25 January 2025
Andrew Tattersall, Information Specialist, University of Sheffield
I have long been interested in Open Educational Resources (OERs) going back to making my own short video tutorials and sharing them via YouTube about 15 years ago. It seemed natural to share these short clips of non-exclusive knowledge to the wider community than just my own institution. It was a few years later in 2016 at the Internet Librarian International conference when Brian Kelly – a now retired but much respected member of the information community – approached me after a talk I had given about these resources. He asked whether I published my materials under a Creative Commons licence and if not, why not? My response was that I did not as that would require permission of some kind and I had no idea where to get it.
On my return back to Sheffield I raised this with a senior academic who directed me to Professor Wyn Morgan who was the Vice President for Education at the time. I knew I was not the only one creating outputs and sharing them openly and there was a need for a wider discussion. This led to the creation of an OER working group in early 2017 with the aim of exploring the potential of OERs at Sheffield. The initial question among the group was whether we needed policy or guidance? The latter was easier to develop, it provided an arms length approach to an evolving issue, whilst policy required more resources and effort. It was agreed that to do this properly that policy should be the end goal but key to any of this working was gaining permission from the institution.
Without really joining the dots, the precursor to this happened a couple of years earlier when I developed a big interest in Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Without making the OER connection MOOCs became something I pioneered at Sheffield in 2013. The year earlier I had been reading lots of Tweets, largely from the United States about MOOCs and so I started to build up a knowledge base and case for their potential. I took this to my school’s director of teaching at the time who asked me to explore the growing area further. Within a few months we had sourced a good pot of funding and put together a team within the school, launching three MOOCs which attracted 8000 students.
Running a MOOC independently of the central university did not come without reputational risks. It was some months before a certain FutureLearn appeared and there had been various cases of institutions coming unstuck in their rush to launch their own open courses. Our philosophy of seeking forgiveness rather than permission meant we could act quickly and with the trust and backing of the department leadership we gained the level of permission we needed. MOOCs may not have lived up to their full potential but they were crucial in reframing how some saw learning could be taken outside of the academy using creative digital methods. And whilst the MOOCs’ impact on higher education burned brightly for just a few years, OER adoption has largely been glacial in UK academia but hopefully that is changing.
Creating and re-using OERs has much in common with the adoption of social media on the campus as part of one’s career activity. It can be hugely beneficial to the institution’s profile for a member of their staff to have a strong visible online profile. Whether that is through creating little teaching vignettes which may attract potential students or by communicating on social media that may lead to collaborations, funding and impact. Both require guidance in how to maximise the use of the appropriate platforms and importantly policy to prevent or help anyone falling foul of their use.
But whilst policy and guidance are instrumental, permission is the catalyst that ensures the academic and professional community has the clearance and support to create OERs. The alternative is to carry on as before or for those who want to make their research and teaching open to do so in a way which is unsupported and unrewarded. As we are seeing with the adoption of generative AI, to have a prohibitive approach rather than an open discussion means there is the potential for academics to get it wrong badly. That might be poor quality, factuality, incorrect content or inappropriate sharing of teaching materials such as formal course content.
The initial OER policy at Sheffield never made it to fruition but a second iteration of the group began in 2023 led by two passionate OER advocates, Professor Louise Robson from Bioscience and Helen Moore based in the University Library. Along with colleagues from across the campus there is a greater momentum to make this happen with the group acting as visible champions to encourage others to create and re-use OERs. This takes us back to the word ‘permission’, as without that the alternative is a missed opportunity and hardly reflective of an industry that sees itself as progressive and transparent.
Questions around OERs no doubt remain as they did around Open Access publications some years back. The often misguided thinking being that open means free and free means lower quality. Hopefully that attitude has changed somewhat from where it was a decade ago. Instead there is an opportunity to bring research and teaching closer together to move the open agenda further forward collaboratively. OERs are often spoken about through the lens of teaching and learning yet I see it much broader than that. Open research materials such as code, data, podcasts and non-journal publications can supplement teaching materials not just as part of the curriculum but before it and afterwards with the benefit that students have access to materials after they leave the institution.
Creating OERs showcases academics and their knowledge beyond just research papers and presentations through a myriad of creative and inventive mediums. I’m not sure whether MOOCs reached their full potential but they were a positive shift and raised questions as to how knowledge could be transferred creatively outside of a traditional degree. They changed how many within the teaching community created and delivered teaching materials online and permission to do that was arguably the biggest factor in its success. Making OERs has the potential to reach many people outside of higher education on a global scale, we only need the permission to set things going.
Access Andrew’s LinkTree here.
Andy is chairing a UKSG seminar on OERs in May – read more here