OER16 Reflections – The Last Post

I had intended to write one last post to follow up the OER16: Open Culture Conference last month, but the moment passed, the weeks slipped by and I decided I’d left it too late. But then a couple of weeks ago Jim Groom posted a belated OER16 reflections post and I thought dammit, if Jim can do it, so can I!

When I was putting together my OER16 Overview  for the eLearning@Ed conference in May I emailed some of our keynotes and delegates to ask if they’d be willing to share some reflections on their experiences of the conference. I got some fabulous and very thoughtful responses that I really wanted to share, so here they are, after much delay and procrastination. Many thanks to everyone who responded.

It’s almost impossible to summarise so many diverse responses but if I can make an attempt…

Many OER16 participants commented on the strength of community that has grown up around open education. This is a mature and diverse community, which encompasses many different perspectives and interpretations of openness. For some open education is about resources, policy, technology, for others it’s about practice. Some are concerned with supporting and sustaining open education at scale across institutions, for others openness is more of a personal ethos. Some focus on the technologies we use to support open education, others are motivated by the potential of openness to address inequality and exclusion. None of these perspectives are mutually exclusive, none are above criticism, and indeed it appears that as a community we are moving towards a much more critical and nuanced analysis of what it means to be open.

As is so often the case Catherine Cronin put this into words much more eloquently than I can

“I feel a collective sense of “moving on” in the open education community, a willingness to tackle some of the more challenging questions about risk, power and inequality.”

Jo Spiller

Jo Spiller by Brian Mather

Educational Design and Engagement, University of Edinburgh

My two highlights were Catherine Cronin’s keynote on participatory culture, the power of open to influence and celebrate change, especially with the focus on the Gay Marriage vote in Ireland. How it can be playful and moving and everyone can contribute to it.

As a counterpoint to this, Sava Singh on the perils of open scholarship “Open wounds: The Myth of Open as Panacea” was really interesting – that open can also become excluding for different demographic groups and also has both great benefits but also great challenges for academics.

Sara Thomas

Wikimedian in Residence, Museums Galleries Scotland

As the Wikimedian in Residence for Museums Galleries Scotland, I usually work alone, or remotely.  The opportunity to connect to the wider open knowledge community was fantastic – energising, informative and so very valuable.  And we had 4 Residents in a room at once!  This, you have to realise, is a rare thing indeed in the world of Wiki.  I’ve worked primarily in open culture and heritage for the last 16 months, and one of the growth areas has been in the interface between education and culture…. So #OER16 seemed to me so prescient, so perfectly timed.

Martin Weller

The Open University

The sessions I attended at OER16 demonstrated how the field is maturing, and in many ways moving beyond a narrow definition of OER as content. The potential of OER in fields as diverse as Shakespeare and understanding modern slavery was demonstrated, but so too was the nature of open identity, the type of research we should be undertaking, and the need for open infrastructure. The UK OER conference is now much more of an international one and also much more critically reflective of the nature of openness.

Sheila MacNeill

Glasgow Caledonian University

Sheila MacNeil and Martin Weller by Josie Fraser

One of the things I keep coming back to is Melissa’s description of technical and cultural debt – I am going to try and blog about this but need to think about it a bit more in terms of my political position! But I found her description of them both really useful and thought provoking.

The theme of #oer16 was Open Culture, and it was great to have input from third sector organisations around the potential of open-ness (content, data and practice) outwith the education sector.  Catherine Cronin’s opening keynote  addressed cultural issues around inequality, culture, participation and open-ness head on.   Changing societal, organisational and personal attitudes to open-ness is an ongoing debate in the open education world.

~ A Tale of Two Conferences: #oer16 and #LAK16

Catherine Cronin

National University of Ireland, Galway

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference – the sessions I attended as well as the many conversations over the course of the 2+ days. I feel a collective sense of “moving on” in the open education community, a willingness to tackle some of the more challenging questions about risk, power and inequality. Though there is much work to do, this move towards more critical analysis is heartening.

Rachel Hosker

Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh

It was great. Really refreshing and challenging in a positive way for collections. It was a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and meet people with different perspectives on sharing collections and how we can all do this.  I also found it useful as a platform for discussing some of the practical things in collections work that need to be done to make things open for use. As an archivist, working in collections I would encourage others in my sector and profession to go to OER and engage with making collections open.

Maha Bali

Center for Learning and Teaching, The American University in Cairo

As a virtual participant who was also doing OLC Innovate at the same time… I only got a glimpse of what was happening. But what I thought was particularly interesting about OER16 was the challenging of two things:

1. Challenging OER as a key mode openness – Catherine Cronin’s keynote, my presentation with Suzan Koseoglu and one by Andrew Middleton and Katherine Jessen tried to move beyond OER as content as being the main form of openness…which was interesting given the title of the conference
2. Challenging openness as necessarily a good thing. This again came from Catherine but also Jim and also my session with Suzan. I am sure if Frances Bell presented something it would also challenge that.

I don’t know if this is all normal for OER16… it resonates a little with how OpenEd last year was, but with OpenEd it felt like maybe a majority of attendees were less critical but there was a vocal minority that was critical…

Thank you for embodying true openness in your approach to my virtual participation and Virtually Connecting. We are continually mentioning ALT as one of the organizations that’s supporting us.

Frances Bell

francesbell.com

OER16 was a very friendly conference – with lots of smiling, networking and fun going on. The conference topic Open Culture, expressed through the themes, enabled participants to celebrate and critique openness in the overlapping contexts of cultural heritage and education. The keynote speakers really helped to frame that celebration and critique in conference sessions and informal discussions

by Catherine Cronin, CC BY SA

Stuart Nicol

Educational Design and Engagement, University of Edinburgh

At a high level I felt a little that there was an underlying split between the very technical-orientated view of open and OER (I’m thinking Jim Groom’s keynote around infrastructure & indie-web) and then the very human side (several presentations talking about the self as OER). But thinking of this as less of a ‘schism’ and more of the strands that sit under the OER grouping. Strands that can sit comfortably but that maybe we haven’t quite got to a place where we realise they can sit comfortably together?

I think it maybe comes down to a tendancy to try to simplify; that OER is a policy and/or it’s a repository. But actually it’s a digital sensibility that underpins a very wide range of practices … the specific human and technical implementation of OER will be different in different practice contexts … and it’s likely to change over time.

John Johnson

Radio EduTalk

Viv Rolf, John Johnson, David Kernohan by Martin Hawksey

In higher education the idea of open education is now well enough established that the discussions have become quite nuanced. There are a wide range of definitions and directions on the open road. Some look at practical issues around, licensing and searching of resources, others social or technical ideas.

I’ve not seen much evidence that these ideas are penetrating primary or secondary education in Scotland. I do think that open ideas are equally valid here. A good place for school based colleagues to start might be the Scottish Open Education Declaration.

I’ve not got a wide ranging knowledge of the OER world, but it was pretty obvious there are different interpretations of open, many speakers alluded to that. There was a general feeling that the more open a resource the more sustainable it is.

It was delightful to spend time with people who are gathered, not because they want to sell something, but with a shared idea that is aimed at doing good in the world.

Joe Wilson

joewilsons.net

I am prejudiced but I do think some of our most creative educators are interested in open education. All of the sessions I attended inspired me and showed the way forward for all of us in rethinking what education could be. There was something for everyone from policy makers to practitioners.

All of the sessions from Wikimedia offered something for Colleges and adult learners – I can’t do them all justice in a post . But Colleges should be using Wikimedia tools not just as reference materials but as active learning tools.

~ #OER16 Quick Overview and Some important links for Scottish FE

Anne-Marie Scott

Digital Learning Applications and Media, University of Edinburgh

My major takeaway has been the value of openness. Making educational resources available for many purposes using Creative Commons licenses, building software and infrastructure using open source technologies and licenses, being open about the algorithms we use to evaluate our students’ online activities, being transparent about what data we collect and why, being open and inclusive about the development of standards that will allow us to work better together, all of this activity requires a commitment to being open. Open to scrutiny, open to challenge, open to collaboration, open to cooperation, and open to being part of a community.

~ The value of being open

And last but not least from twitter….

Stephen Thomas

Michigan State University

#oer16 #sustainability panel had a wide variety of perspectives. Great session!

Pat vs. Viv by Stephen Thomas

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Supporting Engagement with Learning Technology Through Open Education

Earlier this month I went along to the ALT Scotland SIG‘s annual conference, which was held at Dundee and Angus College’s fabulous Gardyne Campus and Learning Lab. This year the theme of the event was Sharing Stories: enablers and drivers for Learning Technology in Scottish Education.  I spoke about how the University of Edinburgh is supporting engagement with learning technology through open education, and my colleague Susan Greig gave a presentation about how the university is supporting staff to become Certified Members of ALT.  

I’ve linked the recording of the afternoon session below along with my slides, and the recording of the morning session can be accessed from ALT’s YouTube channel.  

For once in my life I actually wrote my presentation in advance of the event so I’ve copied my script below too. 

Supporting Engagement with Learning Technology Through Open Education at the University of Edinburgh

Earlier this year the University of Edinburgh launched a new strategic vision which outlined where the university is at present and where it intends to be in 2025.

Central to this vision is increased provision of world-leading online distance learning.

It’s an ambitious vision that aims to see up to 10,000 students, learning online by 2020, through MOOCs and postgraduate online learning programmes, and open education embedded right across the institution.

I’m not going to talk today about MOOCs and online masters programmes per se, what I want to focus on today is how the University is supporting engagement with learning technology through a range of open education initiatives and services, focusing particularly on OER.

The University of Edinburgh’s vision for open educational resources builds on three strands:

• The history of the Edinburgh Settlement.
• Excellent education and research collections.
• Traditions of the Enlightenment and the University’s civic mission.

The University has established an OER Service that will create an OER exchange to enrich both the University and the sector; provide support frameworks to enable staff to share OER created as a routine part of their work, and enable staff to find and use high quality teaching materials developed within and beyond the University.

The service will also showcase Edinburgh at it’s best, highlighting the highest quality learning and teaching; identifying collections of learning materials to be published online for flexible use, and made available as open courseware, and enabling the discovery of these materials to enhance the University’s reputation.

And as a contribution to the University’s civic mission it will open access to Edinburgh’s treasures, making available collections of unique resources to promote health, economic and cultural well-being; digitising, curating and sharing major collections of unique archives and museum resources to encourage public engagement with learning, study and research.

In order to ensure Edinburgh’s OER Vision is sustainable and supported across the institution, the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee has approved an accompanying OER Policy that encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience and to help colleagues make informed decisions about creating and using OER in support of the University’s OER Vision.

The Edinburgh OER Policy will look familiar to many of you as it’s based on the policy developed by the University or Leeds and already adopted by Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Greenwich. Edinburgh has made a number changes to this policy including adopting a more active and inclusive definition of OER.

“Digital resources that are used in the context of teaching and learning, which have been released by the copyright holder under an open licence permitting their use or re-purposing by others.”

By focusing on the context of use, this definition encompasses a wide range of resources including multimedia, courseware, and cultural heritage resources.

In order to provide access to its open educational resource the university has launched Open.Ed, a one-stop-shop which provides access to openly licensed content, the OER Vision statement and OER Policy, together with practical support for staff and students in the form of workshops, advice and guidance on finding, using and creating OERs.

I should add that this is not a formal repository Open.Ed is built on WordPress and aggregates OER from other repositories and sites across the university.

In addition to Open.Ed, the University has also launched Media Hopper a new multimedia asset management system which provides all staff and students with space to upload media and publish it to VLEs, websites and social media channels. Not all the content in Media Hopper is openly licensed, but student interns currently working to develop feeds to pull openly licensed content out of Media Hopper and into Open.Ed.

Edinburgh is also working to enhance the biggest open educational resource in the world; Wikipedia. Building on long term engagement with Wikimedia UK, the University has become the first in the UK to employ a dedicated Wikimedian in Residence.  As an advocate for openness the WiR delivers training events and workshops to further the quantity and quality of open knowledge and enhance digital literacy, through skills training sessions and editathons.

The University is also committed to supporting open education across the sector and last year announced it’s support for Open Scotland. Scotland is a cross sector initiative that aims 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. Part of my role as OER Liaison – Open Scotland will be to continue promoting the Scottish Open Education Declaration and hopefully bring it to the attention of the new Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills.

And of course last, but not least, earlier this year we were very privileged to host the OER16 conference with the support of ALT. The theme of the 7^th OER Conference, and the first to be held in Scotland, was Open Culture and the conference focused on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies.

So to conclude, open education is being used as a key driver to encourage and embed engagement with education technology right across the institution.

The University of Edinburgh’s vision for open education provides a strong foundation for developing a sustainable model for online education at scale, encouraging engagement with learning technology and OER within the curriculum, and improving teachers and learners’ confidence and digital literacy with regard to teaching and learning online.  In addition, this affords the University a valuable opportunity to scale up its community engagement, to disseminate the knowledge created and curated within the institution to the wider community and to help shape conversations about the role of learning technology and the future of open education in Scotland.

OER16: Open Culture Conference Overview

Last Friday I was invited to present an overview of the OER16: Open Culture Conference at the eLearning@Ed Conference at the University of Edinburgh, and as part of my talk I included the following summary of our five fabulous keynotes.

Catherine Cronin, National University of Ireland, Galway

Catherine Cronin set the tone for OER16 in her opening keynote asking “If open is the answer what is the question?” She went on to ask us whether we consider ourselves to be open education practitioners or researchers, advocates or critics, wonderers or agnostics. Catherine explored different definitions of openness, stressing the importance of context, and identifying those that may be excluded. In a very personal talk Catherine reminded us that openness is itself personal and that we are all negotiating risk every time we consider sharing. However

“engaging with the complexity and contextuality of openness is important, if we wish to be keepers not only of openness, but also of hope, equality and justice.”

~ Tressy McMillan Cottom, 2015

Catherine Cronin

Emma Smith, University of Oxford

On the week that marked the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, we were extremely fortunate to have one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars and dedicated open practitioner, Emma Smith, with us. Emma also wins the prize for the best keynote title ever surely with “Free Willy: Shakespeare and Open Educational Resources.” Emma wove together the story of her own open education journey with the colourful history of the Bodleian Library’s First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Emma began sharing her lectures online in 2009, an experience that completely transformed her teaching, and her lectures now reach a huge global audience. She suggested that teaching is now a public activity rather than a private one and added;

“You kind of have to get over yourself and let other people see what you’re doing.”

Emma also touched on the issues of privilege, acknowledging the threat of OER and MOOCs from elite institutions being seen as replacements for staff elsewhere, and she asked “To what extent does open reorder hierarchies?” She also entreated her colleagues in the humanities to share their contextual and teaching materials around original sources.

Emma Smith by Brandon Muramatsu

John Scally, National Library of Scotland

Moving from the personal to the institutional John Scally, National Librarian of Scotland, introduced the National Library’s ambitious digital strategy, launched in 2015, which aims to make a third of its renowned collection of 24 million items available online in the next 10 years. John outlined the range of approaches the National Library is taking to open access to its cultural resources and discussed the challenges for leadership in this area at a national level. The Library’s road to openness has been messy and there have been zigzags and potholes along the way, for example there are tensions between preservation and access. John argued that the National Library needs to go further than widening access, it also needs to promote equity, and “openness” can help with that. After John’s keynote one delegate was overhead to comment that higher education institutions could learn a lot from the National Library’s approach to supporting openness at scale.

John Scally by Anna Page, CC BY SA

Jim Groom, Reclaim Hosting

Jim Groom of edupunk, ds106 and Reclaim Hosting notoriety is one of the most infamous characters on the current ed tech circuit and we scored a bit of a coup by inviting him to give his first ever keynote in the UK. Jim presented a challenging and eclectic keynote titled “Can we imagine tech Infrastructure as an Open Educational Resource? Or, Clouds, Containers, and APIs, Oh My!” and true to form he began with a quote from Black Flag guitarist Greg Gin

“If you don’t like ‘the system’ you should create one of your own.”

~ Greg Gin, Black Flag

Jim urged us to turn our attention from open, shareable educational resources, to shared technical infrastructure. Asking what if we focused more on small-scale personal, re-usable software rather than monolithic, institutional solutions? What if we worked towards a collaborative infrastructure for OER that was always framed and scaled at the level of the individual, not unlike the web? With the shift in web infrastructure to the cloud, the advent of APIs and containers, and a burgeoning network of distributed and collaborative ed tech, we may be entering a moment where the open culture of networks is key to a sustainable future for OER.

Jim Groom by @SuperFamicomGuy

Melissa Highton, University of Edinburgh

Returning to the institutional context, my fellow co-chair Melissa Highton presented the final keynote of OER16 Open with Care, which explored the challenges for leadership in OER, the role of universities in open knowledge communities and the returns and costs associated with institutional investment. Melissa outlined the University of Edinburgh’s policy and vision for OER and reminded us that “education isn’t always about content, but a lot of it is.”

One idea introduced by Melissa, which particularly caught the attention of delegates, was the concept or technical and copyright debt. If you don’t build open licensing into your workflows, you accrue copyright debt for the future. Technical and copyright debt is the price you pay for not doing it properly first time and as a result you end up paying to replace what you already have, rather than building new functionality. So, sustaining OER at scale is a technical issue and IT directors and CIOs need to be persuaded of the value of funding openness.

Melissa Highton by Anna Page, CC BY SA

In conclusion…

It’s difficult to present a neat summary of such a diverse conference but there does appear to be a collective sense of maturing and moving on in the open education community, a willingness to tackle some of the more challenging questions about risk, power and inequality. There may be some residual tension in the OER community between those who have an institutional remit for supporting openness and those who regarded openness as a purely personal practice, however there is a growing appreciation that openness is a digital sensibility that underpins a very wide range of practices.

I’d just like to finish with what I thought was a lovely quote from a blog post written by OER16 delegates and University of Edinburgh MSc in Digital Education postgraduate, Stuart Allen. Stuart wrote ….

“Having a clear, value-driven vision for openness based on ideas of sustainability, civic responsibility and social justice, as advocated by Catherine Cronin and others, represents the very best of what higher education can be (or should be). But when it comes to implementing this vision in a specific context, there are tensions at work between political values, educational aims and pragmatic concerns. These will have to be negotiated with courage and no little skill.”

~ Stuart Allen, Open Culture, Open Questions

All OER16 keynote are available on the ALT Youtube channel.

Why does open matter?

Defining ‘open’ in the context of education.

This piece was originally posted as a feature on the University of Edinburgh’s Teaching Matters site.

Open education has been my passion for a number of years now so when I was invited to write a short piece on why open matters for Teaching Matters I was happy to oblige.

Before trying to explore this question, let me explain what I mean by open education.  Open education is a broad catch-all term that includes open education resources (OERs), massive open online courses (MOOCs), open education practice, open assessment practices (e.g. Open Badges), and other approaches.

In the context of education it can be difficult to pin a single definition on the word “open”.  The open in open educational resources, is different to the open in massive open online courses.

Open educational resources are digital resources used for teaching and learning (e.g. course material, images, multimedia resources) that have been released under an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons) so they can be reused and repurposed by others.  The ability to change and adapt resources is an important aspect of the openness in OER.

MOOCs on the other hand may be free for anyone to join, but frequently the content cannot be accessed or reused outside the course. This sometimes leads to accusations of so-called “open washing”; claiming something is open when really it isn’t.

But why does “open” actually matter in education?  This question is addressed by the Scottish Open Education Declaration produced by Open Scotland, a voluntary cross sector initiative supported by the University of Edinburgh as part of their wider commitment to open education and OER.  Open education in general and OER in particular are part of a worldwide movement to promote and support sustainable educational development. Open education can expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens.

There is also a sound economic case for open education. Releasing publicly funded educational resources under open licences represents a return on investment on public spending. Institutions are already being mandated to publish publicly funded research outputs under open access agreements; surely there is a strong moral argument that publicly funded educational resources should be published under open licences?

I recently had an opportunity to write a more personal reflection on why I believe open matters in a contribution to the open book Cost of Freedom which aims to raise awareness of the disappearance of detained Syrian internet volunteer and open knowledge advocate Bassel Khartabil.

I believe there is huge creative potential in openness and I believe we have a moral and ethical responsibility to open access to publicly funded educational resources. Yes, there are costs, but they are far outweighed by the benefits of open.

Open education practice and open educational resources have the potential to expand access to education while at the same time supporting social inclusion and creating a culture of collaboration and sharing. There are other more intangible, though no less important, benefits of open. Focusing on simple cost-benefit analysis models neglects the creative, fun and serendipitous aspects of openness and, ultimately, this is what keeps us learning.

University of Edinburgh approves new OER Policy

[Cross posted to Open Scotland]

As part of its on going commitment to open education, the University of Edinburgh has recently approved a new Open Educational Resources Policy, that encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience. The University is committed to supporting open and sustainable learning and teaching practices by encouraging engagement with OER within the curriculum, and supporting the development of digital literacies for both staff and students in their use of OERs.

The policy, together with supporting guidance from Open.Ed, intends to help colleagues in making informed decisions about the creation and use of open educational resources in support of the University’s OER vision. This vision builds on the history of the Edinburgh Settlement, the University’s excellence in teaching and learning, it’s unique research collections, and its civic mission.

The policy is based on University of Leeds OER Policy, which has already been adopted by the University of Greenwich and Glasgow Caledonian University. It’s interesting to note how this policy has been adapted by each institution that adopts it. The original policy describes open educational resources as

“…digitised teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released by the copyright owner under an intellectual property licence (e.g. Creative Commons) that permits their use or re-purposing (re-use, revision, remixing, redistribution) by others.”

However Edinburgh has adapted this description to move towards a more active and inclusive definition of OER

“digital resources that are used in the context of teaching and learning (e.g. course material, images, video, multimedia resources, assessment items, etc.), which have been released by the copyright holder under an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons) permitting their use or re-purposing (re-use, revision, remixing, redistribution) by others.”

This definition aims to encompass the widest possible range of resources that can be used in teaching and learning, not just resources that are developed specifically for that purpose. This description acknowledges that it is often the context of use that makes a thing useful for teaching and learning, rather than some inherent property of the resource itself.

Although open licensing is central to the University’s OER vision, this is much more than a resource management policy. In order to place open education at the heart of learning and teaching strategy, the University’s OER Policy has been approved by the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee. The policy is intended to be clear and concise and to encourage participation by all. By adopting this policy, the University is demonstrating its commitment to all staff and students who wish to use and create OERs in their learning and teaching activities, and who wish to disseminate the knowledge created and curated within the University to the wider community.

Growing open educational practice in Scotland: Open Scotland and the Scottish Open Education Declaration

Towards the end of last year I was interviewed by the OEPS Project as part of their series of case studies on open education practice in Scotland.  During the interview I spoke about the Open Scotland initiative, the Scottish Open Education Declaration, OER16, open education initiatives at the University of Edinburgh and the continued need to raise awareness of open education within the Scottish Government and at senior management level.  Here’s a little quote from the interview:

“…there has been a danger in some quarters to expect OER alone to transform education … some people have expected that simply resources to be transformative… that’s not the case. OER is simply content with an open license, that’s all it is. And that alone will not transform education, as part of the wider open education landscape, I think it will, and I feel very, very strongly that there are moral reasons, there are ethical reasons, why publicly funded educational content should be available under an open license. And I think particularly in a country like Scotland, which has a very strong tradition of education, that I kind of find it odd that open education has never quite slotted in at the government vision level.”

You can read the rest on the OEPS website here: http://www.oeps.ac.uk/create-your-own/growing-open-educational-practice-scotland-open-scotland-and-scottish-open-education

How to be a Brilliant Conference Chair

The recent Guardian article that Joanne Begiato, Steven Gray, Isaac Land I I wrote on The Six Best Conference Questions turned out to be so popular that we decided to write another one! This time about conference chairing. An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Higher Education Network on the 2nd December, but here’s the full director’s cut.

How to be everyone’s favourite Conference Chair

By Joanne Begiato, Steven Gray, Lorna M. Campbell and Isaac Land

We’ve all got an anecdote about the worst conference chair we have ever experienced. The chair who forgot or mispronounced the speakers’ names, or (horrors!) forgot to turn up altogether, leaving the bewildered speakers to introduce themselves. The chairs who let questions ramble on through self-interested thickets or didn’t notice the shy hand raisers, only seeing the professor of gesticulation. Or how about the occasional chair who takes the chance to tell the audience about his/her fascinating research and superior knowledge? And don’t we all dread the chair who can’t tell the time, appears not to care that the audience is gasping for a drink, or lets that awkward silence drag on once all the questions have dried up. The painfully self-aware among us know in our heart of hearts that we have all been that chair at one conference or another (possibly after a late night at the conference dinner, not entirely unrelated events). Although such chairing debacles are something of a scholarly rite of passage, which help us to hone our chairing and facilitation skills, our aim here is to help you avoid these pitfalls and offer a six-point check-list so you can become everyone’s favourite conference chair.

Be Prepared and Organised

Make sure contact your speakers in advance, either at the conference or via email, to ask for a short biography or check if they’re happy for you to use their biography and title from the conference programme (quite often people change the focus of their paper by the time they come to present). Then, find your speakers at coffee before the session so you can introduce yourself, find out how they prefer to be addressed and check how to pronounce their names writing them down phonetically if necessary. If needs be, ask whether presenters will be using the conference PC or their own laptop, and make sure you know where to find the tech support to get them connected. In order to assure seamless transitions, ensure that presentations are preloaded, and check that your speakers know how to find and open their own presentations. And if the tech gods let you down, know how to contact the IT support.

Be Fair and Inclusive

When introducing the speakers do not give one of them more prominence than the others, whoever they might be, and highlight each speaker’s key publications and achievements equally. Be prepared for the eventuality that when you open the floor for questions you are met with stony silence, by preparing your own question for each speaker. Nonetheless, if there is a flurry of hands, don’t hog the questions or abuse the chair’s prerogative. Prevent questioners from dominating, bullying, or patronising speakers by courteously reminding them to come to the point and you scan the audience to ensure early career researchers and more reticent colleagues have an opportunity to address the panel. Where possible, try to make sure that all the speakers get and least one comment or question so that none of them leave vowing never to give another paper again.

Be Impartial and Selfless

Keep anecdotes about your own research to coffee time and let the speakers take the spotlight. If you have found links with your own work, or know of references that might help inform speakers’ research, talk to them or email them later and focus on their own findings during the session. Be sensitive and helpful and encourage early career researchers and new speakers and boost their confidence by thanking them for their presentation and showing an interest in their work. Know when to save your own questions for another time because the audience has a lot to ask.

Be Visibly Attentive

You are the chair, on full view and managing the panel, so listen attentively to the speakers, and take notes on relevant points that might be used for questions later. Save your knitting, crocheting, nail filing, and yawning for your evenings in front of the TV. Sit on the podium without fidgeting, or in the front row where you can maintain eye contact with your speakers. When its time for questions, stand to the side of the podium scanning the audience for questions, leaving centre stage for your speakers. If multiple audience members raise their hands, make eye contact with each and nod discretely so they know you have seen them and you return to them to invite them to ask their questions when the opportunity arises.

Be Polite but Firm

Always begin promptly and make sure you time each speakers’ slot individually, so that each has his/her fair share of the session. However, awkward, you must keep people to time because the alternative is unfair. Be prepared to tackle a speaker even if s/he is higher up the academic ranks, self-important, or simply stubborn enough to ignore you. To achieve this difficult task, agree with your speakers in advance what sign you will use to alert them that they must begin drawing their talk to a close, such as a note or finger gesture (no, not that one). If necessary, know when to stop believing the speaker’s promises that they are about to conclude and stand up and inform them firmly that you will have to stop them there in order to introduce the next presenter. By the way, for all speakers reading this, let’s make the chair’s life more comfortable by ending when asked!

You Know When to Finish

When you get to question time, it is your responsibility to lead the discussion by encouraging dialogue between audience and speakers. Questions at the end of a paper can be the most rewarding part of the session; otherwise speakers may as well have stayed at home and read their paper to the cat. Do this simply by ensuring that everyone who wants to speak has the opportunity to do so, and try to read faces and feel the silences. This way you know when the questions have dried up and it’s time to thank the speakers and the audience, and say how great the session has been. Even if there are more questions, when the time for the panel to end arrives, tie things up neatly, thereby allowing everyone to happily head for tea and biscuits or, better still, the pub (where they won’t talk about you, because you did your job well).

Oh, and we were very pleased that this article was the editor’s top pick in last week’s Higher Education Network Newsletter 🙂

Return of the Six Best Conference Questions

Way back in 2013 Joanne Begiato, Steven Gray, Isaac Land and I wrote a blog post called The six best conference questions: Or, how not to paper-bomb at a conference. The piece was intended to be an encouraging response to a rather entertaining article written by Allan Johnson in Time Higher Education about the six questions every academic dreads to hear at conferences. That post turned out to be by far and away the most popular post ever to appear on this blog and it’s now found a new lease of life in The Guardian.  Earlier today The Guardian Higher Education Network re-published our piece under the title Don’t be a conference troll: a guide to asking good questions. We’ve had an overwhelming response to the article on twitter so it seems like this piece is still striking a chord with colleagues across the sector.

I’m also delighted to report that by the end of the day we were more popular than Jo Jonson’s University reforms 😉

Many thanks to Steven for suggesting we submit this to The Guardian!

The Challenge of OER Sustainability

Sustaining the outputs of projects and programmes beyond their initial phase of funding is a weel kent problem but it is one that we still struggle to solve. Back in 2009 when Cetis were working with Jisc to scope the technical guidelines for the forthcoming UKOER Programme we attempted to address this issue by recommending that projects deliver their content through multiple platforms. One of the few actual requirements among the programme guidelines was that projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen, in order to act as a safeguard against resources being lost:

Delivery Platforms

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. However all projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen. In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources e.g. YouTube channels. Although this programme is not about technical development projects are encouraged to make the most of the functionality provided by their chosen delivery platforms.

OER Programme Technical Requirements

Six years down the line and attrition is taking the inevitable toll. Several of the sites and repositories that hosted UKOER content have disappeared and the sustainability of the content hosted by the national Jorum repository remains uncertain following Jisc’s announcement in June that it intended to retire Jorum and “refresh its open educational resources offer”.

These problems were brought into sharp focus by Viv Rolfe (@VivienRolfe) of the University of West England this week when she tweeted

The shear volume of our publicly-funded OER that are no longer available at all is quite staggering. #ukoer #oer pic.twitter.com/Shtef5NQOa

— Viv Rolfe (@VivienRolfe) October 10, 2015

Viv’s tweet sparked a lengthy discussion on twitter that drew in several of the community’s most incisive critical thinkers on open education including Simon Thomson (@digisim), Pat Lockley (@Solvonauts, @patlockley), David Kernohan (@dkernohan), Leo Havemann (@leohavemann) and Theresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage).  

The wide ranging discussion touched on a number of thorny issues relating to OER preservation and sustainability.  I’ve created a Storify of the entire discussion here: The Challenge of OER Sustainability

Self-hosting was seen as one alternative to using institutional or national repositories to host OER, with WordPress being a popular platform in some quarters.  David Kernohan took this one step further, asking if individuals who want to self-host OER should run their own repositories. While this is an interesting idea it was regarded as a rather heavy weight solution to the problem and Pat argued that repositories are the wrong tool for the job as they sit outside standard academic digital literacies.

The discussion then turned to cross-publishing. The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) approach to digital preservation was regarded as one good way to ensure that content does not disappear.  However if content is deposited in multiple places and scattered across the web then other issues arise relating to how to find and curate content. Pat commented that multiple deposit may solve “lost hosting” but complicates “find”. Aggregators and the dark arts of search engine optimisation clearly play a role here, however search engines’ ability to accurately interpret licence information is still problematic.

The Solvonauts aggregator and OER search engine represents a good example of one sustainable approach to locating OER content.  Solvonauts has aggregated 141867 OERs, it costs around $50 a year to run and the code and database are shared on Github. If Pat falls under a bus tomorrow, it’s business as usual for Solvonauts. (Pat’s phrase, not mine.  Please don’t fall under a bus Pat!)  Of course Solvonauts can only find content that it is there; it can not solve the problem of how to sustain content if servers are switched off or repositories shut down with little or no warning, which brings us right back to the issue of repository sustainability.

Leo Havemann commented that the main problem is lack of funding rather than the failure of repositories per se and Simon Thomson suggested MERLOT as a good example of a sustainable OER repository.  This resulted in a rather heated discussion about whether MERLOT can be regarded as an OER repository as not all the content is CC licensed and there is a cost associated with deposit.  Simon has already blogged an excellent summary of this discussion and the points he made regarding MERLOT which you can find here: The challenges of maintaining OER repositories, but why we must never stop trying.

Ultimately there is no simple answer to the question posed by David.

 Where should I put my OER so people can find and use it?

Pat’s answer may suggest a way forward in the short term.

I would place content into any platform which supported some licensing, or was free hosting, caveated with a bulk download option should the platform close.

Even if there is no easy answer, sustainability of OER is a pressing issue that requires immediate attention and a collective response from the community.  Digital curation and sustainability of OERs may represent a challenge, but as Simon pointed out in his own blog post, we must never stop trying.

ALT Community Call – come and talk to me!

Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in the first ALT-C ‘Community Call’ where I’ll be in conversation with ALT’s Chief Innovation, Community and Technology Officer, Martin Hawksey. Among other things,  I’ll be talking about my role in open education technology, policy and practice advocacy, my involvement with ALT, and my work with EDINA and LTW at the University of Edinburgh. I’ll also be giving an update on OER16 and outlining the conference themes.

The Community Call is free to join and will be hosted as a Google Hangout On Air at 12.30 PM. You can watch the call from the Google+ page, YouTube Channel or embedded on the ALT website, and you’ll be able to ask questions during the call from the Google+ page or via Twitter by using the tag #altc.  I hope you’ll come along and join us!

When:1 Oct 2015 12:30 PM   to   1:00 PM

Where: Google+

ETA: In case you missed it, here’s the video of the event.  If I look rather bemused and there’s a delay in me answering Martin’s questions it’s because I was hearing everything repeated with a 2 second delay!