This paper discusses accessibility issues in the context of the HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) programme, launched in April 2009 as collaboration between the Higher Education Academy and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) with funding provided by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). UK-based Higher Education Institutions have received support to explore issues such as processes and policies, intellectual property rights, cultural issues, technical requirements and data management. The paper will explore the challenge of creating and repurposing accessible open educational teaching materials and focus on the ways in which this challenge is being addressed within the UK OER programme.

The paper will address accessibility issues which are specific to Open Educational Resources. On the one hand, OERs are embedded within the ethos of open education and open access, which emphasise the need to widen access and remove educational barriers, including any barriers related to accessibility. At the same time, the main difficulty with regard to producing accessible OERs is that the creator of the resource has to design the material without knowing the context of the users of the resource or without being able to control of the environment in which the resource is downloaded, re-used or re-purposed. Overall, we know little about factors which might motivate OER creators and re-users to embed accessibility within their teaching materials for developing accessible OERs. The paper will address those issues by examining approaches to accessibility taken by project holders in the context of UK OER programme. The prevailing attitude was that of viewing accessibility as an afterthought and a labour-intensive element of the OER workflow, with only a small number of projects focusing on a more holistic approach embedded within the framework of reasonable adjustments and best practices.

Background

Healthcare students train extensively in practice, however significant technological and cultural barriers to sharing resources exist. The NHS eLearning Repository (NeLR) hosts healthcare elearning materials, whilst Jorum is the UK national repository for further and higher education. The Pathways to Open Resource Sharing through Convergence in Healthcare Education (PORSCHE) project encouraged an infrastructure for sharing across NHS and HE domains and aimed for seamless access to resources for staff and students. The Accredited Clinical Teaching Online Resources (ACTOR) project represented a consortium of 5 partner UK HEIs, delivering postgraduate programmes in clinical education, supporting the academic development of clinicians and others involved in teaching students of human and animal healthcare.

Approach

PORSCHE attempted to resolve technical issues: NHS staff could not upload resources to Jorum, while academic staff could neither download nor upload to NeLR, preventing effective discovery and sharing.

ACTOR concentrated on building an informed community able to share content relevant to clinical education programmes licensed with Creative Commons. Using the MEDEV good practice risk assessment toolkit, resources were mapped against institutional policies and procedures in consent, IPR, copyright and quality assurance, and guidance was offered for improvement in local policies and procedures. Actively engaging in developing and disseminating resources and strategies to the wider clinical education development community, through workshops and online events, the projects aimed to facilitate easy sharing of resources in practice contexts. The ACTOR community was used to test the outcomes of the PORSCHE project and together they actively disseminated good practice in sharing across clinical and academic settings.

Conclusion

The success of the projects will be determined by:

The ability to showcase the same OER in eLearning healthcare education from both clinical and academic contexts.

The establishment of the basis for a long term partnership between NHS and academia demonstrated by sharing of appropriately licensed content

Widespread uptake of MEDEV good practice risk assessment and NHS eLearning Readiness toolkits via an effective and sustainable community of practice

Raised awareness over consent issues in using clinical recordings in teaching

Acknowledgement of the value of sharing in enhancing student experiences in clinical placements.

The Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) was established at The Open University in 2009 funded by HEFCE and has as its aim to bring about significant change in attitudes and practice with respect to Open Educational Resources (OER) in the UK. Key to achieving this are the SCORE Fellows, around twenty in number and selected through a competitive process from universities and colleges across England, the Fellows spend six months to a year working on projects that use OER to bring about change in their place of work. The Fellowship Programme, that will be the focus of the paper, brings together perspectives from a range of institutions and highlight the ways in which OER is being used to reach beyond traditional HE.

In this short paper session the authors will look beyond the individual projects and will present an analysis of what the Fellowship Programme as a whole has achieved – the assumptions challenged, the insights gained, the new models introduced, the boundaries straddled and the theories put to the test.

OER has shown itself to be an extraordinary tool for change. One of the most interesting findings from the work of the Fellows has been the ability of OER to redefine the boundaries of the academy. One Fellow has been using OER to move from educating teachers of English as a foreign language working in formal settings to upskilling informal volunteers who are helping their friends to learn. Another is using OER to enable knowledge to be captured from a shrinking set of government-employed specialists and taken up by “Big Society” volunteers. Both of these were groups well beyond the reach of HE previously.

It is counter-intuitive but the experience of SCORE Fellows has been that, at a time of critical belt-tightening for HE, giving stuff away for free that helps people learn makes better sense than ever before.

The session will conclude by identifying some of the issues that are preventing OER from having a bigger impact and suggest ways they might be addressed.

Information on the SCORE Fellowship Programme can be viewed at www.OpenEd.ac.uk/current_fellows.

Despite well-publicised reports of its demise, evidence emerging from the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery Programme projects across further and higher education suggests that the VLE (or adaptations of it) are very much at the forefront of curriculum innovation. Rather than being sidelined by 21st century technologies, does the VLE in fact play a key role in curriculum development? In short, is it time to rethink the role of the institutional VLE?

Based on published outcomes from a range of very different projects in FE colleges and universities (JISC 2010), the symposium will encourage delegates to ‘think differently’ about the institutional VLE, covering topics such as:

• Is the VLE simply one system among many for supporting and managing learning or should the VLE be positioned at the very heart of curriculum development?
• Can the VLE be made flexible enough to support individual needs? Do we need to look for alternatives in some contexts?
• Can the VLE be a tool for innovation? Is its current use limited by our perceptions of what a VLE can do?

Representatives of project teams that have focused on rethinking or reconfiguring their VLE will represent a wide spectrum of views. Arguments that the VLE is at the heart of institutional practice will be opposed by alternative approaches to supporting and managing student learning. In the process of presenting their case and answering questions from the floor, a panel of four representatives will outline attempts to develop the VLE in their own institution or department to achieve particular ends – for example, reducing costs and time spent on administrative tasks, improving the experience of remote learners, overcoming challenges of increased student numbers and poor engagement, and opening up new ways of delivering the curriculum. The session will be chaired to enable audience members to bring forward their own views on the future of the VLE.

Delegates will take away a short publication on outcomes from the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology Programme and will have the opportunity to engage with VLE-based innovations that may be applicable to their own context.