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Open Educational Resources (OERs) - use, useability, creation Recording
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Open Educational Resources (OERs) - use, useability, creation Recording
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Upload Date:
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Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Melissa Stoner.
I am the Native American studies librarian at the Ethnic Studies Library at University University of California, Berkeley. And I am today I'll be your moderator for the session. Open educational resources. We are there use usability and creation. And I'm going to be joined today by 3 awesome speakers. The first one is going to be Jesse ransom. Jesse is a lead product manager for the junto, the teaching and learning solution from lupus, part of clarivate.
She works with academic libraries globally, but primarily in North America, to understand how libraries support teaching and learning within their institutions, including the challenges they face and their goals for the future. She joined zobrist in 2015. After 13 years spent working in libraries in various roles, she has an Ms. from the University of Washington and now lives in Denver, Colorado.
Our next speaker is going to be Cynthia Holt. Cynthia is the executive director for the Council of Atlantic academic libraries, also known as Cow. Cynthia has worked in and with academic libraries for 29 years. At Cal she has resembled she is Responsive Web Design. I'm sorry. She is responsible for running all aspects of the consortium, including operations, government, governance, e resource licensing, member education and training, and key to this presentation leading the regional service Atlantic.
Cynthia is focused on advancing adoption in the Atlantic region and most critically, advocating for regional, sustainable, long term funding for Atlantic. She is currently a member of the CRL working group and our third speaker is going to be Emily Gillingham. And Emily Gillingham is the head of communications for impact at Oxfam gb, the team tasked with sharing knowledge and learning to support the movement of people working to end the injustice of poverty.
Previously, Emily was the director of library relations at John Wiley and sons, and I'm going to give the floor to Jessie. Great let me just share my screen here. All right. So thank you so much for that introduction. I'm going to start the presentation today with a quick overview of OR.
Including kind of where we are today, some of the benefits of Omar and also some of the challenges associated with who we are. And before I start, I want to say that I learned about Omar, not as a student, not as a librarian, not as an educator. I learned about it just because I wanted to because I wanted to better understand what people were doing to help support courses and course materials.
So my knowledge comes from following what different people or schools or organizations are doing and also from the conversations that I've had with librarians over the past several years. So I'll be presenting an overview to help set the stage. And then Emily and Cynthia will present on their more personal experiences working with Omar. I'll also give the disclaimer that my knowledge is really focused on we are in higher Ed.
Of course, it's also used in other settings K through 12 education, workforce development, social justice organizations such as which you'll hear about in a little bit. But I have up to now really been focused on are in higher Ed. And I think it's important to start by clarifying how I define open educational resources. This is not my definition, but I find that when I talk to people about we are sometimes people use OCR and learning affordability somewhat interchangeably or they use a we are in open access interchangeably.
So I, I wanted to start with a definition. I picked the first one, which is from 2002. It says open educational resources are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no cost access, reuse, repurpose adaptation and redistribution by others. I think that this definition is a good one because it really encompasses what I think of as all of the main ideas of ocr, that they are all different types of materials, not just textbooks, but all different types of materials in any format.
And what really matters here is the license that they're licensed in such a way that you can do all of these different things with them. And in terms of what those different things are, I really like the David Wiley five rs. I think that this lays it out in a way that is easy to understand. Then maybe the Creative Commons licenses themselves, but you have the right to retain the materials, to own it, to own your copy and Control that copy, to reuse the materials in lots of different ways, whatever way you need to use them to revise them.
If you need to change them, change the content, change the language. You have permission to do that, to remix them, or to combine them with other content, to create something that is new and also to redistribute them. So once you've done all of this or if you're just taking someone else, you have the right to share that information. So these are, I think, a good way to understand what is meant by the licensing of these resources.
There are a lot of resources that are free to use, for example, but are not actually what we are. And so these five hours can be a good way to distinguish where we are from other resources. Again, really coming down to the licensing question there. I'm going to talk a little bit about the benefits. There are a lot of potential benefits to are a lot of reasons to get excited about what we are.
I like this quote here. The most important reason for harnessing all we are is that openly licensed educational materials have tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education. And I think that's really the thing about OCR that is so intriguing and so exciting is that the potential is gigantic for what could be done with OCR.
To me, there's something that feels morally right about ocr, and I think that this quote captures that for me. So it's about making high quality educational materials available to anybody, accessible to anybody. It's about relying on the power of collaboration, the power of openness in sharing to create these resources, to improve these resources over time. It's really a philosophical shift, and with that shift comes a lot of great potential benefits, but also, of course, a lot of challenges.
So we'll look at the benefits first. And the first benefit, I'll say, especially in higher Ed, is learning affordability to me. You absolutely cannot talk about OCR without talking about learning affordability. I do recognize that this is a very maybe us or North American specific perception, but for many schools, for many faculty, obviously for many students, this is really the biggest motivator to use OCR.
And I'll say this is the piece that really speaks to me as well. I read a study at one point a few years ago that said that 43% of students have skipped a meal to pay for their course materials. And I think when you hear those types of statistics, you can see it's really just not OK. So this is definitely a well-known challenge, learning, affordability.
It's something that is very prominent in the media, prominent in higher Ed and the student experience. So learning affordability is really the most impactful benefit that OCR provides and the impact really is quite high. So just a couple of examples that I dug up in 2020. Suny or the State University system of New York reported that they had saved about $15 million in textbook costs for students with their open, open courses using we are.
A couple of years ago, OpenStax announced that they had saved an estimated $1.2 billion in textbook costs. So we're talking about rather significant numbers here. And every single OCR textbook that is written, when you stretch the numbers across the number of students who can use it, the number of years that it can be used, the number of institutions that could use it, it again, that has a really great potential to save students money.
I have just a couple of other facts on the slide, but I won't go through them here. I will say this. I think it's important to recognize that we are is not the only way to provide students with affordable course content. I'm a librarian. I work with libraries. I am quite partial to also promoting library resources.
And the other thing that is really important about talking about learning affordability is that, oh, we are itself isn't free, which is something that I'll talk about a little bit later. It's free to students, but it's definitely not free to create. The other benefits that I have here, I have listed actually as potential benefits. I think that the learning affordability is kind of a known benefit.
We know that we are is cheaper than buying a textbook and we know that there are benefits for students in having free and simple access to their course materials on day one. But the rest of these I really see as potential benefits. Potentially, instructors can pull bits and pieces from different resources to better support the course that they want to teach. They can add or remove content as they need.
They can combine these resources. They can keep the materials up to date. The materials can potentially represent more diverse voices. And the list here, these are definitely real benefits. I don't want to come across as too cynical here. There are many, many really amazing stories about people using VR and getting really great value from those resources with the ability to include more diverse voices, for example.
But these are not guaranteed benefits or we are is not inherently more diverse. It's not inherently a better, better aligned to the structure of the course. These are really potential benefits, benefits that are possible with VR. And that leads me to talking a little bit more about the challenges of Oh we are, which you may already be well aware of, or you may be starting to guess that based on some of the other things that I've said, I pulled what I say is a partial list here, but I think these are some of the more important ones or the more prominent ones.
I'll say there is often a significant time commitment to create a VRF to update or we are even just to adopt it. If you are switching from a standard textbook, achieving the dream as an organization that's focused on supporting community colleges and student success and community colleges, I have a link on the slide here, but they had an r degree initiative that was a three year project. It involved 38 community colleges.
And the reason that I'm telling you all of this is because they reported that the estimated cost to create an OER degree pathway was between 300,000 and $1,000,000. So this is a lot of money. They looked at this across institutions. The good news is that there is definitely money available. There's grants, there's federal funding there, state funding. But we are itself is not free.
And I think that this number here is a good way to put that in context. Once you've created something, you need to make sure that it's going to be easily reused because that's where that initial investment becomes worthwhile. And I can't remember the numbers, but, you know, the cost per students, I think initially was about $70 per student.
And then as time goes on and as the resources get used, of course that cost per student goes down. So that brings me to the next challenge, which is discoverability. And there's really a lot of challenges associated with the discoverability of the resources. One big one is that there's really not one single repository where you can just check and find everything that's available.
I look at a lot of websites that are about getting started with we are, and it's not uncommon to see between 5 and 30 different repositories that faculty could potentially search. Not only do you need to look in a lot of different places, but the search experience is different across those different places. The metadata that's available, maybe the different facets that are available.
This is inconsistent across different platforms. And there also isn't generally a way to see different versions or different changes from a resource. You may have this resource but not know if it's been if anyone's updated it. And maybe that updated version is actually saved somewhere else. The quality of the resources can be inconsistent.
The advantage, as I said, is that you can fix them. But the challenge here is that you may have to fix them. There are definitely very excellent quality resources out there. Absolutely but there are also resources that are just not as good. And how do if something is high quality or not without investing a lot of your time in looking into that? And in the end, the resources that you want may not actually be available in this really depends on the subject that you teach or the type of resource that you're looking for.
A lot of the largest OCR projects that have been funded over the past 15 years, especially earlier projects, really targeted high cost, high impact courses. Again, with that focus on saving students money because of this, there's a lot of we are available for general education courses such as psychology, biology, calculus. This is also, in some ways, a stereotype. This is definitely changing.
There's more and more resources available all the time, additional content available all the time, supplementary content available all the time. This is getting better, but it is also still a challenge depending on what it is that you're looking for. Licensing can also be a difficult question here. Thinking about things like the images that are in the text that are in it, what is the license mean?
If you're actually publishing your own intellectual property? Do you understand what you're doing with your intellectual property when you publish it under a Creative Commons licensing? What about if you're republishing work that someone else has claimed is open and free to use, but might actually include copyrighted materials? So there's definitely some questions there. And then finally, accessibility.
I think this can also be an opportunity. So it's an opportunity and a challenge. Actually, probably a lot of these things are. But I put it here because I personally see it as a bigger challenge. We are opens up a lot of potential for things like different formats, more accessible resources. But again, the resources have to be intentionally designed with accessibility in mind.
And faculty may not be well versed in that. There are other challenges that I don't have listed here, but again, I see these as the ones that I hear about over and over again as people are talking about working with or we are. These are all big challenges. They're definitely not unsolvable challenges, though, and I think that this is potentially interesting for us to talk about as a group.
How do or how could some of these problems be solved? I pulled out actually a quick summary of this. There's kind of a next in terms of next steps or where to go from here. In 2019, there was an OCR recommendation that came out of Masco about what could be done to ensure the success of where we are. This beautiful image is in the report, but I'm sure you can't read any of it.
So I will summarize the main points here. Capacity building. The capacity for educational stakeholders to create, access, reuse, repurpose, adapt, apply, open licenses and so on. Supportive policies in both government and education. I think of this as also including tenure policies effective, inclusive and equitable access. This is about relevant technology to ensure that we are shared in open formats, open standards to maximize access and also searchability.
They talk about searchability here, nurturing the creation of sustainability models and also international cooperation to reduce unnecessary duplication in the development of resources and also to develop a global pool of resources that are culturally diverse, locally relevant, gender sensitive, accessible in multiple languages and formats. And I'm pulling that language directly from them. So again, not a small task, but also an interesting jumping off point for discussion.
So I did pull out a couple of potential topics that I think are a good area to discuss the standardization of the metadata as a big open area here. There are metadata standards for OCR. There's metadata standards for learning objects, but there's not necessarily one standard. They're not consistently applied across resources, across platforms.
And as I said, one of the biggest challenges is that there are many different places where the content can live. Some organizations have pulled content from different repositories, but then you lose out on the more detailed metadata that might be available in one repository versus another. Versioning I talked about this a little bit before, but how to do this also in a way that's not cumbersome for the creator to the point where it's harder to actually use OCR because you have to add all this stuff to it.
Quality, again, is something that I talked about. Should there be a standard approach to evaluating the quality, to storing the information about somebody's quality? Somebody is determination of the quality. And then I have a question here that was sort of just it kind of poking at this. But does more standardization help or does it also detract from what I call here the spirit of ocr?
Like I said in the beginning, one of the amazing things is that we are not bogged down by complex processes or bureaucratic processes. You can create the resources need and you can share them. So what does it mean to try to standardize something like that? And then the other set of questions here or topics is more about sustainability and sustainability.
I see two main things here advocacy. This is an advocacy for funding and also for policies and policies. Again, I talked very briefly about tenure, but there's only a few institutions that are actually considering OCR and tenure decisions. So this is a problem in terms of the sustainability and kind of interest in adopting OCR or creating OCR. And then finally the need to coordinate across a global community.
Our duplicative efforts, actually. Good are they bad? It's not bad to have multiple viewpoints. So how to balance the limited resources with the diversity of viewpoints and also plenty more to discuss that I haven't pulled out here, but these are just things that I'm sort of always thinking about when I'm thinking about what we are and we will have time to discuss.
But before we get there, Cynthia and Emily will share some more specific examples of how they've used OER in practice and those experiences. Thank you for that, Jesse. All right. I'm going to pass the mic over to Cynthia. One my name is Cynthia Holt, and I'm the executive director of the Council of Atlantic academic libraries.
Or call, as it's otherwise known, which is a consortium of 20 publicly funded universities and community colleges in the Atlantic Canada region. First, I'd like to acknowledge that call CBPP represents member libraries across the region, all of whom sit on the unceded and traditional territories of first peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador. Our libraries sit on the homelands of the Inuit of nunavut, Silva, and took the innu of Natasha and the Baltic and the magma peoples in Prince Edward Island in Nova Scotia.
We find our friends and colleagues situated on the territory of the magma and a New Brunswick libraries are found on the land of the wolves, stoic, the magma and passamaquoddy peoples we call CVP to wish to express our sincere gratitude for the first peoples who share their ancestral homelands with us all. So today I'm going to talk I'm going to build on Jesse's presentation earlier that with a great introduction to what we are.
But today I'm going to focus on discussing Atlantic air, which is a regional service, a service that was created by Karl and its members in collaboration with many partners in the region. And that's one of the things you're going to hear throughout my presentation today, that theme of collaboration and partnering as just like with children, it takes a village to build, maintain and evolve in our service, particularly one at a regional scale.
So before I start, I need to set the context for the wider Atlantic over circumstance and where it sits within the ecosystem. So first, our council has 15 universities and five community colleges as members, and they are spread across four provinces, which for those in the US are equivalent to states. The thing with those four provinces are they represent four political parties or different political parties in power with very different budget priorities, which may or may not feature higher education.
So the difference here in Canada to some other places is that education is a provincial jurisdiction and that includes funding. So we need to work with all four provincial governments when it comes to advancing within the region. And this may be different from other countries, but that's the situation here in Canada and specifically in this region. Another complication that we or a challenge that we work with here at call is that we have 17 English speaking member institutions and three French speaking institutions, as Canada is officially and officially bilingual country.
So we do need to ensure that there is bilingualism built into the service we are building. And lastly, the important point to remember is that Atlantic air is fully funded and as is the Council of Atlantic academic libraries, it's fully funded by membership fees. We have no other income sources. So now that context is set, let me move on and talk about our service.
So what is Atlantic, though? We are. So it is an air service here in the Atlantic region, and it has multiple components as part of it. I'm going to just talk about some of those components that are the I guess would say would be the main points that we really need to discuss. First off, the service is built around the press books, digital publishing platform, which other air services, a lot of other services use.
Now the limitation with press books is that it can really only host text based materials. So textbooks, ancillary materials, things like that. You can link to other formats, but you can't actually host it on the platform. So that does create a limitation on what we can provide in terms of hosting for owners in the region. Now we also I did want to point out that press books, we don't limit it just to faculty members as creators.
We actually open it up to anybody at one of our member institutions, which includes students. So Atlantic, we are not only hosts materials like textbooks but from faculty members, but we also host honors projects with students and things of that, of that nature. So we try to not limit the use of Atlantic OER because education can come in many forms and student created learning materials are just as valuable as those created by faculty members.
Now, one of the things that we do do, because, as Jesse mentioned in her presentation, creation of oers is not necessarily free. So we do provide development grants to our creators, particularly our faculty members, in the creation of materials specific to preparing courses. Now the nice thing about the development grants are we aren't limited on format, so we can provide funding to those creating oers in other formats than text.
So that's something we've done over the past two years and we're in the currently in the process of doing a third year. So that's important in order to actually advance OER in the region because not only do you have to know about it, but you need to be able to our creators need to be able to afford to create those materials because there are a lot of moving pieces in an are that and there's lots of criteria that you need to ensure our included in that requires a lot of person power.
So let's move on to some of those components in our atlantico er service. One of if you're, if you're familiar with any service, there's always a policy and procedural framework and service standards that need to be built into that service. And that's a Foundation that ensures that there's that a certain, it's conveys a professional image and then it also conveys legitimacy and trust to creators and consumers.
So we have that was one of the first things we did in building the service is to ensure that we have. Policy and procedural framework in place and for Atlantic Oh we are that framework is embodied in two different documents. We have an internal service manual which is used by the staff and then also by our facilitators are at our member institutions and we are facilitators are basically usually in libraries, a person who's been designated as a support person at that institution for creators in that institution.
So they use that manual as well. And then we also, for our creators have a pre publication checklist that they need to complete before they can publish their works and that that is shared with them at the beginning of this process when they first create their accounts in a standard welcome message. And this policy and procedural framework, in both of those particular documents provide consistency to the service, the product images, the processes and product quality, which is significantly important when it comes to oers.
It also provides transparency in our processes, particularly around the grants program, because it's important to ensure that everybody is aware of the criteria and how their applications are being assessed and how they're being chosen in the end. So transparency is important and then also risk mitigation. This isn't something that a lot of people think about, but risk mitigation is critical to an OER service, particularly around things like copyright infringement.
So that's one of those things that we make sure we include very specifically on our publication checklist to ensure that the proper copyright is being observed by any of the content in the materials that will be published. Now, three of the things that you also need to ensure are in an our service is a sustainability plan. We can't just put up a book.
And let it sit there forever and ever. We need to ensure that the content creators are making a commitment to the preservation of that content and long term access, but also evolving that content over time as it's needed. So with those created with grants, we require a sustainability plan in the grant requirements, the checklist. But for non grants we do include it in the checklist as something to ensure that they have, but we can't really enforce it as they have having a fully fledged sustainability plan.
We strongly encourage it. But and that's what the facilitators will work with the creators on. But it's more of a strong suggestion, just like it is with research data management, if you're familiar with that. The other thing is to ensure that those materials that get created, there's a lot of money put into them and we need to make sure that people are actually going to use them.
And to do that, we need to ensure that there's a sufficient and quality metadata around those publications and a lot of that is building built into the platform. But there's lots of different options for adding metadata to materials when they're published. The last thing is credibility. And legitimacy is another is another way of thinking of it. ESPN'S are very well known standard for commercial textbooks.
It's a identifier and that to many people equates to quality that things have been vetted, there's a stamp of approval put on it, and that we use ESPN'S every book that gets published, we add an ISBN to it or we generate an ISBN for it. For those who may be wondering, we did explore dois, but unfortunately with dois it's very labor intensive process. And as a lean organization, we just could not could not support that.
So we grant ESPN'S but we do not do I do this now when you're starting in a way our service one of the biggest things you need to do. And one of the things we discovered through a survey is there was very little awareness among our stakeholder communities of what we are was and what its benefits were except among the students, because they were very focused on it from a text, an affordability or an education affordability standpoint.
So we did do a lot of initial education and awareness. And to do that, we partnered with student government leaders because that was a natural partnership, because they were already strong supporters. We are. So it was a great alignment with them and they had access to things that we did not have access to, to stakeholder communities, to different groups within their institutions.
And so we made sure to partner with them. And what we actually did, we had a campaign where we would partner the student government leader at the institution with our supporters at the institution, like the facilitators and the faculty members, any champions of that sort, because they would deliver presentations to various groups on campus, whether they be administrators, the Center for Teaching and learning, all sorts of groups to spread that awareness around and the benefit of what we are, which Jesse has already summed up very nicely in her presentation.
So that was important, but it wasn't just at the beginning. People change, people move around, things change. You need to continue that process of education and awareness. It's not a one and one and go type thing is an ongoing process. So we continue to do that in partnership with our student government leaders and also our supporters.
Now, if you had, as I told you before, Atlantic, what we are is strictly totally funded by coal and that's not sustainable. So in order to ensure that we have the data around when we do our advocacy. So we've been very focused on that advocacy for sustainable funding, and we need to demonstrate value in that process. If you're asking for funding, they'll want to know what's in it for us.
How will this impact our clientele? And so to do that, you need to make sure that you're collecting data and success metrics. And we do that on a weekly basis. We update our data. We these are examples of some of the data that we do collect. But there are other pieces that you're not seeing there that we collect as well. And I just want to state that over collecting is not a bad thing.
You never know what you might, how you might need to pause your data. And so collect more than you think you need because you may need to parse it in a different way than you thought at the very beginning. You can always you can always just ignore the data if you don't need to use it. But if it's not there at the beginning, then there's can be some issues, but you can always add as you go along as well.
So just to give you an example of that. And then lastly, I wanted to focus on advocacy for sustainable funding. As you as I mentioned several times, we don't have sustainable funding for Atlantic air. And we're getting to a point where that's become it's starting to become a bit of a crisis. So what we've been doing in terms of advocating for sustainable funding is once more partnering with primarily our student government leaders who already have those existing provincial government and media contacts because they regularly advocate with those groups.
So we don't have that internal expertise. So we are partnering with them for that expertise. And they also are strong supporters and they are a voice that those targets listen to. They regularly submit pre budget submissions and in the last few years, they've all included oers in those. So it's a great to have a voice coming from a different direction than just us.
We also continue those education and awareness opportunities. The other thing is you can't just focus on the student stakeholder because there are other stakeholder groups like faculty members, senior administrators that are member institutions. And so we've also partnered with several organizations in the region that are specifically focused on those different stakeholder groups and conveying the message around Atlantic we are and the need for sustainable funding and particularly the benefits to their institutions in terms of student success and things of that nature to really sell.
The idea that we are is something they wish they should invest in and that they should add their voice to when advocating with the provincial governments. And as I said, we have those four different provinces with different potential political parties, budget priorities, reporting structures. We not only have to work within those frameworks, but we also have to demonstrate to each of those four groups, those four provinces, the return on investment or the value of their investment into Atlantic OER.
So that's an ongoing process. It's been evolving. It's starting to bear fruit. And we are cautiously optimistic. And so that is some place where we're putting a majority of our effort around Atlantic. The last thing I want to note, just from a national standpoint, so we are doing provincially and regionally, but there is a place for national advocacy.
We are I'm actually involved with Carl, which is a group that's been coordinating national strategy framework for an advocacy program around oers, particularly infrastructure, bilingualism and indigenous materials and truth that support truth and reconciliation. So that is something that's happening on a national level. And we're hoping that that will also coming from both sides, from the federal side down to the provincial and the provincial coming up from us to the province will have the effect that we are hoping for in that we will get sustainable funding in this region for supporting this valuable resource and service.
So that's where we stand now and we're going to continue to engage with our partners to move things forward. But in the meantime, I'm happy to discuss this further later in. The session and I will pass the session over to our next speaker. Thank you. Awesome thank you, Cynthia.
All right, Emily, take it away. Hello my name is Emily Gillingham and I am the head of communications for impact at Oxfam Great Britain. And I'm going to tell you about an ER project that we've done aimed at practitioners and activists around the world and the various challenges we had and it could make change happen and we also refer to it as a massive open online course and.
In case you don't know so much about oxfam, I hope you're familiar with it. But we work with others to address the causes and consequences of poverty. So there are three main strands of oxfam's work. One is around humanitarian action and supporting people in conflict and in crises often caused by climate change. The other is we work on long term development programs with communities to support communities and different partners to increase their economic self-reliance.
And then the third area is around campaigns and advocacy to address the causes of the different inequalities that cause poverty. And so I've shared with you here a piece from the Oxfam strategic framework, just to give you a sense of where the project I'm going to tell you about set in terms of our global strategy, and that is to support others to address the causes of inequalities.
So that was the primary driver behind the project. And then the other driver was that we share a lot of our knowledge, our learning, our materials as published PDFS. So I'm sharing here policy and practice website, which has 5,000 resources for people that work in the sector and researchers and so on, including our influencing impact guide, which is a useful sort of PDF based guide.
And we also run face to face trainings which as you can imagine, are hard to scale and expensive to run. And we were looking for something that was sort of in between these different ways of exchanging knowledge. And so that was the driver behind this project. And so what we wanted to do is find a mean means to connect and inspire changemakers and activists where they are and the projects that they're working on to provide a platform for sharing knowledge and skills, hope and experience, and for those people to share theirs as well.
So it's not just coming from us. And to build a network of active citizens who understand how change happens. And how to work in a feminist way for change. And as it said in our strategic framework, to lend our support to social change movements. So as well as those sort of goals for the project, we were also looking for something that was scalable, that was accessible for learners to do and free at the point of use and also affordable for us to put together and develop and to run.
And so we set out to find some partners in this project. And talk to a number of organizations. But we're very happy to work with open university, which are a UK distance learning based University with a long track record. And they had a partnership with future learn, which is the platform that we've partnered with. And I'll also say a little bit about open, learn and create, which is the open source platform, which will be moving to as well.
And so what is the first things that we did in kind of trying to work out? What we wanted from this resource was to have various workshops with Open University. You're not expected to read these flip charts, but one of the first things we did was to think about what we would like people to come away from the course saying and what would they tweet about the course.
So that was a really useful methodology really to help iframe our thinking and to capture all the various ideas that needed to go into a course that is around influencing change and put them into a useful structure. And another first thing that we did in the air the early days was to identify the target audiences. And like a lot of organizations, there are a lot of them. And what we did was sort of hone it down to three target personas.
And we built the course for these three people thinking they would represent the bulk of our target audience. So there are practitioners there not based in University settings, even the student that we identified has graduated. So a Nigerian youth activist working on community change actions. Somebody who's motivated really by climate action.
Zainab fair in our profiles and also an Ngo worker who's working on community food Protection Program in Indonesia and sort of wants to enhance their skills and how to do advocacy and influencing. And so in those early days, we were thinking about the learning objectives and there were a lot of the main focus was about sharing those foundational skills, about understanding power and systems and how change happens.
But we were also looking for people to feel they were part of something and to connect with others and also to come away motivated to work on change actions, whether that's on gender justice or climate justice, anti-racism, whatever, the piece of work that they're motivated to, that sort of addresses those causes and the consequences of poverty. And so this project was managed by me out of oxfam, great Britain, and we had funding from an innovation pot, part of our unrestricted funding.
We had a core content team who with expertise in different areas like monitoring and evaluation, gender governance and citizenship and campaigning, of course. And then but there was also a reference group of 40 people from all kinds of areas of work and all levels in the organization and across the world where I they sense checked the framing of the course, they input ideas, contributed case studies so that it had that full involvement.
As I said, Open University were our partners and we were started work on the course in 2017, launched it in 2018 and we're just working now on a refresh and relaunch this year. And so there are a number of considerations and challenges and many of the challenges that Jesse has already shared, I really recognize and they're ours as well. But there are also some others that I've pulled out here. So one of them was thinking about power in the project.
And where power lies, which is part of some feminist practice that we try to practice at Oxfam. So it was managed in the UK with UK funding and of course those with time and funds to do this leverage power over the content and the project direction. So we were conscious of that and part of the effort of getting the reference group from around the world was to offset that and to put power back to the people doing the work whose knowledge, decolonizing knowledge is also a core tenant.
So we wanted to ensure that the activists are really driving change, driving that feminist practice and challenging systems of oppression was front and central to the content, despite it being sort of led in the UK. So that was the conscious effort. There was the diversity of different types of activism to include what do you include? What do you not include?
Making sure there's a range of different people's identities. The geographic range, of course, and also the thematic range. So people are motivated to drive change in different aspects of work. So whether it's local climate activism or on gender based violence or whatever it is. So we wanted to have that range of activities. There were a number of risks that I was concerned with to begin with.
So on safeguarding the participants in the course, particularly around activism and change, is a risky business. So we needed to ensure that people were not sorry for not going out and putting themselves at risk. So that's a core part of the course. I was also worried within the discussion forums in the course where there would be harassment. It didn't actually come to pass and also to ensure that the change making that people were working on was aligned with oxfam's vision for change.
There were issues around stance around language, which has been mentioned already for a lot of people in the course, English is a second, third or more language, so it needed to really be accessible to people. And of course everybody's got a different learning style. So some like written works and like to do tests, some like video or sound or imagery. So we've just tried to include that range, hoping that some parts appeal to different people.
There were also challenges around accessibility. It's intended for people who are working in quite different, difficult environments, sometimes have access to technology, internet, having the time to do an eight week course, it has its limitations. So just being conscious of that and doing what we can. There were issues around how we promote it, giving them range of audiences and moderation, maintenance funding, which has been mentioned already.
But we did go ahead and we launched the course in 2018. Originally on the future platform, please go and sign up and take a look. It will next open in May when we relaunch it. There are eight weeks of content, so it includes a case studies from many interesting campaigns, really fascinating work, but it also has space for people to share their own. So actually the energy that comes from the discussion forums, from people who are working on different things, sharing their thoughts and ideas, is actually a really positive part of the course.
And we also interview have interviews with 10 different activists working in all kinds of different areas as part of the course to hear from people themselves and try and get some motivation and energy from them. I mentioned those three target personas and actually the data from the course has shown that those sort of three different types of people are the people that we've reached.
So we've reached a geographic spread than the both people who work professionally in change making, if you like, non-government organizations, but also people who do it are on the side, if you like, as part of their sort of personal passion in their communities, as part of movements and groups. And we've had 16,000 people register their interest.
10,000 people started the course. They may not have got very far in. It was a long course, but I actually we frontloaded the content so that even if you just do week one, you come away with something useful. So I don't see I see that as still some success. But 1,000 people did complete the eight weeks of the course, which I think is pretty good going. And about a third of users and learners in the course were social learners.
So they participated in some part for the online discussions. You can see from the pie chart there that. Almost half of users were from Europe, actually a third of those were from the UK. And I think that's partly because FutureLearn has such and Open University and probably Oxfam have strong UK brand identity.
So it was strong in the UK, but we were also heartened that there were a lot of users, particularly from India, Nigeria, Kenya, some countries where English is a strong language. I mentioned the learning objectives. Just what you need to know from this graph is that the orange columns were what we asked people at the before they started. The course is how confident they were in taking a change action on understanding how change happens.
And the blue columns is after the course. So it's higher, quite a bit higher for a number of things. So we were really heartened by that, pleased that there was that difference. We got a lot of feedback throughout the course at the beginning, middle and each step of the way, but really positive feedback at the end from those people that did complete it, feeling more confident and able to go forth in their change actions.
And what was interesting that I actually contacted people where they had agreed to it, where they'd provided their details a few months after the course ended to ask how they were getting on, what they were working on. And what I found was that that actually the confidence levels did seem to remain that people were feeling confident to contribute to petitions. Some had participated in marches or protests, some had just connected with others working on the same thing or signed up for campaigns, and so on.
So that was that. That was a good outcome as well. I mentioned that we're refreshing it this year, so we're replacing the case studies, interviewing new changemakers, and we've also worked at adding some new pieces into the course as thinking has sort of progressed. So ensuring that there's a conflict sensitive lens throughout the content.
So recognizing that change making usually does lead to conflict or might unearth conflict that's already there. Even if you're not working, you know, even if you're just working on local community action, not in a conflict zone, if you like, but just giving people the tools to navigate those challenges. And also narratives has been incorporated into the course as well.
And so we're relaunch it in May on future learning, and we're also going to replicate it over to the open source platform, open, learn, create where we can then deliver it in different languages. So with the social elements to remove without the discussion forums, it's a lot easier for us to manage the different languages. So we hope to have those later in the summer.
And we also then could add new modules and just have a think about what we are actually provides for our desires to kind of strengthen movements and see what the feedback is, see what people would like Oxfam to be providing, what kind of resources would help, particularly those smaller charities, smaller NGOs that don't have some of the resources that are available to us.
So I would encourage you to connect with oxfam, if you can. Oxfam America. I've provided that URL there, but there are many Oxfam around the world. So do please connect policy and practice. If you work in a library, please do take a look because there are all those written documents and of course, sign up for make change happen if you can. Many Thanks indeed.
But by.
Segment:0 .
Melissa Stoner.
I am the Native American studies librarian at the Ethnic Studies Library at University University of California, Berkeley. And I am today I'll be your moderator for the session. Open educational resources. We are there use usability and creation. And I'm going to be joined today by 3 awesome speakers. The first one is going to be Jesse ransom. Jesse is a lead product manager for the junto, the teaching and learning solution from lupus, part of clarivate.
She works with academic libraries globally, but primarily in North America, to understand how libraries support teaching and learning within their institutions, including the challenges they face and their goals for the future. She joined zobrist in 2015. After 13 years spent working in libraries in various roles, she has an Ms. from the University of Washington and now lives in Denver, Colorado.
Our next speaker is going to be Cynthia Holt. Cynthia is the executive director for the Council of Atlantic academic libraries, also known as Cow. Cynthia has worked in and with academic libraries for 29 years. At Cal she has resembled she is Responsive Web Design. I'm sorry. She is responsible for running all aspects of the consortium, including operations, government, governance, e resource licensing, member education and training, and key to this presentation leading the regional service Atlantic.
Cynthia is focused on advancing adoption in the Atlantic region and most critically, advocating for regional, sustainable, long term funding for Atlantic. She is currently a member of the CRL working group and our third speaker is going to be Emily Gillingham. And Emily Gillingham is the head of communications for impact at Oxfam gb, the team tasked with sharing knowledge and learning to support the movement of people working to end the injustice of poverty.
Previously, Emily was the director of library relations at John Wiley and sons, and I'm going to give the floor to Jessie. Great let me just share my screen here. All right. So thank you so much for that introduction. I'm going to start the presentation today with a quick overview of OR.
Including kind of where we are today, some of the benefits of Omar and also some of the challenges associated with who we are. And before I start, I want to say that I learned about Omar, not as a student, not as a librarian, not as an educator. I learned about it just because I wanted to because I wanted to better understand what people were doing to help support courses and course materials.
So my knowledge comes from following what different people or schools or organizations are doing and also from the conversations that I've had with librarians over the past several years. So I'll be presenting an overview to help set the stage. And then Emily and Cynthia will present on their more personal experiences working with Omar. I'll also give the disclaimer that my knowledge is really focused on we are in higher Ed.
Of course, it's also used in other settings K through 12 education, workforce development, social justice organizations such as which you'll hear about in a little bit. But I have up to now really been focused on are in higher Ed. And I think it's important to start by clarifying how I define open educational resources. This is not my definition, but I find that when I talk to people about we are sometimes people use OCR and learning affordability somewhat interchangeably or they use a we are in open access interchangeably.
So I, I wanted to start with a definition. I picked the first one, which is from 2002. It says open educational resources are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no cost access, reuse, repurpose adaptation and redistribution by others. I think that this definition is a good one because it really encompasses what I think of as all of the main ideas of ocr, that they are all different types of materials, not just textbooks, but all different types of materials in any format.
And what really matters here is the license that they're licensed in such a way that you can do all of these different things with them. And in terms of what those different things are, I really like the David Wiley five rs. I think that this lays it out in a way that is easy to understand. Then maybe the Creative Commons licenses themselves, but you have the right to retain the materials, to own it, to own your copy and Control that copy, to reuse the materials in lots of different ways, whatever way you need to use them to revise them.
If you need to change them, change the content, change the language. You have permission to do that, to remix them, or to combine them with other content, to create something that is new and also to redistribute them. So once you've done all of this or if you're just taking someone else, you have the right to share that information. So these are, I think, a good way to understand what is meant by the licensing of these resources.
There are a lot of resources that are free to use, for example, but are not actually what we are. And so these five hours can be a good way to distinguish where we are from other resources. Again, really coming down to the licensing question there. I'm going to talk a little bit about the benefits. There are a lot of potential benefits to are a lot of reasons to get excited about what we are.
I like this quote here. The most important reason for harnessing all we are is that openly licensed educational materials have tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education. And I think that's really the thing about OCR that is so intriguing and so exciting is that the potential is gigantic for what could be done with OCR.
To me, there's something that feels morally right about ocr, and I think that this quote captures that for me. So it's about making high quality educational materials available to anybody, accessible to anybody. It's about relying on the power of collaboration, the power of openness in sharing to create these resources, to improve these resources over time. It's really a philosophical shift, and with that shift comes a lot of great potential benefits, but also, of course, a lot of challenges.
So we'll look at the benefits first. And the first benefit, I'll say, especially in higher Ed, is learning affordability to me. You absolutely cannot talk about OCR without talking about learning affordability. I do recognize that this is a very maybe us or North American specific perception, but for many schools, for many faculty, obviously for many students, this is really the biggest motivator to use OCR.
And I'll say this is the piece that really speaks to me as well. I read a study at one point a few years ago that said that 43% of students have skipped a meal to pay for their course materials. And I think when you hear those types of statistics, you can see it's really just not OK. So this is definitely a well-known challenge, learning, affordability.
It's something that is very prominent in the media, prominent in higher Ed and the student experience. So learning affordability is really the most impactful benefit that OCR provides and the impact really is quite high. So just a couple of examples that I dug up in 2020. Suny or the State University system of New York reported that they had saved about $15 million in textbook costs for students with their open, open courses using we are.
A couple of years ago, OpenStax announced that they had saved an estimated $1.2 billion in textbook costs. So we're talking about rather significant numbers here. And every single OCR textbook that is written, when you stretch the numbers across the number of students who can use it, the number of years that it can be used, the number of institutions that could use it, it again, that has a really great potential to save students money.
I have just a couple of other facts on the slide, but I won't go through them here. I will say this. I think it's important to recognize that we are is not the only way to provide students with affordable course content. I'm a librarian. I work with libraries. I am quite partial to also promoting library resources.
And the other thing that is really important about talking about learning affordability is that, oh, we are itself isn't free, which is something that I'll talk about a little bit later. It's free to students, but it's definitely not free to create. The other benefits that I have here, I have listed actually as potential benefits. I think that the learning affordability is kind of a known benefit.
We know that we are is cheaper than buying a textbook and we know that there are benefits for students in having free and simple access to their course materials on day one. But the rest of these I really see as potential benefits. Potentially, instructors can pull bits and pieces from different resources to better support the course that they want to teach. They can add or remove content as they need.
They can combine these resources. They can keep the materials up to date. The materials can potentially represent more diverse voices. And the list here, these are definitely real benefits. I don't want to come across as too cynical here. There are many, many really amazing stories about people using VR and getting really great value from those resources with the ability to include more diverse voices, for example.
But these are not guaranteed benefits or we are is not inherently more diverse. It's not inherently a better, better aligned to the structure of the course. These are really potential benefits, benefits that are possible with VR. And that leads me to talking a little bit more about the challenges of Oh we are, which you may already be well aware of, or you may be starting to guess that based on some of the other things that I've said, I pulled what I say is a partial list here, but I think these are some of the more important ones or the more prominent ones.
I'll say there is often a significant time commitment to create a VRF to update or we are even just to adopt it. If you are switching from a standard textbook, achieving the dream as an organization that's focused on supporting community colleges and student success and community colleges, I have a link on the slide here, but they had an r degree initiative that was a three year project. It involved 38 community colleges.
And the reason that I'm telling you all of this is because they reported that the estimated cost to create an OER degree pathway was between 300,000 and $1,000,000. So this is a lot of money. They looked at this across institutions. The good news is that there is definitely money available. There's grants, there's federal funding there, state funding. But we are itself is not free.
And I think that this number here is a good way to put that in context. Once you've created something, you need to make sure that it's going to be easily reused because that's where that initial investment becomes worthwhile. And I can't remember the numbers, but, you know, the cost per students, I think initially was about $70 per student.
And then as time goes on and as the resources get used, of course that cost per student goes down. So that brings me to the next challenge, which is discoverability. And there's really a lot of challenges associated with the discoverability of the resources. One big one is that there's really not one single repository where you can just check and find everything that's available.
I look at a lot of websites that are about getting started with we are, and it's not uncommon to see between 5 and 30 different repositories that faculty could potentially search. Not only do you need to look in a lot of different places, but the search experience is different across those different places. The metadata that's available, maybe the different facets that are available.
This is inconsistent across different platforms. And there also isn't generally a way to see different versions or different changes from a resource. You may have this resource but not know if it's been if anyone's updated it. And maybe that updated version is actually saved somewhere else. The quality of the resources can be inconsistent.
The advantage, as I said, is that you can fix them. But the challenge here is that you may have to fix them. There are definitely very excellent quality resources out there. Absolutely but there are also resources that are just not as good. And how do if something is high quality or not without investing a lot of your time in looking into that? And in the end, the resources that you want may not actually be available in this really depends on the subject that you teach or the type of resource that you're looking for.
A lot of the largest OCR projects that have been funded over the past 15 years, especially earlier projects, really targeted high cost, high impact courses. Again, with that focus on saving students money because of this, there's a lot of we are available for general education courses such as psychology, biology, calculus. This is also, in some ways, a stereotype. This is definitely changing.
There's more and more resources available all the time, additional content available all the time, supplementary content available all the time. This is getting better, but it is also still a challenge depending on what it is that you're looking for. Licensing can also be a difficult question here. Thinking about things like the images that are in the text that are in it, what is the license mean?
If you're actually publishing your own intellectual property? Do you understand what you're doing with your intellectual property when you publish it under a Creative Commons licensing? What about if you're republishing work that someone else has claimed is open and free to use, but might actually include copyrighted materials? So there's definitely some questions there. And then finally, accessibility.
I think this can also be an opportunity. So it's an opportunity and a challenge. Actually, probably a lot of these things are. But I put it here because I personally see it as a bigger challenge. We are opens up a lot of potential for things like different formats, more accessible resources. But again, the resources have to be intentionally designed with accessibility in mind.
And faculty may not be well versed in that. There are other challenges that I don't have listed here, but again, I see these as the ones that I hear about over and over again as people are talking about working with or we are. These are all big challenges. They're definitely not unsolvable challenges, though, and I think that this is potentially interesting for us to talk about as a group.
How do or how could some of these problems be solved? I pulled out actually a quick summary of this. There's kind of a next in terms of next steps or where to go from here. In 2019, there was an OCR recommendation that came out of Masco about what could be done to ensure the success of where we are. This beautiful image is in the report, but I'm sure you can't read any of it.
So I will summarize the main points here. Capacity building. The capacity for educational stakeholders to create, access, reuse, repurpose, adapt, apply, open licenses and so on. Supportive policies in both government and education. I think of this as also including tenure policies effective, inclusive and equitable access. This is about relevant technology to ensure that we are shared in open formats, open standards to maximize access and also searchability.
They talk about searchability here, nurturing the creation of sustainability models and also international cooperation to reduce unnecessary duplication in the development of resources and also to develop a global pool of resources that are culturally diverse, locally relevant, gender sensitive, accessible in multiple languages and formats. And I'm pulling that language directly from them. So again, not a small task, but also an interesting jumping off point for discussion.
So I did pull out a couple of potential topics that I think are a good area to discuss the standardization of the metadata as a big open area here. There are metadata standards for OCR. There's metadata standards for learning objects, but there's not necessarily one standard. They're not consistently applied across resources, across platforms.
And as I said, one of the biggest challenges is that there are many different places where the content can live. Some organizations have pulled content from different repositories, but then you lose out on the more detailed metadata that might be available in one repository versus another. Versioning I talked about this a little bit before, but how to do this also in a way that's not cumbersome for the creator to the point where it's harder to actually use OCR because you have to add all this stuff to it.
Quality, again, is something that I talked about. Should there be a standard approach to evaluating the quality, to storing the information about somebody's quality? Somebody is determination of the quality. And then I have a question here that was sort of just it kind of poking at this. But does more standardization help or does it also detract from what I call here the spirit of ocr?
Like I said in the beginning, one of the amazing things is that we are not bogged down by complex processes or bureaucratic processes. You can create the resources need and you can share them. So what does it mean to try to standardize something like that? And then the other set of questions here or topics is more about sustainability and sustainability.
I see two main things here advocacy. This is an advocacy for funding and also for policies and policies. Again, I talked very briefly about tenure, but there's only a few institutions that are actually considering OCR and tenure decisions. So this is a problem in terms of the sustainability and kind of interest in adopting OCR or creating OCR. And then finally the need to coordinate across a global community.
Our duplicative efforts, actually. Good are they bad? It's not bad to have multiple viewpoints. So how to balance the limited resources with the diversity of viewpoints and also plenty more to discuss that I haven't pulled out here, but these are just things that I'm sort of always thinking about when I'm thinking about what we are and we will have time to discuss.
But before we get there, Cynthia and Emily will share some more specific examples of how they've used OER in practice and those experiences. Thank you for that, Jesse. All right. I'm going to pass the mic over to Cynthia. One my name is Cynthia Holt, and I'm the executive director of the Council of Atlantic academic libraries.
Or call, as it's otherwise known, which is a consortium of 20 publicly funded universities and community colleges in the Atlantic Canada region. First, I'd like to acknowledge that call CBPP represents member libraries across the region, all of whom sit on the unceded and traditional territories of first peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador. Our libraries sit on the homelands of the Inuit of nunavut, Silva, and took the innu of Natasha and the Baltic and the magma peoples in Prince Edward Island in Nova Scotia.
We find our friends and colleagues situated on the territory of the magma and a New Brunswick libraries are found on the land of the wolves, stoic, the magma and passamaquoddy peoples we call CVP to wish to express our sincere gratitude for the first peoples who share their ancestral homelands with us all. So today I'm going to talk I'm going to build on Jesse's presentation earlier that with a great introduction to what we are.
But today I'm going to focus on discussing Atlantic air, which is a regional service, a service that was created by Karl and its members in collaboration with many partners in the region. And that's one of the things you're going to hear throughout my presentation today, that theme of collaboration and partnering as just like with children, it takes a village to build, maintain and evolve in our service, particularly one at a regional scale.
So before I start, I need to set the context for the wider Atlantic over circumstance and where it sits within the ecosystem. So first, our council has 15 universities and five community colleges as members, and they are spread across four provinces, which for those in the US are equivalent to states. The thing with those four provinces are they represent four political parties or different political parties in power with very different budget priorities, which may or may not feature higher education.
So the difference here in Canada to some other places is that education is a provincial jurisdiction and that includes funding. So we need to work with all four provincial governments when it comes to advancing within the region. And this may be different from other countries, but that's the situation here in Canada and specifically in this region. Another complication that we or a challenge that we work with here at call is that we have 17 English speaking member institutions and three French speaking institutions, as Canada is officially and officially bilingual country.
So we do need to ensure that there is bilingualism built into the service we are building. And lastly, the important point to remember is that Atlantic air is fully funded and as is the Council of Atlantic academic libraries, it's fully funded by membership fees. We have no other income sources. So now that context is set, let me move on and talk about our service.
So what is Atlantic, though? We are. So it is an air service here in the Atlantic region, and it has multiple components as part of it. I'm going to just talk about some of those components that are the I guess would say would be the main points that we really need to discuss. First off, the service is built around the press books, digital publishing platform, which other air services, a lot of other services use.
Now the limitation with press books is that it can really only host text based materials. So textbooks, ancillary materials, things like that. You can link to other formats, but you can't actually host it on the platform. So that does create a limitation on what we can provide in terms of hosting for owners in the region. Now we also I did want to point out that press books, we don't limit it just to faculty members as creators.
We actually open it up to anybody at one of our member institutions, which includes students. So Atlantic, we are not only hosts materials like textbooks but from faculty members, but we also host honors projects with students and things of that, of that nature. So we try to not limit the use of Atlantic OER because education can come in many forms and student created learning materials are just as valuable as those created by faculty members.
Now, one of the things that we do do, because, as Jesse mentioned in her presentation, creation of oers is not necessarily free. So we do provide development grants to our creators, particularly our faculty members, in the creation of materials specific to preparing courses. Now the nice thing about the development grants are we aren't limited on format, so we can provide funding to those creating oers in other formats than text.
So that's something we've done over the past two years and we're in the currently in the process of doing a third year. So that's important in order to actually advance OER in the region because not only do you have to know about it, but you need to be able to our creators need to be able to afford to create those materials because there are a lot of moving pieces in an are that and there's lots of criteria that you need to ensure our included in that requires a lot of person power.
So let's move on to some of those components in our atlantico er service. One of if you're, if you're familiar with any service, there's always a policy and procedural framework and service standards that need to be built into that service. And that's a Foundation that ensures that there's that a certain, it's conveys a professional image and then it also conveys legitimacy and trust to creators and consumers.
So we have that was one of the first things we did in building the service is to ensure that we have. Policy and procedural framework in place and for Atlantic Oh we are that framework is embodied in two different documents. We have an internal service manual which is used by the staff and then also by our facilitators are at our member institutions and we are facilitators are basically usually in libraries, a person who's been designated as a support person at that institution for creators in that institution.
So they use that manual as well. And then we also, for our creators have a pre publication checklist that they need to complete before they can publish their works and that that is shared with them at the beginning of this process when they first create their accounts in a standard welcome message. And this policy and procedural framework, in both of those particular documents provide consistency to the service, the product images, the processes and product quality, which is significantly important when it comes to oers.
It also provides transparency in our processes, particularly around the grants program, because it's important to ensure that everybody is aware of the criteria and how their applications are being assessed and how they're being chosen in the end. So transparency is important and then also risk mitigation. This isn't something that a lot of people think about, but risk mitigation is critical to an OER service, particularly around things like copyright infringement.
So that's one of those things that we make sure we include very specifically on our publication checklist to ensure that the proper copyright is being observed by any of the content in the materials that will be published. Now, three of the things that you also need to ensure are in an our service is a sustainability plan. We can't just put up a book.
And let it sit there forever and ever. We need to ensure that the content creators are making a commitment to the preservation of that content and long term access, but also evolving that content over time as it's needed. So with those created with grants, we require a sustainability plan in the grant requirements, the checklist. But for non grants we do include it in the checklist as something to ensure that they have, but we can't really enforce it as they have having a fully fledged sustainability plan.
We strongly encourage it. But and that's what the facilitators will work with the creators on. But it's more of a strong suggestion, just like it is with research data management, if you're familiar with that. The other thing is to ensure that those materials that get created, there's a lot of money put into them and we need to make sure that people are actually going to use them.
And to do that, we need to ensure that there's a sufficient and quality metadata around those publications and a lot of that is building built into the platform. But there's lots of different options for adding metadata to materials when they're published. The last thing is credibility. And legitimacy is another is another way of thinking of it. ESPN'S are very well known standard for commercial textbooks.
It's a identifier and that to many people equates to quality that things have been vetted, there's a stamp of approval put on it, and that we use ESPN'S every book that gets published, we add an ISBN to it or we generate an ISBN for it. For those who may be wondering, we did explore dois, but unfortunately with dois it's very labor intensive process. And as a lean organization, we just could not could not support that.
So we grant ESPN'S but we do not do I do this now when you're starting in a way our service one of the biggest things you need to do. And one of the things we discovered through a survey is there was very little awareness among our stakeholder communities of what we are was and what its benefits were except among the students, because they were very focused on it from a text, an affordability or an education affordability standpoint.
So we did do a lot of initial education and awareness. And to do that, we partnered with student government leaders because that was a natural partnership, because they were already strong supporters. We are. So it was a great alignment with them and they had access to things that we did not have access to, to stakeholder communities, to different groups within their institutions.
And so we made sure to partner with them. And what we actually did, we had a campaign where we would partner the student government leader at the institution with our supporters at the institution, like the facilitators and the faculty members, any champions of that sort, because they would deliver presentations to various groups on campus, whether they be administrators, the Center for Teaching and learning, all sorts of groups to spread that awareness around and the benefit of what we are, which Jesse has already summed up very nicely in her presentation.
So that was important, but it wasn't just at the beginning. People change, people move around, things change. You need to continue that process of education and awareness. It's not a one and one and go type thing is an ongoing process. So we continue to do that in partnership with our student government leaders and also our supporters.
Now, if you had, as I told you before, Atlantic, what we are is strictly totally funded by coal and that's not sustainable. So in order to ensure that we have the data around when we do our advocacy. So we've been very focused on that advocacy for sustainable funding, and we need to demonstrate value in that process. If you're asking for funding, they'll want to know what's in it for us.
How will this impact our clientele? And so to do that, you need to make sure that you're collecting data and success metrics. And we do that on a weekly basis. We update our data. We these are examples of some of the data that we do collect. But there are other pieces that you're not seeing there that we collect as well. And I just want to state that over collecting is not a bad thing.
You never know what you might, how you might need to pause your data. And so collect more than you think you need because you may need to parse it in a different way than you thought at the very beginning. You can always you can always just ignore the data if you don't need to use it. But if it's not there at the beginning, then there's can be some issues, but you can always add as you go along as well.
So just to give you an example of that. And then lastly, I wanted to focus on advocacy for sustainable funding. As you as I mentioned several times, we don't have sustainable funding for Atlantic air. And we're getting to a point where that's become it's starting to become a bit of a crisis. So what we've been doing in terms of advocating for sustainable funding is once more partnering with primarily our student government leaders who already have those existing provincial government and media contacts because they regularly advocate with those groups.
So we don't have that internal expertise. So we are partnering with them for that expertise. And they also are strong supporters and they are a voice that those targets listen to. They regularly submit pre budget submissions and in the last few years, they've all included oers in those. So it's a great to have a voice coming from a different direction than just us.
We also continue those education and awareness opportunities. The other thing is you can't just focus on the student stakeholder because there are other stakeholder groups like faculty members, senior administrators that are member institutions. And so we've also partnered with several organizations in the region that are specifically focused on those different stakeholder groups and conveying the message around Atlantic we are and the need for sustainable funding and particularly the benefits to their institutions in terms of student success and things of that nature to really sell.
The idea that we are is something they wish they should invest in and that they should add their voice to when advocating with the provincial governments. And as I said, we have those four different provinces with different potential political parties, budget priorities, reporting structures. We not only have to work within those frameworks, but we also have to demonstrate to each of those four groups, those four provinces, the return on investment or the value of their investment into Atlantic OER.
So that's an ongoing process. It's been evolving. It's starting to bear fruit. And we are cautiously optimistic. And so that is some place where we're putting a majority of our effort around Atlantic. The last thing I want to note, just from a national standpoint, so we are doing provincially and regionally, but there is a place for national advocacy.
We are I'm actually involved with Carl, which is a group that's been coordinating national strategy framework for an advocacy program around oers, particularly infrastructure, bilingualism and indigenous materials and truth that support truth and reconciliation. So that is something that's happening on a national level. And we're hoping that that will also coming from both sides, from the federal side down to the provincial and the provincial coming up from us to the province will have the effect that we are hoping for in that we will get sustainable funding in this region for supporting this valuable resource and service.
So that's where we stand now and we're going to continue to engage with our partners to move things forward. But in the meantime, I'm happy to discuss this further later in. The session and I will pass the session over to our next speaker. Thank you. Awesome thank you, Cynthia.
All right, Emily, take it away. Hello my name is Emily Gillingham and I am the head of communications for impact at Oxfam Great Britain. And I'm going to tell you about an ER project that we've done aimed at practitioners and activists around the world and the various challenges we had and it could make change happen and we also refer to it as a massive open online course and.
In case you don't know so much about oxfam, I hope you're familiar with it. But we work with others to address the causes and consequences of poverty. So there are three main strands of oxfam's work. One is around humanitarian action and supporting people in conflict and in crises often caused by climate change. The other is we work on long term development programs with communities to support communities and different partners to increase their economic self-reliance.
And then the third area is around campaigns and advocacy to address the causes of the different inequalities that cause poverty. And so I've shared with you here a piece from the Oxfam strategic framework, just to give you a sense of where the project I'm going to tell you about set in terms of our global strategy, and that is to support others to address the causes of inequalities.
So that was the primary driver behind the project. And then the other driver was that we share a lot of our knowledge, our learning, our materials as published PDFS. So I'm sharing here policy and practice website, which has 5,000 resources for people that work in the sector and researchers and so on, including our influencing impact guide, which is a useful sort of PDF based guide.
And we also run face to face trainings which as you can imagine, are hard to scale and expensive to run. And we were looking for something that was sort of in between these different ways of exchanging knowledge. And so that was the driver behind this project. And so what we wanted to do is find a mean means to connect and inspire changemakers and activists where they are and the projects that they're working on to provide a platform for sharing knowledge and skills, hope and experience, and for those people to share theirs as well.
So it's not just coming from us. And to build a network of active citizens who understand how change happens. And how to work in a feminist way for change. And as it said in our strategic framework, to lend our support to social change movements. So as well as those sort of goals for the project, we were also looking for something that was scalable, that was accessible for learners to do and free at the point of use and also affordable for us to put together and develop and to run.
And so we set out to find some partners in this project. And talk to a number of organizations. But we're very happy to work with open university, which are a UK distance learning based University with a long track record. And they had a partnership with future learn, which is the platform that we've partnered with. And I'll also say a little bit about open, learn and create, which is the open source platform, which will be moving to as well.
And so what is the first things that we did in kind of trying to work out? What we wanted from this resource was to have various workshops with Open University. You're not expected to read these flip charts, but one of the first things we did was to think about what we would like people to come away from the course saying and what would they tweet about the course.
So that was a really useful methodology really to help iframe our thinking and to capture all the various ideas that needed to go into a course that is around influencing change and put them into a useful structure. And another first thing that we did in the air the early days was to identify the target audiences. And like a lot of organizations, there are a lot of them. And what we did was sort of hone it down to three target personas.
And we built the course for these three people thinking they would represent the bulk of our target audience. So there are practitioners there not based in University settings, even the student that we identified has graduated. So a Nigerian youth activist working on community change actions. Somebody who's motivated really by climate action.
Zainab fair in our profiles and also an Ngo worker who's working on community food Protection Program in Indonesia and sort of wants to enhance their skills and how to do advocacy and influencing. And so in those early days, we were thinking about the learning objectives and there were a lot of the main focus was about sharing those foundational skills, about understanding power and systems and how change happens.
But we were also looking for people to feel they were part of something and to connect with others and also to come away motivated to work on change actions, whether that's on gender justice or climate justice, anti-racism, whatever, the piece of work that they're motivated to, that sort of addresses those causes and the consequences of poverty. And so this project was managed by me out of oxfam, great Britain, and we had funding from an innovation pot, part of our unrestricted funding.
We had a core content team who with expertise in different areas like monitoring and evaluation, gender governance and citizenship and campaigning, of course. And then but there was also a reference group of 40 people from all kinds of areas of work and all levels in the organization and across the world where I they sense checked the framing of the course, they input ideas, contributed case studies so that it had that full involvement.
As I said, Open University were our partners and we were started work on the course in 2017, launched it in 2018 and we're just working now on a refresh and relaunch this year. And so there are a number of considerations and challenges and many of the challenges that Jesse has already shared, I really recognize and they're ours as well. But there are also some others that I've pulled out here. So one of them was thinking about power in the project.
And where power lies, which is part of some feminist practice that we try to practice at Oxfam. So it was managed in the UK with UK funding and of course those with time and funds to do this leverage power over the content and the project direction. So we were conscious of that and part of the effort of getting the reference group from around the world was to offset that and to put power back to the people doing the work whose knowledge, decolonizing knowledge is also a core tenant.
So we wanted to ensure that the activists are really driving change, driving that feminist practice and challenging systems of oppression was front and central to the content, despite it being sort of led in the UK. So that was the conscious effort. There was the diversity of different types of activism to include what do you include? What do you not include?
Making sure there's a range of different people's identities. The geographic range, of course, and also the thematic range. So people are motivated to drive change in different aspects of work. So whether it's local climate activism or on gender based violence or whatever it is. So we wanted to have that range of activities. There were a number of risks that I was concerned with to begin with.
So on safeguarding the participants in the course, particularly around activism and change, is a risky business. So we needed to ensure that people were not sorry for not going out and putting themselves at risk. So that's a core part of the course. I was also worried within the discussion forums in the course where there would be harassment. It didn't actually come to pass and also to ensure that the change making that people were working on was aligned with oxfam's vision for change.
There were issues around stance around language, which has been mentioned already for a lot of people in the course, English is a second, third or more language, so it needed to really be accessible to people. And of course everybody's got a different learning style. So some like written works and like to do tests, some like video or sound or imagery. So we've just tried to include that range, hoping that some parts appeal to different people.
There were also challenges around accessibility. It's intended for people who are working in quite different, difficult environments, sometimes have access to technology, internet, having the time to do an eight week course, it has its limitations. So just being conscious of that and doing what we can. There were issues around how we promote it, giving them range of audiences and moderation, maintenance funding, which has been mentioned already.
But we did go ahead and we launched the course in 2018. Originally on the future platform, please go and sign up and take a look. It will next open in May when we relaunch it. There are eight weeks of content, so it includes a case studies from many interesting campaigns, really fascinating work, but it also has space for people to share their own. So actually the energy that comes from the discussion forums, from people who are working on different things, sharing their thoughts and ideas, is actually a really positive part of the course.
And we also interview have interviews with 10 different activists working in all kinds of different areas as part of the course to hear from people themselves and try and get some motivation and energy from them. I mentioned those three target personas and actually the data from the course has shown that those sort of three different types of people are the people that we've reached.
So we've reached a geographic spread than the both people who work professionally in change making, if you like, non-government organizations, but also people who do it are on the side, if you like, as part of their sort of personal passion in their communities, as part of movements and groups. And we've had 16,000 people register their interest.
10,000 people started the course. They may not have got very far in. It was a long course, but I actually we frontloaded the content so that even if you just do week one, you come away with something useful. So I don't see I see that as still some success. But 1,000 people did complete the eight weeks of the course, which I think is pretty good going. And about a third of users and learners in the course were social learners.
So they participated in some part for the online discussions. You can see from the pie chart there that. Almost half of users were from Europe, actually a third of those were from the UK. And I think that's partly because FutureLearn has such and Open University and probably Oxfam have strong UK brand identity.
So it was strong in the UK, but we were also heartened that there were a lot of users, particularly from India, Nigeria, Kenya, some countries where English is a strong language. I mentioned the learning objectives. Just what you need to know from this graph is that the orange columns were what we asked people at the before they started. The course is how confident they were in taking a change action on understanding how change happens.
And the blue columns is after the course. So it's higher, quite a bit higher for a number of things. So we were really heartened by that, pleased that there was that difference. We got a lot of feedback throughout the course at the beginning, middle and each step of the way, but really positive feedback at the end from those people that did complete it, feeling more confident and able to go forth in their change actions.
And what was interesting that I actually contacted people where they had agreed to it, where they'd provided their details a few months after the course ended to ask how they were getting on, what they were working on. And what I found was that that actually the confidence levels did seem to remain that people were feeling confident to contribute to petitions. Some had participated in marches or protests, some had just connected with others working on the same thing or signed up for campaigns, and so on.
So that was that. That was a good outcome as well. I mentioned that we're refreshing it this year, so we're replacing the case studies, interviewing new changemakers, and we've also worked at adding some new pieces into the course as thinking has sort of progressed. So ensuring that there's a conflict sensitive lens throughout the content.
So recognizing that change making usually does lead to conflict or might unearth conflict that's already there. Even if you're not working, you know, even if you're just working on local community action, not in a conflict zone, if you like, but just giving people the tools to navigate those challenges. And also narratives has been incorporated into the course as well.
And so we're relaunch it in May on future learning, and we're also going to replicate it over to the open source platform, open, learn, create where we can then deliver it in different languages. So with the social elements to remove without the discussion forums, it's a lot easier for us to manage the different languages. So we hope to have those later in the summer.
And we also then could add new modules and just have a think about what we are actually provides for our desires to kind of strengthen movements and see what the feedback is, see what people would like Oxfam to be providing, what kind of resources would help, particularly those smaller charities, smaller NGOs that don't have some of the resources that are available to us.
So I would encourage you to connect with oxfam, if you can. Oxfam America. I've provided that URL there, but there are many Oxfam around the world. So do please connect policy and practice. If you work in a library, please do take a look because there are all those written documents and of course, sign up for make change happen if you can. Many Thanks indeed.
But by.
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