C-SAP Open Educational Resources Project

supported by JISC / HEA

C-SAP has been successful in receiving funding from the JISC/HEA Open Educational Resources Programme. This new initiative will work across three main areas; institutionally managed learning materials, individually developed materials, and materials drawn from across a set of subject areas in conjunction with individuals and departments. It is this latter area that C-SAP, as one the Higher Education Academy Subject Centres, will operate within for the purpose of this pilot project. Working with a few key partners (ranging across the C-SAP subject areas), our project will focus on the processes of making ‘open’ a selection of learning materials by re-working them and depositing into a dedicated learning and teaching repository such as JORUM. However, alongside the transformation of digital materials and the practical challenges which may ensue, our project will also aim to take a critical social science perspective on the processes, motivations, and incentives for sharing digital educational resources, and to try and develop recommendations and practices for the ongoing release of learning material within a spirit of collective review and endeavour.

C-SAP’s Web and e-Learning Co-ordinator, Darren Marsh, will be co-ordinating the project and will report back to the subject community on progress and developments.

Key Dates: May 2009 to April 2010

Evaluating the Practice of Opening up Resources for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences

The production of teaching and learning resources within social sciences to date tends to be an individualised and ‘private’ enterprise within which teaching staff in part draw on broad disciplinary frameworks and institutionalised structures in developing what they consider to be relevant material for their particular teaching and learning activities. Unlike in disciplines whose curriculum are governed by professional associations as well as guided by Benchmark Statements, C-SAP ‘s disciplines of Sociology, Anthropology, Politics and Criminology are only guided by Benchmark Statements, which allows individual tutors greater discretion in determining relevant materials for learning and teaching. The materials chosen for any module vary depending on what lecturers consider most relevant, as well as module level, student numbers and physical resources such as availability and kinds of rooms, virtual learning environments and timetabling constraints. In addition, given the changing nature of disciplinary content material, and students’ changing needs, teaching and learning materials tend to be transient; although there is a growing acceptance of peer review of teaching performance and of the necessity of reflection on teaching and learning activities, educational resources produced or managed by individual teachers tend to remain in a liminal position.

In contrast, social science research is seen as a collective endeavour whereby previous insights and data generation methods are publicised both to share the immediate ‘discovery’ and to allow future research to build on its new insights. It has established (although not perfect) processes whereby critical assessments are made about the appropriateness, theoretical principles and findings. It is generally accepted that scrutiny of research proposals and outcomes are necessary to ensure good practice and ongoing developments aiming to more fully understand human social activities. Research thus rests on and develops further disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses through which it operates. In light of the progressive development of research findings and methods, it could be argued that it is the lack of comparable discourses and collective processes in the production of educational resources which prevents them from being more actively shared. This project aims to use insights gained from social science knowledge production to inform the process of making educational resources ‘open’ in ways that render them as accessible to others as possible. As such, these insights could then be useful to those in other disciplines engaged in similar processes.

The current individualisation of the production of teaching and learning resources means that the ways in which they are now used in and out of the classroom are often unrecorded. For example, documents in which these resources are located may omit the spoken instructions with which they are presented in the classroom. Teaching materials will often be chosen with particular students, settings or assessment (s)in mind. These choices rely upon tacit understandings embedded in materials. If, as this project intends, resources are to be openly available, then such tacit understandings need to be made explicit. Consequently, this proposal seeks to develop and evaluate the ways in which teaching and learning resources can move from a model of tacit, individualised production and consumption to one whose assumptions are shared so that the resources to be made ‘open’ are as fully appreciated as possible. The development of this appreciation of the processes informing the production of educational resources aims to begin to create a cultural shift from an individualised to a more dialogical production of resources that is informed and builds upon lecturers’ prior and considerable knowledge of learning and teaching. It aims to uncover the facilitators and barriers to building this cultural shift. Thus the proposed project aims to use the analytical tools of the social science disciplines to help make current tacit knowledge that informs the production of learning materials visible so that these materials can be as effectively reusable as possible.

Dr Mª Àngels Trias i Valls - Senior Research Assistant, Institute of Contemporary European Studies, Regent’s College London

Dr Helen Jones - Principal Lecturer in Criminology, Faculty of Humanities & Social Science, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dr Pam Lowe – Lecturer in Sociology, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University

Dr Cathy Gormly-Heenan - Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Social and Policy Research Institute, University of Ulster

Dr Jonathan Parker - Senior Lecturer in Politics, School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy (SPIRE), Keele University

Given the above pedagogical framework which will inform this project, we intend to align the release of resources in accordance with key criteria from the QAA Subject Benchmark Statements for Sociology, Anthropology, Politics and Criminology, approved by the subject professional associations. These Benchmark Statements all recognise that their disciplines’ programmes are in continual change, and that the implementation of teaching policy, methods and assessment are the province of each institution. More specifically, these Statements all draw together a body of resources which address core components of discipline-specific academic literacies as outlined by ‘typical standards’ of graduate knowledge:

These pilot projects, under the Open Educational Resources Programme, will aim to uncover the processes and principles, across the HE sector, which might support the ongoing release of open educational content beyond the initial lifetime of the projects. As part of our dissemination, evaluation, and reporting of findings we will aim to engage with a wide range of key stakeholders including academic staff and colleagues, senior management, learning support staff, developers, technologists, students.

We are also keen to work with critical guidance and input from the social science subject associations and professional bodies; this will be reflected in the project's reference to Subject Benchmark Statements in our articulation of the subject specific benefits of open educational materials, and also in associated dissemination activity and contribution to the project advisory group.

The JISC webpages on OER provide background to the project and materials from the start up meeting on 9 June 2009:

As part of the existing research which has informed the OER programme, and the C-SAP project, an informative summary of existing practice in open sharing of materials is L McGill, S Currier, C Duncan and Peter Douglas (2008) "Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials":

Other drivers which have informed the OER programme include the recent government HE debate – in particular Ron Cooke’s report (the recent Chair of JISC ) on e-learning:

For our C-SAP OER project we have also reflected on some of the thought provoking presentations and discussions from our January 2009 conference on The Virtual University? Social Science Critiques of Learning and Teaching in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Many of the papers, and the Keynote from Martin Oliver, are available to registered readers of our new online journal ELiSS: