I was musing about how to represent OCEP on a poster for the forthcoming OEER Programme Meeting. I use Mindmapping quite a lot for thinking about the structure of problems. It does not always work for me, but in this case it turned out to be a little bit more than a way of grouping things together. When I started to add a few relationships in I came to a familiar conclusion. The key success issue is what is in OER to persuade individuals to deposit resources? In another life I still do a bit of economics (nowadays I am very interested in behavioural economics) and perhaps the map refelects that interest. Behavioural economists believe than incentives shape all behaviour. So the question turns out to be - if people are fundamenatally selfish than what incentives are there for them to act in the collective good? A bit like bankers and knighthoods perhaps.
Archive for the ‘OCEP Issues’ Category
Summer discussions
There have been a number of meetings and discussions related to OCEP across the university during the summer. A number of issues of interest have emerged.
1. In talking to the internal project partners from across the university is very clear that individuals and groups are happy to collaborate in making learning and teaching materials open if it fits in with something else they want to do, for example a course review or adapting content to the needs of a new business partner. In such circumstances teaching staff have to do something and are often willing to consider the options, especially if we can offer them some help to achieve their aims (which may not explicitly be to make material open). So the trigger to make content open may not be OCEP or a similar project but the need to upgrade content for some other reason. So one tactic for OCEP is to seek out colleagues who are reviewing content for whatever reason and then trade some help to make it open since such interventions may also help them achieve their own objectives.
2. The OCEP project is very important to Coventry University because, in addition to helping us promote a culture of “openness”, it provides a further impetus to the development of Curve, our institutional repository. The OCEP project team contains (not surprisingly) a lot of people who worked on the Curve project. However we have also become aware of a lot of Curve developments which have been undertaken across the university which were not part of the project plans. Obviously we are very pleased at this since it is strong evidence that Curve is “embedded” in the sense that it does not need the project team to take sole responsibility for initiating new activity. One major example of this is the (democratic) decision by one department in the university to adopt an Open Mandate for all research, teaching and other content developed by its staff. Curiously this was not really on the OCEP Team’s internal radar – it is now! Maybe the lessons are that development takes a long time (Curve work began some years ago) and that we should not neglect our own backyard as a source of innovation.
3. Coventry staff have a marked preference for depositing content in Curve and then publishing it via other routes through linking. The positive reason for doing this is that they only need to maintain one copy of the content. This has nothing to do with the merits or demerits of other repositories or systems; it is simply the security of knowing that if the “master” copy is right then all the other instances will be as well.
4. We used to think of Curve, rather naively, as a solution to a wide range of problems. More recently we have begun to conceptually and practically unbundle what we have to do with content. So we used to think (or seem to think) that the Curve software (Equella) would perform all the functions we needed – content management, publishing storage, archiving, preservation and so on. But staff do not behave in this way. In particular they have little if any interest in the arcane world of archiving, storage and preservation. On the other hand they can be quite busy exploring all sorts of new publishing opportunities such as iTunesU and YouTube. Indeed the university now has quite prominent channels in both areas. On the other hand we do not have policies for archiving and preservation.
5. The development of a university iTunesU channel and YouTube presence (CUTV) has been driven by marketing considerations and not learning and teaching. However we have developed a close relationship with colleagues in the university’s marketing department who are responsible for CUTV and related media and we are developing means of making learning and teaching content available in this way. This includes, for example, developing easy deposit systems which allow staff to indicate what they want to happen to their content (Curve deposit as a requirement, other channels such as iTunesU as options). Again there is an interesting lesson here. The university, corporately, was initially nervous about the use of iTunes, YouTube and Facebook. If the drive to exploit these channels had come from the (e-) learning community I suspect the nervousness might have continued. However the attraction of such media as potential direct influences on student recruitment and the financial bottom-line and the notion that somehow exploiting such media was a corporate (central) idea has dispelled the nervousness and the university (centrally) is now looking for suitable learning and teaching content to sustain its presence.
6. OCEP has reignited the re-use/re-purposing debate in the university. In particular we are asking ourselves what Coventry University open content might look like. Should it all come with some “use” notes to explain how it has been used at Coventry and what other content it might have been used in conjunction with it? Should Coventry content be recognisable as Coventry content or is it just content? What are we going to do about contextualised parts of the content? If we eliminate them then other users might not be aware that they will need to consider the detailed implications of using the content in their own teaching. On the other hand we may be teaching our granny colleagues to suck pedagogic eggs.