Cross-institutional open educational practice: the opportunities and challenges of collaboration

1. Cross-institutional open educational practice: the opportunities and challenges of collaboration Dr Anne Wheeler, Higher Education Academy DrKeith Smyth, Edinburgh Napier University Open Education Week University of Sussex 2014

3. Context for Development • Recognising the need to collectively explore and critique the current state of HE and to rethink the values that inform the educational opportunities provided to our students • Direction being given around the importance of institutions working together to meet the needs of our learners, e.g. the Collaborate to Compete report of the HEFCE Online Learning Task Force (2011), and Review of Higher Education Governance in Scotland (2012) • Our shared view that that an online postgraduate module – to be used in teaching qualifications and other staff development - presents an ideal vehicle for engaging academics in thinking critically about HE as a sector, how it is likely to change, and how our institutions can remain relevant nationally and internationally • Seeing how ‘open’ and collaborative we can really be!

4. Progress to date • Part funded by the HEA/JISC OER Project • Developed as fully online collaborative module, featuring a range of digital artefacts (video interviews, podcasts, case studies, digitised texts) and activity descriptors that will support critical engagement • Action research approach has allowed development of the module to take place through a process of public and reflective inquiry • Project blog to document progress, challenges and lessons learned, including a series of ‘Global Stories’ where academics in the international community give their view on relevant global issues • GD in HE to be piloted as an open collaborative course during 2013/14 before being refined and made available as an OER course.

5. Mapping of GDinHE module content http://globaldimensionsinhe.wordpress.com/module-map/

6. Challenges of being ‘open’ • Addressing assumptions about the extent to which OERs and open education as concepts are understood within the international academic community that GD in HE is being developed for. The language of openness is not shared, but ‘culturally bounded’ • Avoiding ‘divisive practices’ in globalised education provision, including the ‘cultural imperialism’ that McBurnie and Ziguras (2009) warn against and within which the offering of programmes informed by other cultural norms may undermine important national beliefs and norms relating to education • Institutional educational technologies are usually built upon an information architecture, where students and course codes are ‘units of data’ within internal information transactions

7. Implementation challenges • Alignment and compatibility of institutional curricula models (including credit levels and teaching periods) • Joint approval of collaborative course provision • Enrolment and assessment of ‘open access’ versus institutional participants, and ensuring equal access to institutional owned technologies and licensed resources • Integration of open platforms of delivery with institutional technologies and administrative systems • Distribution of developmental/administrative costs • Restructuring institutional policy and regulations to accommodate collaborative online course design and delivery

8. Task and Discussion Task: Working in small groups, take ten minutes to discuss the challenge you have been allocated. Identify the barriers and possible solutions for your challenge, and annotate these on the hand-out. Be prepared to report back! • Challenge 1: Alignment and compatibility of institutional curricula models (including credit levels and teaching periods) • Challenge 2: Enrolment and assessment of ‘open access’ versus institutional participants, and ensuring equal access to institutional owned technologies and licensed resources • Challenge 3: Integration of open platforms of delivery with institutional technologies and administrative systems

9. What next? We’ve been developing the Global Dimensions in Higher Education module through a process of action-based inquiry. We’ll take the outcomes of today’s discussion, and summarise our collective thoughts from today on the project blog: http://globaldimensionsinhe.wordpress.com Look out for the summary by the close of Friday 14thMarch. And if you would like to get involved in the pilot of the module, as a participant or a facilitator, please get in touch with us.

10. Looking forward • Encouraged by the levels of interest from potential participants, institutions, and colleagues in the academic community who have contributed materials or offered input as facilitators • Optimistic about tackling the aforementioned implementation challenges, and finding (or at least identifying) potential solutions • Our view is that truly joined-up, truly collaborative development of credit-bearing cross-institutional online courses is currently limited by the constraints that institutional policies, practices and systems place on innovative partnership working, and at the very least we hope our experience will help futher articulate these constraints • However, we are now asking ourselves ‘Who takes overall ownership of institutional open educational initiatives – the institution, or the enthusiasts within?’

11. Thank you Global Dimensions in Higher Education http://globaldimensionsinhe.wordpress.com Twitter @gdinhe Keith Smyth @smythkrs PanosVlachopoulos @PanosMQ David Walker @drdjwalker Anne Wheeler @annewheel