Open Scotland: Policies and strategies for opening up education in ScotlandLorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker, Joe Wilson, Sheila MacNeill

Overview

• Introduction to Cetis

• UK OER Programme

• Open education initiatives in Scotland

• Open Scotland aims and objectives

What is Cetis?

• Centre for Education Technology, Interoperability

and Standards http://www.cetis.ac.uk/

• A national UK technology advisory centre

providing strategic, technical and pedagogical

advice on educational technology and standards

to funding bodies, standards agencies,

government, institutions and commercial

partners.

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About Cetis

Partnership between:

• University of Bolton,

England.

• Heriot Watt

University, Scotland.

• Three staff located in

Scotland.

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Cetis and Jisc

• Cetis have a long association with Jisc, http:/jisc.ac.uk

• Formerly an F/HE quango, now a charity.

• Funded Cetis as a project 2001 – 2005 & an Innovation

Support Centre 2006 – 2013.

• Provided Jisc with strategic technical input and guidance.

• Represented the Jisc community on international standards

bodies.

• Supported the Jisc development programmes.

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UKOER Programme

• Funded by HEFCE between 2009 – 2012.

• Managed by Jisc and HEA and supported by Cetis.

• Invested over £15 million.

• Funded over 80 individual projects.

• Aimed at releasing OERs and embedding sustainable open practice

in institutions.

• All resource tagged #ukoer

and deposited in Jorum

national repository

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

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Scottish Open Education Developments

• 3E Framework

• GCU Library OER Guidelines

• MOOCs

• Re:Source OER Repository

• Curriculum for Excellence

• Open Badges

• Learner Journey Project

• Smarter Scotland Strategic Objective

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Napier 3E Framework

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Glasgow Caledonian University Library OER Guidelines

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MOOCs

• University of Edinburgh have successfully run 6

courses on Coursera attracting over 300,000

students.

• Three Scottish HE institutions involved in

FutureLearn.

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Re:Source

• A Resource sharing platform for the college sector in Scotland.

• Powered by Jorum.

• Aims to provide “…access to a rich collection of OER content from Scotland’s Colleges & related collections of interest to the FE Sector.”

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Curriculum for Excellence

• New curriculum introduced in 2010 which aims to

“ensure that all children and young people in Scotland

develop the attributes, knowledge and skills they will need

to flourish in life, learning and work.”

• Curriculum for Excellence based on developing 4 capacities,

helping children to become:

• Successful learners

• Confident individuals

• Responsible citizens

• Effective contributors

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Mozilla Open Badges

• Open Badges in Scottish Education Group supported by Jisc

RSC Scotland. http://www.rsc-scotland.org/?page_id=3068

• SQA formally announced it’s intention to work with Mozilla

Foundation and OBSEG to:

“investigate the opportunities presented by an innovative

approach to displaying individuals’ learning

accomplishments online.”

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Learner Journey Project

• Scottish Government led project aiming to:

“empower learners to make better decisions by making it easier

for them to see what they have achieved so far, what learning

opportunities are available to them and how they can get to

where they want to be in the future.”

• Commissioned Learning Journey Data Jam.

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A Smarter Scotland

“A smarter Scotland is critical to delivering the

Government’s Purpose of achieving sustainable

economic growth. By making Scotland smarter, we will

lay the foundations for the future wellbeing and

achievement of our children and young people,

increase skill levels across the population and better

channel the outputs of our universities and colleges

into sustainable wealth creation, especially

participation, productivity and economic growth.”

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Open Scotland Summit

• Brought together senior

managers, policy makers

and key thinkers to explore

the development of open

education policy and

practice in Scotland.

• National Museum of

Scotland, Edinburgh, June

2013.

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Open Scotland Summit

• Organised by Cetis, in collaboration with SQA, Jisc RSC Scotland and the ALT Scotland SIG

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Open Scotland Participants

• Scottish Government

• Scottish Qualifications Authority

• Education Scotland

• Scottish Funding Council

• Quality Assurance Agency

• College Development Network

• National Library of Scotland

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• Universities of Edinburgh, Dundee, Heriot Watt, UHI, Glasgow Caledonian.

• Jisc• Jorum• Jisc RSC Scotland• Jisc RSC Cymru• OSS Watch• Nordic Open

Education Alliance• Creative Commons• POERUP Project

Lightning Talks and Case Studies

• Lightning talks on

• Open data

• Open Source in education

• MOOCs

• UKOER

• Case studies from

• Scandinavia

• Wales

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Open Scotland Keynote

“Open Education: The

Business and Policy Case for

OER”

by Dr Cable Green,

Creative Commons, Director

of Global Learning.

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Open Scotland Keynote

“At the heart of the movement towards Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse it.”

- Cathy Casserly & Mike Smith, Creative Commons & Hewlett Foundation

“the opposite of open is not closed, the opposite of open is broken.”

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How can openness help to address strategic priorities and challenges?

• Publishing - current models for publishing research and educational content are outdated. New open models are needed. This requires changes in attitude and practice.

• Licence Restrictions – tendency to release OER under restrictive licences limiting ability to re-use & remix. Develop open policy & practice to support openness & overcome “closed minds”. But need investment to make resources open.

• Joining Up Open Practice – pockets of good practice across Scotland that need joining up, e.g. public libraries.

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How can openness help to address strategic priorities and challenges?

• Quality Assurance – lack of quality assurance still a concern. Need to move from “not invented here” to “proudly borrowed from there”.

• Learners as Co-creators – how can we engage learners?

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• “The Big Ticket” – how can opennes address government strategic agendas: post-16 education, knowledge transfer, curriculum change, school – college – university articulation.

How can openness help to address strategic priorities and challenges?

• Change Management – sector is undergoing

period of massive change, unsettling for staff, but

change also presents opportunity for radical new

developments.

• Curriculum for Excellence– changing the way

children think and learn. Can open resources help

prepare colleges and universities for this change?

• FE Funding Cuts– massive cuts in FE sector.

More students and fewer staff. How can colleges

make better use of?EADTU Conference, Paris, October 2013.

An Open Declaration for Scotland?• Took Paris OER Declaration as a

starting point.

• Declaration a “good thing” but too limited in scope.

• Scottish declaration should focus on open education more widely.

• Contextualisation required. Need to provide evidence of declaration’s statements in action.

© UNESCO

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Open Scotland Actions

• Action 1 – Establish working group, similar to the Nordic countries, to stimulate open education research and inform future Government white papers.

• Action 2 – Learn from nations that are further ahead of Scotland in promoting the open agenda. Work with the other devolved nations in the UK.

• Action 3 – Use the working group to focus on key Government priorities and agendas, e.g. learner journeys, articulation, work based learning, knowledge transfer. 

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Open Scotland Deliverables

• Key Deliverable 1 - Position paper providing evidence of the benefits of openness with examples of how these can impact on Government priorities.

• Key Deliverable 2 - A Scottish Open Learning Declaration.

• Key Deliverable 3 - Government policy on open education. This will require stakeholder groups to state how they will engage with and contribute to the implementation of the policy.  

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Progress

• Less progress since June than hoped.

• No funded remit to devote resource to Open Scotland.

• Key staff unavailable.

• Loss of momentum.

But…

• Open Scotland blog launched http://openscot.wordpress.com

• Encouraging developments e.g. SQA Open badges announcement.

• Continued interest in open education.

• Willingness to engage.

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Licence

Open Scotland: Policies and strategies for opening up education in Scotland

by Lorna M Campbell, lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com of Cetis http://www.cetis.ac.uk is licensed under the

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/