Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
Blurring Boundaries through Opening up Educational Practice: Exploring Open Educational Resources in Partnership
Pete Cannell: [email protected]
Ronald Macintyre: [email protected]
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
About OEPS
Opening Educational Practices in Scotland is a three-year cross-sector project that facilitates best practice in Scottish open education. We aim to enhance Scotland’s reputation and capacity for developing publicly available and licenced online materials, supported by high quality pedagogy and learning technology.
Distinctive focus on social justice and widening participation.
Project ends 31st July 2017.
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
Open Practice - OEP
• The early impetus of UK OER movement provided a necessary focus on enabling things to be more open through the development of platforms and standards.
• Its legacy has been a tendency to treat the issue of openness as a technical problem with technical solutions.
• OEPS has approached it as a complex adaptive problem, concerned with educational practice and what openness enables (Macintyre 2016a).
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
Use practices, pedagogy, partners
CC0 Public Domain https://pixabay.com/en/climate-cloud-communications-data-2099146/
Multi-stranded action research project – more than 60 partnersEach partner strand involved the typical action research cycle of planning, acting, observing and reflectingIdentifying good practice and share new understanding across the strands of the project
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
Tackling barriers
www.open.edu/openlearncreate/
Focus on practice and participation has meant addressing use and users.
Influenced by participatory design approaches, we view openness, not simply as a matter of releasing content “into the world”, but as a two way process (Macintyre 2016b).
With partners we have been able to reach and understand those distanced from education (Cannell and Macintyre 2017) and co-design appropriate content and practice .
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
Parkinson’s UK – case study
http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/course/view.php?id=2161
First course designed as an introduction for residential care staff with no previous HE experience
Two further courses in production – specialist material – professional development for health professionals – source materials for universities who wish to adopt or adapt
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
ConclusionsValue of partnership – crossing boundaries – blurring boundaries
Primacy of pedagogy – technology as a means of exchange
Expanding definitions of OEP to include use practice and social context
What open enables – building on tried and tested material – combining large scale with contextualisation
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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland
References•Cannell, P. (2016) Lifelong learning and partnerships: rethinking the boundaries of the university in the digital age, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 18, 1: 61-73•Cannell P. Macintyre R. (2017) Revisiting Barriers to Widening Participation, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 19, 1: in press•Lane, A., and Van Dorp, K. J. (2011) Open educational resources and widening participation in higher education: Innovations and lessons from open universities. In: EDULEARN11, the 3rd annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, 4th-5th of July 2011, Barcelona. http://oro.open.ac.uk/29201/•Macintyre, R. (2016a). Open Education as Disruption: Lessons for Open and Distance Learning from Open Educational Practice. In: EDEN 25: Re-imagining Learning Environments, 14th-17th of June, Budapest, http://oro.open.ac.uk/46658/•Macintyre, R. (2016b). Approaching Participatory Design in "Citizen Science". In: Design for Learning: 5th International Conference designing new learning ecologies, 18th -20th of May, Copenhagen, http://oro.open.ac.uk/46337/
Email:[email protected]
Social media:@OEPScotland
Courses on OpenLearn Createwww.open.edu/openlearncreate/
Blog and project progress:www.oepscotland.org
Email:[email protected]
Social media:@OEPScotland
Courses on OpenLearn Createwww.open.edu/openlearncreate/
Blog and project progress:www.oepscotland.org