colleagues to share their resources under open licence, and the sponsors of awards to consider OERs in their award criteria, we didn’t enshrine this in policy.
A third approach adopted by some institutions is that any resource produced in cooperation with the central learning technology service must be open by default. This is often the case in practice here at the University of Edinburgh; the majority of the teaching and learning resources created with support from the
Online Course Production Service
for our free short online courses are open licensed and are available on Media Hopper Create. In addition, the OER Service’s
digital skills programme
helps to increase understanding of the benefits of using and creating OERs, encouraging open practice, and improving copyright literacy among both staff and students.
Policy Updates
Following current global practice, the policy has adopted a new definition of OER from the
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Education Resources
“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.”
The update also brings the OER Policy in line with our
Lecture Recording Policy
and
Virtual Classroom Policy
. With the increase in media being recorded, knowledge of data protection has become essential when creating and sharing open content. The policy clarifies what personally identifiable information colleagues should be aware of when creating open resources, including names, images, voices and personal opinions of individuals.
Policy Licence
As with our previous policy, the new
OER Policy
has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) to enable it to be shared, reused and repurposed by others.
Visit the University’s OER Service at
Open.Ed
to find out more about the new OER Policy and what it means for you.
Today is my last day of work before I switch on my out of office notification and take a complete break from work for the next fortnight.  It’s been a long, hard year for many or us, and for some more so than most, so its been wonderful to see the year out on a high with the
ALT Winter Conference
. Over two days this week, ALT welcomed 300 delegates for their annual online conference.  This year’s theme was “Celebrating Learning Technology practice, research and policy” and it really was a celebration.  A celebration of all the hard work learning technologists have done to keep the systems running and support staff and students throughout the unprecedented challenges this year has brought.  A celebration of innovation and creativity.  A celebration that we made it this far.  I like to think it was also a celebration of how we all supported each other along the way.  The conference also brought together the community’s key thinking and experiences of some of the important themes that have emerged this year, most notably privacy, ethics, assessment, surveillance, and openness.
Always committed to sharing our experience and practice, colleagues from Edinburgh contributed to a number of sessions over the course of the two days.  Vicki Madden spoke about the work she’s being leading to develop
Digital Safety and Citizenship
support and guidance for staff and students, and why adopting an intersectional approach to online safety and citizenship is so critically important for digital wellbeing.  As Vicki noted, digital safety and wellbeing really depend on everyone in the community playing their part.  It’s more important than ever that we all support each other online.
Jen Ross and Anna Wilson (University of Stirling) gave a presentation about the wonderfully creative
Telling Data Stories
project, which has created a tool, crafted by
pgogy
of PressEDConf fame, that enables users to write fiction to explore different aspects of interacting with technology, and to tell stories that cannot be told in other ways.
Colleagues from across EDE came together on Thursday for a bumper panel exploring how the University of Edinburgh
moved beyond emergency provision
by focusing on people, policy and practice to support reusable practices in the implementation of learning technology. Stuart Nicol opened the panel with an overview of the university’s Edinburgh Model for Teaching Online,
ELDeR
and
Learn Foundations
initiatives. With the boundaries between on campus and online increasingly fading, Stuart noted that all these initiatives share a post-digital approach, focusing on teaching regardless of whether it’s on campus or mediated by digital tools.  Martin Lewis, one of our undergraduate student interns gave a brilliant talk about his experience of working with the Learn Foundations project, reminding me yet again, how privileged we are to be able to work with such thoughtful motivated students.  And my colleague Neil wrapped up by telling the story of how we developed our new
Virtual Classroom Policy
, which is available under open licence along with our existing
open policies for learning and teaching
I also participated in the
Open COVID Pledge for Education
plenary panel, another blog post coming up about that soon.  Hopefully!
I enjoyed hearing Leo Havemann and Javiera Atenas talking about the new
guidelines for co-creating open education policy
in a really interactive and participatory session. Practicing what they preach, Javiera and Leo adopted a co-creation approach to developing these guidelines by seeking input from a
diverse group of policy experts
Catherine Cronin’s session,
New Windows on Open Educational Practices
, was also participatory and interactive but in a more unexpected way.  Catherine had a complete laptop failure right before she was about to present, and ended up phoning her talk in to Javiera who relayed it via her laptop!  Some of the rest of us in the session also stepped in to discuss the themes that Catherine had highlighted on her slides. It all turned out to be a brilliant example of spontaneous community engagement, open practice and co-creation in action.
The real highlight of the conference for me though was the
Learning Technologist of the Year Awards
.  These awards are always inspiring and the calibre of this years winners was exemplary.  Congratulations to all. The trophies this year were also particularly appropriate; beautiful forged steel pieces made by student blacksmith Jonjoe Preston, from Hereford College of Arts.  This year’s Community Award was a little different however.  Rather than inviting ALT members to vote for the recipient, ALT presented the award to all learning technologists in recognition of their outstanding contribution and commitment to education this year.  It was a really touching gesture, and I’m not sure an award has ever been so well deserved and hard earned. I posted a
tweet
about the award shortly after Maren and Dave announced it, and it’s been really heartwarming seeing learning technologists all over the world retweeting it and tagging in their teams and colleagues.  That tweet has now had over 18,000 impressions and I hope its brought a smile to each and every learning technologist who’s seen it.
It just remains for me to say a huge thank you to Maren Deepwell and the ALT team for running another brilliant conference, and for stepping up to support the learning technology community, while we were all busy supporting our students, colleagues, families and friends through the unprecedented challenges of this year.
Today saw the publication of an important and very timely resource for open educators and policy makers:
Open Education Policies: Guidelines for Co-Creation
by Javiera Atenas, Leo Havemann, Jan Neumann and Cristina Stefanelli.  The aim of the guidelines is to:
“support institutions and governments in the development of open education policies promoting the adoption of open educational practices and resources, and the fostering of collaborations amongst social-educational actors which favour the democratisation of knowledge access and production.”
In order to ensure policies have public value, the authors call for a “transversal and democratic approach to policymaking” and identify co-creation as a critical factor in policy effectiveness, in that it helps to ensure that policy makers and communities develop a sense of shared ownership, responsibility and purpose.
One of the things I particularly appreciate about this work is that the authors very much practiced what they preach as the guidelines were co created with input from a diverse group of policy experts.  My small contribution to these guidelines centred on the relationship between normative (mandatory) policy and informative (permissive) policies, both of which I believe are necessary:
“Campbell (2020b) notes that while organisations in receipt of public funding to create resources should be mandated to make these freely and openly available to the public, institutional OE policies focusing on the educational practices of staff and students should be primarily permissive rather than mandatory, thereby empowering those engaged in learning and teaching to come to their own decisions about whether and how to engage with OEP.”
My thinking in this area is very much influenced by Catherine Cronin who also contributed to the guidelines.  One of the points that Catherine and I both fed in is that:
“OE aims to increase educational access and effectiveness, as well as equity, through fostering participation and knowledge co-creation, including by marginalised and traditionally under-represented groups.”
Centering the experiences and requirements of marginalised and under represented groups is just one of the reasons why it’s so important that open education policies are founded on co-creation. and the guidelines clearly articulate a step by step cycle to enable this process; from agenda setting, through development, formulation, implementation, evaluation and revision.
The authors conclude by stating that.
“Co-creation of policies to support and foster inclusive, democratic approaches in education must follow an inclusive and participatory process.
And by co-creating these guidelines, the authors have done exactly that.
Open Education Policies: Guidelines for Co-Creation
is published by the Open Education Policy Lab and the Open Education Policy Hub and can be downloaded under CC BY-NC-4.0 licence from Zenodo.
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