Re‐invigorating openness at The Open University: the role of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

This paper describes the internal motivations and external drivers that led The Open University UK to enter the field of Open Educational Resources through its institution‐wide OpenLearn initiative (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn). It also describes some of the emerging evidence of the impacts inside and outside the university. Through the rapid implementation and operation of the OpenLearn website, The Open University UK has been able to better understand and promote openness through open and distance learning.

Keywords:

• open educational resources
• open universities
• open and distance learning

Introduction

It did not take long for Open Educational Resources (OER) to capture the attention and imagination of people working at The Open University UK (OU UK). The very name of the movement resonates with that of the university; as one professor exclaimed at one of the early discussions: ‘This is our destiny!’ To understand this reaction, one needs to know that the fundamental mission of the OU UK is to be ‘open to people, places, methods and ideas’ (The Open University, 2008). Indeed it would have been inconceivable for it not to be so readily embraced. The OU UK is widely seen as a leader in open and distance learning, and it would have been an abandonment of that leadership if the institution had not been eager to engage in something that has such enormous promise for furthering its mission.

Openness at The Open University UK

Throughout its history the OU UK has given a great deal of attention to the meaning of ‘open’ and its consequences both for learners and the context in which they shape their learning experiences. Importantly (and most relevant to the OER movement), the institution has no barriers to entry, no entry requirements – only exit standards. A person’s background and previous advantage or disadvantage is entirely irrelevant. This makes the journey from informal (the OER domain) to formal (where a student might well wish to have some validation of their learning) a seamless one, an encouraging one.

By its very nature the OU UK is no stranger to the concept of making its material ‘public’ – published and available to students and the public to buy. From its inception it has also had a powerful partnership with the BBC and for several decades its lectures were available to the public through that medium. Indeed our work with the BBC has meant that (free to view at first, then free to record) educational radio and television programmes have been openly available through terrestrial public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom ever since we began teaching in 1971. People have had the freedom to access and to copy this particular content for personal use but not the freedom to use it for educational or public performance purposes without a licence or prior permission.

Two developments have greatly opened up the ways in which we can make our content openly available and changed the way in which we can engage with its users. First, the giant leaps in technology have turned one‐way single platform broadcasting into multi‐way, multiple platform communication and collaboration. The ubiquity of the Internet and the sophistication of the modern ‘telephone’ have meant that learning can literally be accessed any time, anywhere, on any device. Open and distance learning has come of age – and gone global.

Second, the emergence of new forms of licensing for (largely) digital content has changed the ‘marketplace’ for educational resources. This ‘some rights reserved open licensing’ (e.g. the Creative Commons licences) placed on new and previously ‘all rights reserved’ copyrighted content enables the free copying, sharing, reuse and remixing of that content within pre‐defined terms of use.

Whilst OER flow naturally from our mission this does not mean that we did not, and do not, have to carefully examine and assess the impact of launching an OER initiative on our current business model. The university is in a highly competitive situation competing for students not only in its home market (where more and more institutions are adding e‐learning options to their prospectuses) but in the international market where there is an enormous number of choices available. Some people at the OU UK thought we were giving away the family silver. Such concerns had to be taken seriously. We had the music business as an example before us – and we also had other developments to consider as businesses everywhere found themselves able to exploit the possibilities of ‘the long tail’ (Anderson, 2006). What would this OER movement mean for our financial security? Clearly any initiative would have to be conceived as an experiment but it would have to be a large enough experiment to test the impact on our business and small enough to not threaten that business in the short to medium term.

The decision to proceed was enormously assisted by the offer of financial assistance from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (www.hewlett.org) in the United States, who have supported nearly all the other main sites demonstrating leadership in this field (e.g. Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare [OCW]). A substantial change such as this can usually only be effected in such a relatively short time scale with this kind of external support coupled with very strong internal support from the leadership of the institution. This is not a marginal activity for any institution, and the stakes could be high.

Open Educational Resources at The Open University UK

A two‐year start‐up project was initiated in April 2006 (The Open University, 2006, 2007), which has since become known as OpenLearn (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn). It was devised as a large institutional project that would help to answer some fundamental questions through action research – about the potential role and impact of free educational content and an open, web‐based, learning environment on the work of the OU UK in particular, and systems of education in general. The major planned outcomes were:

•	enhanced learning experiences for users of OER;
•	greater involvement in higher education by under‐represented groups and empowerment for various support networks that work with them;
•	enhanced knowledge and understanding of OER delivery, how it can be effective, and the contribution it can make to further development of e‐learning; and
•	enhanced understanding of sustainable and scaleable models of OER delivery.

We could not claim that any one of the above aspects of our initiative was unique but it was the combination and configuration of them in one project that we believed was unique at the time.

The official website was ready for launch in October 2006, using the open source product Moodle as the basis of the learning environment and with 900 hours of published current content from OU UK sources. The site was divided into two parts: one dubbed a LearningSpace aimed mainly at learners, and another dubbed a LabSpace mainly for educators. By the end of April 2008 the project had achieved 5400 hours of current content in the LearningSpace, and that same content plus a further 8100 hours of archived content in the LabSpace, together with an enhanced learning environment with various tools and technologies to support users of the site. Much of the content is available in eight alternative formats for downloading/taking away by users of both the LearningSpace and LabSpace with the ability to upload repurposed content, or even new content, only to the LabSpace. It is hoped that the LabSpace will encourage educators throughout the world to share, contextualise, repurpose and translate content, and then put it back on the site for others to use and alter to suit their purposes.

The OpenLearn initiative is increasing our understanding of the impact on learners and teachers of materials developed specifically for self‐study, whether for formal or informal learning, whether for pleasure or for professional development. In particular, by placing as much emphasis on the environment, tools and support as on the content itself, we are reinforcing our belief that learning does not take place in a social vacuum. Many of the publications arising from the initiative that detail the full scope of our developments and findings so far can be found on the OU UK Knowledge Network (Anon, 2008). The key benefits are summarised below.

With nearly two million unique visitors and 60,000 registered users in the first 18 months of operation of the website, OpenLearn is being used by more and more people for study, either individually or in groups. Most of the resources on OpenLearn can be viewed by any browsing visitor but users need to register – for free and providing minimal information – if they wish to use the various communication and collaboration tools. The benefits they gain depend upon the requirements of the user as a learner, educator or facilitator of learning experiences (Lane, 2008a). We are also investigating all the potential barriers to using the site and its resources (Lane, 2008b). To date we have evidence from observations and surveys for the following benefits to individual learners who primarily engage with the LearningSpace study units:

•	A place for improving study skills.
•	The opportunity to sample higher education study before enrolling on a taught course.
•	A way of choosing an OU UK course on which to enrol.
•	A way to begin study of a course and converse with fellow students before the formal start date of the course.
•	An opportunity to pursue in depth a topic that interests them, perhaps as an addition or enrichment to their formal courses.
•	A place to discuss topics and share knowledge and experiences with others.
•	A way to test their English‐language skills.
•	A place to keep a formal record of their informal study.

The observed and reported benefits to lecturers or other educators of both the LearningSpace and the LabSpace are equally diverse but include:

•	Investigating the OU UK approach to teaching a particular topic.
•	Directly referring their students to a study unit as additional reading or a set text for their face‐to‐face or online course.
•	Downloading units for incorporation into their own courses, whether online, blended or face‐to‐face.
•	Versioning and localising units for their own purposes and their own contexts (this includes translation).
•	Sharing their materials and ideas with other educators worldwide.
•	Collaborating with others in developing new OER.
•	Contributing to research into the effectiveness and uses made of OER.

There are also benefits for organisations with whom we currently work to have further access to, and be able to participate in, both formal and non‐formal learning opportunities. Both the University of the Third Age (http://www.u3a.org.uk/) and Unionlearn (http://www.unionlearn.org.uk/) in the United Kingdom have begun to use OpenLearn study units in volunteer‐run study groups, which has led to some participants subsequently enrolling on formal courses. Some OU UK staff in our regional centres have used resources on OpenLearn in outreach and widening participation schemes such as with women from Asian communities in Yorkshire (Khokar, 2007). Much of this study is not necessarily online but takes place in blended learning situations or for increasing individuals’ confidence in web and information technology skills necessary to support online learning. In fact, this latter need for information and communication literacy is fundamental and may often be lacking in many so‐called digital natives.

A final point is that our surveys of registered users of OpenLearn indicate a large and often unfulfilled desire for learners to gain some form of recognition for their study and/or be able to convert or trade‐in their informal studies for more formal or readily recognised credits, certificates or qualifications given by organisations or their peer community. This is the lifelong learning agenda where individuals may operate a personalised portfolio approach to their post‐secondary education, picking up formal bits of education from different providers, mixing it with non‐formal learning experiences and expecting recognition of their achievements to come from trustworthy professional organisations; for example, universities, professional associations and/or peer review by a trustworthy community of people working/active in the same field as they are. In other words, open education potentially opens up not only who produces the ‘content’ and the ‘context’ in which the ‘content’ is learned, but also who validates that learning so that it has currency in the labour and/or interest markets.

We are now exploring the possibilities that new technologies open up for the recognition of achievements gained through individual, group‐based or long‐term participatory learners, but there is a lot more work to be done to create cost‐effective and credible systems and processes. A first step has been to use technology to track registered users’ activity within study units such that they can print out a statement of activity to show others – such as employers or professional bodies. Another step has been to enable the inclusion of study through OpenLearn within accredited courses dealing with the assessment of prior learning. Shortly we will embark on an experiment by having ‘paid for’ assessment associated with all the teaching materials from a short course. However, much more work will be required to enable more effective articulation and movement between informal and formal learning.

What has The Open University UK brought to the OER field?

OER from the OU UK differ from those provided by many of the other OER providers whose material was created on the assumption of face‐to‐face or at best blended use. The majority of OER developed so far have been of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OCW model (although more open universities like that in the Netherlands have also joined the movement). These are resources derived from and supporting a classroom‐based approach to teaching where there is a single teacher or tutor involved. This approach may benefit the following groups:

•	First, it can be of interest to other teachers/lecturers as it relates closely to what they have to do, providing lesson plans, reading lists, and so forth, from acknowledged leaders in their field.
•	Second, it is of interest to current students choosing their next course, prospective students who can more clearly see what they will be signing up for, and students from other institutions who can compare these resources with what their own institution provides. All these audiences like OCW.

However, OCW is not as readily accessible and understandable by those lacking confidence and formal qualifications. OCW is not designed explicitly for self‐study. OCW is a set of resources and often not pedagogically designed open learning materials. As such, individuals using OCW for independent learning need to have already developed good self‐study skills.

There is enormous potential if the open education movement also embraces aspects of open and distance learning as practised by the many open and distance teaching universities around the world (Lane, 2008c).

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First, the type of support models used in open and distance learning can enhance access to groups who would not previously have tried higher education or who have not coped with classroom based education.

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Second, good‐quality self‐study OER can be a replacement for ones developed by a teacher for their own use or be a supplement where educational resources are scarce. In both cases they can make a difference to the teacher because, in principle, quality assured and/or collectively developed resources should be much better than those the individual can develop on their own (the wisdom of the crowd). This will free the teacher from always having to be a developer of resources (teacher‐centred) to devoting more time to being a supporter of learning (learner‐centred). This may or may not lead to greater levels of achievement by the learners but a more significant measure will be teacher and student satisfaction levels with both the learning resources and the teacher support.

OER do not ensure that overall standards will be higher or that a greater proportion of students will achieve the highest grades but they can increase the absolute numbers of people participating and provide a greater range of ways for people to learn, giving them more control of when and how they learn and not having to fit in with selective, pre‐determined opportunities. So evaluation measures have to be varied and not just restricted to educational attainment.

What has The Open University UK gained from OER?

The OpenLearn initiative has, to some degree, touched upon almost all aspects of work and parts of the OU UK within its first two years. While it will take much longer to fully understand its impact, the project team has collected and analysed a wide range of quantitative and qualitative evidence of achievements and behaviours, including solicited and unsolicited personal testimonies, to capture some emerging lessons. The achievements and lessons have been grouped under 10 bullet points, but some lessons inevitably cross these boundaries due to the interdependencies of so many activities within the university. Some of the lessons also have more of an internal focus, others an external focus.

In brief, internally it has:

•	demonstrated that the university can successfully deliver a large‐scale cross‐institutional project in a relatively short time scale (useful in itself in understanding how we can cope with rapid and large scale changes in our own practices and in external events);
•	shown that it can implement the Web 2.0 philosophy of perpetual beta‐release changes often and release early (the functionality of the site is added to or changed every four months in response to user feedback and internal evaluation and designs);
•	significantly tested and enhanced its new e‐production and publication technologies and provided a robust platform for wider exposure and use of technologies devised by our Knowledge Media Institute (supporting both innovation and movement of innovations from proof of concept or use in one setting to another setting);
•	supported significant institutional R&D activities such as Learning Design for course development and helped win substantial new research grants;
•	enabled staff to undertake new and successful forms of information, advice and guidance, outreach and widening participation activities; and
•	enabled significant testing and evaluation of Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Marketing (e.g. linking content to the SkyLearning™ website – http://explorer.jointhebiggerpicture.com/courseshome.aspx – and placing audiovisual content on YouTube™ – http://www.youtube.com/openlearn), enhancing our external web presence and e‐visibility in mass market Web 2.0 sites.

While externally it has:

•	generated substantial international attention for the university amongst individuals and institutions, with 69% of the visitors from outside the United Kingdom;
•	placed the university at the forefront of open education and web‐based learning through gaining awards, positive media coverage, many institutional visits and approaches, book chapters and commissioned reports, refereed journal articles and conference papers, and active inclusion in related work instigated by major worldwide consortia;
•	enhanced relationships with major strategic partners in the United Kingdom (e.g. National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, Unionlearn, University of Third Age), stimulated existing or new partnerships with international organisations (e.g. Commonwealth of Learning) and organisations in other countries (e.g. UNISUL in Brazil), and contributed to our growing relationship in the worldwide Moodle community, the open source virtual learning environment that powers OpenLearn; and
•	brought students into the university – as of April 2008 at least 4400 people have registered on OU UK courses through OpenLearn, representing teaching income of nearly £2.7 million.

Beyond these broad statements there is a growing body of activity that demonstrates the value of OER to different users and which is changing the relationships that the OU UK has with individuals and organisations based upon the open principles enshrined in OER and open source software. To date there have been many thousands of forum postings, some of which highlight the value users are getting:

OpenLearn helped me to prepare myself and get used to the idea of studying with Open University. I have since enrolled at Open University as a result. I think OpenLearn is a fantastic resource and I look forward to watching its continued development and growth. Thank you.

I am currently in the Army on a 6 month tour in Iraq. It has been difficult for me to get computer access consistently but when I have been able to go on open learn I have enjoyed the opportunity. The purpose of my learning is mainly self development but also work related.

Equally, we know that there have been thousands of downloads of content and software from the site and that people are using and experimenting with these, using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to place a study unit in a blog, conducting self‐organised tutorials using the FM videoconferencing tool, uploading their own material to the LabSpace, or being given their own space there to translate or create their own resources.

The size and scale of some of these activities is small, albeit growing, but few of them would have been likely to happen without the additional openness that OER have provided. Now that OER have become an established feature of the OU UK and as the nature of their impact becomes clearer, the strategy for sustaining the development and use of OER within the organisation is being built on four strands (Lane, 2008d).

•	The first strand is to embed the development and use of OER within all our existing activities (and hence existing funding) wherever possible, rather than commit specialist funding to the activity as has so far been the case. In other words we are using OER to help our existing business model.
•	The second strand is to secure additional recurrent and project grant funding from a variety of sources to build upon this core work and to work with many partners around the world. A key feature of OER is about sharing in a gift economy and this requires greater, not less, bilateral and multi‐lateral collaboration tempered with an appreciation of the mutual benefits as well as the areas of competition.
•	The third strand is to investigate new business models and potential revenue streams arising from differentiated or disaggregated services that support learning and that can be provided to very large numbers of learners using digital technologies either through the OU UK or through strategic partnerships.
•	And the fourth strand is to explore the potential of combining the best in current technology developments (and in particular social networking) to a learning context to provide a flexible and innovative, technology‐enabled framework for learning consistent with what John Seely Brown and colleagues are calling the next generation of educational resources – or the Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure initiative (Atkins, Seely Brown, & Hammond, 2007).

All of these are attempts to respond to the view expressed by this user: ‘I believe OpenLearn is a brilliant concept. It challenges traditionally held views about education. OpenLearn IS the way teaching & learning need to be. Free. No boundaries. Web‐based, self‐paced, 365–24–7, collaborative’.

Conclusion

It is not only the OU UK’s mission to promote social justice in our unequal and uncertain world. It should be the goal of every university and each will make its contribution in different ways. The advent of the Internet and the contributions it has made possible – like the OER movement in particular – have made the world of knowledge a lot more democratic and open, and our collective mission to bring education to all who can benefit by it ever more possible and important. The few universities in the world that are contributing to the movement are to be commended but many more need to do so. We invite them to join our LabSpace. We also invite them to participate in our Moodle development so that the learning platforms are ever more exciting, interesting and relevant to students, wherever they may be. This is a marvellous time in the history of higher education – and we cannot think of a more worthwhile educational endeavour than the OER movement.