Wayne Mackintosh

Hi Joyce,

You're right - -we do need a marketing workgroup to assist in getting the word out, and the timing is about right and we will set time aside for the marketing side of things at the meeting. Good suggestion for the agenda. 

In the higher education sector I think that it is prudent to wait until we have something of substance to market -- rather than soft launches promising something which might (or might not) happen in the future. 

We will have a spanking new OERu website listing the courses we have on offer as well as those which will be scheduled for completion in the near future. I have distributed the call for new courses that will be listed on the launch site to all our partners. Each course listed on the website will offer pathways to university credit at a minimum of one of our partner institutes. OERu parnters will also be profiled on the launch website. This website will help with our marketing. 

I'll be contacting our OERu partners within the next few days for the text they would like to have on their respective partner pages for the launch website including the option for promotional videos. 

We're getting better at our marketing -- now that we have something real to "market". 

Hi Hadyn,

All excellent points. Funny how innovation generates BIG questions.

I think the OERu model of an independant non-profit entity focusing on the successful implementation of the OERu enables our partner institutions to move forward with open education in ways which would not be easy to achieve working as single institutions. The network model results in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Collective value of the network far exceeds the contribution from individual partners.

I like your suggestion that we should summarise the values of the OERu and its characteristic features at the beginning of the meeting. As you point out, not all our partners have been able to contribute to these discussions and it will be important to start the meeting from the "same page" and bring our new partners up to speed with how the OERu network functions. 

Mika has also highlighted the sustainability question. Fortunately as an open organisation, the OER Foundation can share our budgets and numbers transparently. The OER Foundation has done some modelling to illustrate the sustainability of the network and network value for our individual partners. We can discuss these at the meeting.  We'll also focus discussions on ideas to recruit at least 10 new members and this is where our exisiting partners can help through their own networks. 

The central (and open) coordination which the OER Foundation provides helps to move our project forward. During this "entreprenuerial" set-up phase -- it would be benefical to have a management / leadership team steering identified, but clearly defined bits of the puzzle. Perhaps we could use a rotation model so that these tasks are not overly onnerus on any individual. This could accellerate our implementation as we are building the model.

A key feature of our partnership is that the implementation of the OERu is an official project of the UNESCO-COL OER Chair network. Another advantage which the OER Foundation brings to the table.

We've come a long way since the idea of the OERu was floated in February 2011. Now to lay the foundations for exponential growth in 2014 and beyond!

Mika wrote:

How do we increase awareness of OERu and position it amongst all the other alternatives out there?

That's a good question and I agree that we should allocate time to this discussion at our meetings.

I think an important feature of the OERu network is that we are a collaboration of "like-minded" institutions with our strength coming from our geographical diversity. I think flying below the radar of the media hype of the commercial MOOC startups has been good for us. Through incremental design we're able to take small steps ensuring what we do is implementable within existing policies and practices at our member institutions. This will contribute significantly to our sustainability and future scalability.

Hi Mika,

Thanks for that. Yes the assessment and credit processes are a big issue for our network and we will allocate quality time for the partners to discuss these issues at the meeting. We also have the COL TQF meeting where our PLAR experts can delve deeper into the course articulation and credit transfer issues.

For the launch of the OERu we will be adopting a two phase approach:

• Phase 1: Each OERu course must offer credit at the OERu partner who contributed the course (plus any credit transfer pre-arranged by individual articulation agreement or existing policies at the respective receiving partner.)
• Phase 2: Maximising the protocols for course articulation in the network

I like your suggestion for a working group to draft the criteria. One approach we could consider is for the partners to provide the generic guidelines / issues to be resolved during discussions at the 2nd meeting of partners for the working group to take forward and prepare the first draft criteria for consideration by the network. The scenarios published by COL in the Report on the Assessment and Accreditation of Learners using OER provides a useful structure to frame the discussion. 

We will also allocate time to discussion the fiscal sustainability and scalability of the OERu model. 

In this closing session of our open OERu planning session we will summarise our discussions to inform the agenda of the 2nd meeting of anchor partners and identify research gaps to inform our development using an educational design research (EDR) framework. (See 7 things you should know about educational design research)

What is EDR?

EDR addresses education problems in the real-world. It has two aims: to develop knowledge and to develop solutions.

EDR, not unlike action based research or incremental software development approaches, uses repeated cycles of:

• Analysis where educators, researchers and students talk to one another about the root causes of practical problems (for example, our discussions during this ScoPE seminar);

• Design where multidisciplinary teams review theoretical knowledge and generate designs for prototyping solutions to real-world problems;

• Evaluation for revising both design and ideas on which the solution is based.

What is the OERu knowledge base?

The OERu is slowly building its knowledge base through a number of research activities and outputs, for example:

• McGreal, R. Mackintosh, W. & Taylor, J. (2011) OER University: Towards a logic model and plan for action

• Murphy, A (2012) OERu context evaluation study.

• Murphy, A. (2012) Benchmarking open educational practices in higher education. In ASCILITE 2012: 29th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education: Future Challenges, Sustainable Futures, 25-28 Nov 2012, Wellington, New Zealand.

• Witthaus, G.(2012). The OER university: from vision to reality. In: Okada, A. (2012). Open Educational Resources and Social Networks: Co-Learning and Professional Development. London: Scholio Educational Research & Publishing.

• Conrad D., Mackintosh, W., McGreal, R., Murphy, A., & Witthaus, G. (2013). Report on the Assessment and Accreditation of Learners using OER. Commonwealth of Learning.

Questions for this session

Drawing on our evolving knowledge and open SCoPE discussions:

1. What are the real-world problems the 2nd meeting of OERu anchors should prioritise for our agenda?

2. What design solutions do you propose for addressing these problems.

Look forward to reading your advice on how we can build more affordable education futures for all students worldwide.